There was mild surprise a couple of weeks back when William Florescu walked out on the Florentine Opera Company of Milwaukee after 13 years of doing a decent job, and with a contract taking him forward to 2024.
Now, with the following statement, the company has blown a personnel issue into headline news:
Since the announcement of William Florescu’s resignation from the Florentine Opera Company on May 9, 2018, we have received information previously unknown to the company regarding Mr. Florescu’s conduct in the workplace. Having learned this additional information, we feel that greater transparency is critical in order to move forward with promoting the positive work culture that we expect. For that reason, we wish to make clear that Mr. Florescu’s resignation was related to his violation of the Florentine Opera’s policies and prohibitions concerning sexual misconduct.
We take any complaint of such misconduct seriously, investigate it thoroughly and impartially and act with purpose and urgency to hold those who violate the values of the Florentine Opera accountable.
Two young Israelis were accepted as new members of the IPO this week.
Ziv Stein, who has been playing in DSO Berlin, will be assistant principal timpani and percussion.
Hagai Shalom, an academy member of the Dresden Staatskapelle, will play low horn.
photo: Roman Langoff
From our diarist, Anthea Kreston:
I first met the septuagenarian Georgian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja last year in Vienna, when she dined with us after one of Quartet concerts at the Konzerthaus. We were seated, all of us (Quartet, various friends and artistic staff), and in came an older woman, wearing an iridescent a-symmetrical dress, colorful, chunky necklace, and with a larger-than-life aura. One of my colleagues leaned in and said – that is Lisa – our long-time collaborator and the person we will be recording with next season.
After a round of double-kisses and hand-clutching, we settled in for an avant-guard Viennese dinner (complete with edible gold leaf on the final course). Part-way through, she pulled from her over-sized purse what seemed to be a long, shriveled sausage and a small, ancient wood-handled knife. She began to aggressively saw at the strange item, passing around pieces, nodding and smiling, saying – “this is from my country”. I popped a piece in my mouth, chewing the hardened, leather-like substance, guessing that I was, as I often find myself doing here, taking a little vacation from being a vegetarian. It had the trappings of an exotic land, a texture that was both challenging and satisfying, and a taste which was neither sweet nor savory – as if it were somehow concocted from the unwanted parts of unfamiliar foods. And so, my adventure with Elisabeth Leonskaja (sometimes referred to as the “Lioness of the Keyboard”) began.
This past week, we have been rehearsing intensely, and have now played our program together four times – Munich, Berlin and twice in Vienna, her adopted home-town. She was born and raised in Tbilisi, an ancient cobblestone city which has a long, complicated history, with periods under Persian and Russian rule. Born in 1945 to Polish-Jewish heritage, when Tbilisi was the capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, she was early recognized as an extraordinary talent, sent to the Moscow Conservatory, and won a slew of competitions. It became clear that, because of her Jewish heritage, she would be unable to realize her potential (she was forbidden to perform in the West), and both Israel and Austria extended citizenship to her. She chose, in 1978, to make Vienna her home, and has remained there, performing with nearly all of the major orchestras of the world. There are few remaining pianists of the old Russian piano school, and her approach has an almost visceral link to the great Russian masters – her musical voice always true, personal, and with a gravitas which in unwavering.
Tomorrow, onto Dresden, and then to the recording studio – four days for this wonderful Shostakovich Piano Quintet with our incredible recording engineer and team. My favorite part so far – being able to play the slow movement of the Brahms Quintet for an encore (which is a long end for a very long and challenging program of Shostakovich fifth quartet, Dvorak Piano Quintet and Shostakovich Piano Quintet). The second violin plays rarely in this movement, and I get to just stand, and listen, to the wonderful world all around me.
Houston Grand Opera has signed Eun Sun Kim as principal guest conductor, starting September 2019.
‘Eun Sun Kim seems to me a limitless talent at the outset of an important career,’ said HGO Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers, ‘as her music-making is elegant, effortless, precise, and deep. Her incredible facility with languages and ability to communicate with singers, both supporting and challenging them, are all-too-rare qualities in a conductor. Having been the music director of HGO for a long time now, I am excited to welcome her fresh ear and new musical ideas, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with her.’
… Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much that the Kennedy Center has hosed Mr. Cosby’s name off its increasingly trivial roll of pop-culture sycophancy. But Met Opera Radio did something far more consequential when it chucked Mr. Levine’s historic recordings into the memory hole, an act of suppression that bears a distant but nonetheless definite resemblance to book-burning. By doing so, it effectively declared that great musicians must also be good men—a position that can be defended only by the tone-deaf.
From the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden:
During the spring, a letter arrived at Helsingborg Concert Hall. The letter referred to a Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra concert in which music by homosexual and bisexual composers was performed. The anonymous writer accused the HSO of ‘hopping aboard the fag train’. In response to this criticism, the HSO will perform a newly written cantata Bögtåget (The Fag Train).
The anonymous writer states that, ‘like many others’, she/he will not be visiting our concert hall again. The HSO, led by Fredrik Österling and tenor soloist Rickard Söderberg (pictured), is using the text of this letter in the cantata on May 26.
Österling, says: ‘As an artistic institution, we naturally actively relate to our surroundings and events going on around us. The hate letter I received reeked of contempt and fear for the love between human beings. I had no hesitation when Rickard Söderberg suggested that I should set it to music. By considering the text as an opera libretto, we were able to scrutinise the emotions that the anonymous sender was seeking to express. And at the same time, we are doing exactly what an artistic institution should be doing; we are reflecting our times in our art.’
1 When did Birgit Nilsson (BN) marry Bertil Niklasson?
20 September 1948
2 Which country featured BN as Turandot on a postage stamp?
Nicaragua
3 What is the earliest extant recording of BN?
Berwald: Estrella de Soria – Estrella’s aria / April 1947 with Stockholm RO / Frykberg
4 Which conductor did BN infamously have a disagreement with over the lighting design during a rehearsal of Wagner’s Ring?<
Herbert von Karajan
5 With the exception of three roles BN first performed all of her roles in Stockholm (and usually in Swedish). What are the roles and where did she perform them?
Amelia (Ballo in maschera), 1958 Vienna; Leonore (Fidelio), 1953 Bad Hersfeld, Germany; Elettra (Idomeneo), 1951 Glyndebourne
6 BN made her MET debut 18 December 1959 as Isolde. The second performance had three different Tristans – who were they?
Karl Liebl, Ramon Vinay, Alberto da Costa
7 According to opera gossip columns, which famous tenor decided to exact revenge by biting Birgit instead of kissing her during their love scene in the third act of Turandot after losing a battle of the high Cs with Birgit in the previous act?
Franco Corelli
8 What was the name of BN’s beloved St. Bernard?
Nalle
And the winner…. shake the hat….. is….
Peter Steiner on London N6……
A box will be on its way to you soon.
UPDATE: The winner got one answer wrong. We’re having a reshuffle.
Watch this spot.
The winner is: Alain Ober of New York City.
Fabio Luisi, 59, has extended his contract until 2023 with the Danish Radio symphony orchestra.
The press release speaks of his ‘great passion for Carl Nielsen’s music’ and upcoming performances by Hans Abrahamsen and Bent Sørensen.
‘With Fabio Luisi in the lead, we find that many new doors are open to the DR Symphony Orchestra,’ says DR boss, Kim Bohr.
Here’s the DR’s full set of conductors:
Herbert Blomstedt 1967-1977
Lamberto Gardelli 1986-1988
Leif Segerstam 1988-1995
Ulf Schirmer 1995-1998
Gerd Albrecht 1999-2004
Thomas Dausgaard 2004-2012
Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos 2012-2014
Fabio Luisi 2017-2023
The fast-rising Hong Kong conductor, 32, was named this morning music director of the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in Belgium.
Former assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Elim is chief conductor at Norrlands Opera in Sweden and principal guest with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
She conducted Antwerp for the first time last November and it must have gone well. She starts work there in October 2019.
The composer Moritz Eggert, professor of composition at the Munich Hochschule, has been talking about the jail sentence handed to his academy’s former president, Siegfried Mauser.
He tells Deutschlandfunk: ‘I believe one can say with fairly great certainty that there are such cases at virtually all the music academies in Germany.’ Mostly, says Eggert, the accusations are hushed up and the professors go on to get a better job in another college.
At the Munich Hochschule, he says, there have been instances of professors showing their genitals to students and reports of various forms of harassment, up to and including rape. Eggert says he was threatened with the sack when he asked too many questions.
A second Munich professor, a well-known composer, is due to face trial soon.
