Kim Walker, one of the swing-door chiefs of the Sydney Conservatorium in the past decade, has been named director of Texas Tech University School of Music.

It’s in Lubbock, deep in the heart of.

Proof there is life after Oz.

Press release here.

It takes three to bring off this costly rarity.

The performers in tonight’s Hamburg performance are: Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, conductors Cornelius Meister, Duncan Ward and Dietger Holm.

Break a baton.

UPDATE: Here’s a Japanese version:

The Metropolitan Opera, responding to its former music director’s unfair dismissal suit, has revealed that James Levine was paid $27,000 for each performance, on top of a salary of $400,000 a year.

The numbers make some sense in respect of Levine’s failing health in recent years: the less he conducted, the less he cost.

But the base rate of 27 grand a night is out of all proportion to anything else in the opera economy. No maestro on earth makes that kind of money with a cast-iron guarantee. They might get $80k for a one-off in Japan, but that’s just cherry-blossom. There rest of the cake contains much less fat.

Likewise, the nightingales. The Met has always capped singers’ fees. A tiny handful of very big names are paid $20,000 per show. The rest get a lot less. If a singer turns up for every single rehearsal and then falls sick, he or she gets nothing at all.

The Met’s orchestra musicians who play their hearts out every night do not, however (apart from the concertmaster), earn $27,000 in a month.

For a conductor to earn more than the house’s biggest box-office draw, and more per night than any other musician in a month, is absurd. Worse, for him now to sue the company for $5.8 million in lost earnings when a full-scale legal investigation has exposed his sexual misconduct over many years is, quite literally, obscene.

Levine did wrong. Levine had to go. Levine is history.

But the Met lives on. Its management and board has shown itself, over many years, to have been irrational, myopic and incompetent in handling the company’s most important employee – its music director.

There have been no resignations, either from the management or the board. That suggests the ineptitude continues unchecked.

The Met needs to get clear of its Levine mentality.

 

The international concert singer Elisabeth Kulman, an Austrian campaigner for the rights of opera singers at major festivals, has issued an appeal on video for more victims of sexual harassment in her country to make themselves known.

The appeal is connected to a defamation trial around allegations made against a Tyrolean festival.

Voice it, says Elisabeth.

Welcome to Dublin, where the news travels slow.

Exactly half the contestants in the second round of the 11th Dublin International Piano Competition were students of jury members, according to our mole in the aisles.

In the semi-finals, it was 7 out of 12.

In the finals it is now two out of four.

The jury is chaired by John O’Conor.

 

We hope he will ensure fair play.

 

 

 

The only known manuscript of Étude en forme de Habanera is to be sold at auction on June 20 for an estimated 25-30,000 Euros.

Ravel’s admirers are trying to raise enough funds to ensure it is bought for the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Report here.

From a farewell review of the Dallas Symphony’s music director:

…this weekend’s three performances mark the end of a decade-long tenure during which the orchestra reached a high point in its history. In spite of the changes roiling the international musical community, the Dallas Symphony clearly reached a new level of excellence under van Zweden. Although one could quibble over the details week to week or fine points of the orchestra’s general direction, van Zweden is leaving an orchestra in fine condition to move forward and to enhance its position in the local community and in the larger world of music. The Dallas Symphony continues to function as an essential and, indeed, central element of cultural life in Dallas and the surrounding region.

For his part van Zweden, a podium leader more dour than charismatic, has emerged during his decade here as a key player on the international scene; largely unknown to the broad base of the classical music audience when he arrived in Dallas, he will, as music director of the New York Philharmonic, move into one of the most visible positions in the music world, with all the opportunities and pitfalls that position implies. He will step onto a podium once occupied by Bernstein, Boulez and Mahler, and into scrutiny far more intense than any he experienced in Dallas….

Read on here.

 

A professor at Aaron Copland School of Music was was fired two years ago on an accusation of sexual harassment is suing Queens College for unfair dismissal.

John Walter says the student made up the accusation.

The college says it was inependently verified.

Read on here.

 

Jacks Reilly, who died on Friday in New Jersey, aged 86, was Professor and Head of the Jazz Studies Departments at the New England Conservatory of Music Boston, The New School for Social Research and The Mannes College of Music.

A gret intellectualiser of an organic art form her could find a needle of jazz in a Bruckner haystack.

John Romero, principal trombone of the Fort Worth Symphony, has won the audition for a Metropolitan Opera orchestra vacancy. He will start in September.

John, who is from Longview, Texas, studied at Baylor and Rice universities.

 

 

The Canadian-Greek soprano reaches a milestone this weekend.

Rudi van den Bulck has prepared an Opera Nostalgia compilation of her early recordings for our enjoyment.

And a homeland tribute: