A memoir of Lili Boulanger.

... success led to a contract from the publisher Tito Ricordi in 1913, which assured her a fixed yearly income and resulted in the publication of her prize-winning cantata. In 1916, Ricordi further published

 

Read on here.

The vocal composer and chorus leader signed with Columbia Artists today, presumably to gain traction in symphony halls.

Friends are lamenting the death, from a heart attack, of Blair Lawhead, a professional violinist on Broadway who also ran a successful hair-replacement clinic. He was just 55.

From his website:

In 1989 Blair Lawhead came to New York City with a violin, a pair of scissors and a dream. Today, Blair Hair is being toasted by New York nightclub personalities and the Gay Press as a legendary part of the city’s lavender landscape and as much a part of queer culture as the Chelsea neighborhood in which the business is located.

A really useful service.

 

The 2018-19 season of La Monnaie, announced today, features the world premiere of Frankenstein, an opera by the American composer, Mark Grey.

The Brussels date is three years behind schedule, but the horror stuff should feel timely for Brexiteers.

 

From the newly published memoirs of Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Among the proudest moments of my career was when one of my heroes, Dmitri Shostakovich, saw the production in 1975, said he wished he’d composed it and really liked the way the rock section underpinned the woodwind and the brass.

DSCH was a very polite man.

I’ll be elaborating about Marion von Weber at the Liverpool Phil tonight.

Here‘s some dirt that I dug up seven years ago.

The world owes Mahler’s First Symphony to Marion von Weber, his Leipzig love… 

Now for the nagging detail. In an excess of local patriotism, Leipzig scholars trawled through the rest of Marion’s life to find some exceptional trait, and came up with no further incident from the day Mahler left in 1886 until her death in 1931. But tracing her origins, they found an inconvenient fact. Marion was not from Leipzig at all: she was from Manchester. Fancy that.

An English researcher, Nigel Simeone, has furnished me with further details. Marion was born into a German-Jewish family called Schwabe, living at 313 Oxford Road …

Read on here.

The Artemis Quartet suffered a terrible trauma when its viola player Friedemann Weigle took his own life in 2015.

Their colleague and friend had been suffering from a bipolar disorder and talked about it with the group, but no-one expected the awful outcome.

Now, for the first time, the survivors talk frankly about suicide and mental health in an interview with Zsolt Bognar.

A compelling video, essential watching for everyone who is involved in music, where so many live close to the edge.

Scott Caizley grew up on a council estate in Rothwell, the son of a labourer.

He became obsessed with the idea of becoming a concert pianist.

But when he got into Trinity Laban music college in London, Scott floundered. ‘I was struggling. I felt as though I was not ‘fitting in’. I felt like a fish out of water. My accent was funny, my schooling was not great, I was not as cultured or as well-travelled as the other students and I did not make one single friend whilst at the music college…’

Read his extraordinarily candid interview here.

Scott is now trying for Cambridge, but he needs our help to get there.

UPDATE: Slipped Disc readers today set the ball rolling on his fundraiser.

Evelyn Herlitzius was past 50, approaching retirement age for an opera singer, when she made her US debut in January as Kundry in the Met’s Parsifal.

Next, she’s singing Brünnhilde in San Francisco’s Ring this summer.

Evelyn says: ‘I don’t know why it never happened before.’

What took them so long?

Report by AP’s Mike Silverman.

Taken at a music club in Helsinki.

#finns-are-fun

Renaud Capucon has succeeded in reviving one of the more respected international competitions, the Long Thibaud, after it ran out of cash two years ago.

Founded in 1943 and named after a mediocre pianist and a fine violinist, the competition’s winners include Samson Francois, Dmitri Bashkirov, Jean-Philippe Collard, Philippe Entremont, Christian Ferras, Peter Frankl, György Pauk, Vladimir Spivakov, Cédric Tiberghien and Tamás Vásáry – an intriguing mix of French and East European talent.

Capucon will chair the jury of the revived competition this November.

 

Hellmut Stern, born in Berlin and for 34 years a front-desk player in the Philharmonic, will turn 90 in May.

A fugitive in China during the Second World War, he was spotted as a bar pianist in Jerusalem by Isaac Stern and sent for audition as a violist to the Israel Philharmonic.

He moved on to orchestras in St Louis and New York before returning to Berlin and playing in the Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan for 34 years.

I got to know Hellmut when he was a leader of the Karajan rebels in the orchestra, fighting the orchestra’s subjugation to the maestro’s financial empire. He was enterprising, principled and utterly fearless.

After Karajan’s death he helped organise the Berlin Phil’s first trip to Israel with Daniel Barenboim.

He published a memoir, Saitensprünge, and now lives in Florida.

I hope the orchestra does something to remember his 90th birthday, on May 28.