The Chinese pianist will play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor, K.491, on the opening night of Tanglewood, July 6. Nelsons conducts.

It will be Lang Lang’s first live performance since he was invalided out 15  months ago.

We wish him well.

 

The Spaniard conductor Sergio Alapont has signed with Hazard Chase in Cambridge.

And London agency RayfieldAllied has taken on Dane Lam, an Australian ex-Masur assistant.

 

The conductor, 78, signed his contract today as chief-in-waiting of the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester, resident at the Konzerthaus on the Gendarmenmarkt. He succeeds Ivan Fischer in September 2019.

 

 

 

Deutsche Oper Berlin has released news of the death, aged 87, of Barry McDaniel, a Kansas baritone who won a Fulbright in 1953 and spent the rest of his life singing in Germany. He was under contract with the Deutsche Oper from 1962 to 1999.

It was one of the sayings of Gennady Rozhdestvensky and it opens Bruno Monsaignon’s film on the late conductor.

Switch off the football and watch this now.

So wise, and so funny.

 

 

The soprano has let it be known she has sung her last Lucia.

Munich has replaced her next season in Donizetti’s opera by Pretty Yende (she’ll have to learn how to handle a Chevy).

 

The busiest guillotine in music education has just announced its next head.

The tenor Paul Bambrough will become principal of the Purcell School from September.

 

Presently vice-principal at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Bamborough is a tenor, harpsichordist and organist and has been an active teacher through his career.

More promising , we hear that the bursar, who has been implicated in recent Purcell upheavals, its taking retirement.

 

Tomas Zierhofer-Kin is gone, with three years left on his contract.

As ever in Vienna, it’s political. The new government want a person of different stripe.

The virtuoso balalaika player Mikhail Rozhkov has died at the age of 99.

It was none other than Herbert von Karajan who gave him the Paganini title.

From the company’s financial statement for the year ending 31 July 2017:

Across the period ENO staged 112 performances (2016: 139) which attracted a total audience of 171,000 at 69% of capacity (2016: 237,000 attendees and 75% capacity) with performances of Tristan and Isolde, Lulu and The Winter’s Tale on BBCRadio 3 reaching
an estimated audience of over 535,0000.

ENO’s ambition to reach and develop a wider audience has led to date, to 47% of audiences being first time bookers at ENO. The audience development strategy was supported by affordable ticket pricing (with more than 56,000 tickets being made available at
£20 or less).

Spun whichever way you like, a drop below 70% is seriously bad performance. But put those 171,000 attenders in context: 

Audiences for ENO reached 171,000 and in addition 90,000 saw Sunset Boulevard with Glen Close and 77,000 Carousel that were presented in association with Michael Grade and Michael Linnit.

In other words, the entire ENO opera season attracted the same number of people as attended just two musicals. Sunset at the Coliseum says it all.

From one of our readers:

I had a ticket for a Swan Lake performance on Friday 8 June at Covent Garden as a gift for my retirement. The show was due to start at 7.30pm but it did not. The audience was waiting patiently. After 20 minutes, Kevin O’Hare announced that they were missing a harp player. A few minutes after that, the performance started.

There was no harp for the whole of Act 1. As soon as Act 1 finished, Kevin O’Hare reappeared on stage and announced that the famous harp cadenza and violin solo accompaniment in Act 2 would be played on the piano from the wings by an ROH repetiteur who had come in from home. O’Hare said this would make it a more special experience. Many in the audience got up and left. Those of us who stayed witnessed piano playing with lots of wrong notes, on an instrument in desperate need of tuning. Later on during the interval we heard that the pianist was Koen Kessels.

The performance finished with 25 minutes overtime.

No mention of this improvisation has been permitted to appear among Covent Garden’s adulatory audience comments. The season’s last performance of the ballet is sold out.