The death of Brian Kellow, a cornerstone of Opera News for three decades, has been reported by the magazine.

Dismissed two years ago after an assault on the magazine by the Met’s Peter Gelb, Brian had been stirring up a storm of coverage for Florida Grand Opera as its public relations manager.

At Opera News he had been successively assistant editor, managing editor and executive editor.

He knew opera inside out.

Martha Argerich pulled out of this year’s Verbier Festival yesterday. No reason.

Marcelo Puente cancelled on July 11 on health grounds.

Janine Jansens pulled out the same day, saying she is ‘slowly recovering’.

Gautier Capuçon withdrew with a shoulder injury.

And today Amanda Forsyth says she’s out ‘for medical reasons’.

Is the magic mountain losing its charm?

UPDATE: Verbier is hit by further cancellation

This is a tale of our times, brilliantly told by Basil Considine in the Twin Cities Arts Reader. It begins:

One night in July, wigmaster Jolie O’Dell turned out the lights and went to bed. She awoke, she says, to find herself being groped by her house guest, a bass-baritone opera singer named Matthew Stump. Stump masturbated as he fondled her; amidst the angry yelling that followed, he refused to leave the building. Finally, O’Dell grabbed his phone and threw it out the front door. Stump ran outside to retrieve the phone and O’Dell locked the door behind him….

What happened next? Read Basil’s story here.

But there’s more. Jolie has just posted this:

Matthew Stump, after making a public apology, has now deleted that apology and is messaging anyone in the opera world to deny this apology. Here’s the police report. I agreed to drop charges in exchange for the public apology. I can post text exchanges with him where he admits to all the things in the apology and police report, as well.

Matt and I went back and forth for days trying to come to an acceptable solution that would give me a sense of justice without putting me through court proceedings or interfering with his career. After arguing over wording, this statement made us both feel pretty OK. He only deleted it when he realized that people were reading it. He wanted to make a public apology that wouldn’t be seen by anyone he knew. He is not being extorted. This was an agreement we both reached after he committed a crime and I was left hurting and depressed.

The accomplished opera house manager Carlo Majer died yesterday after a long illness. He was 62.

Born into a wealthy Milanese inustrial family, Carlo became the youngest artistic director of any opera house in Italy at the age of 35, presiding at the Teatro Regio in Torino from 1991 to 1998. He went on to head the Teatro San Carlo in Naples for three years, returning to full-time involvement in his family business.

Among his best-remembered achievements are a centennial Bohème with Pavarotti and Freni, watched by a hige television audience, and a Ronconi production of Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust.

The conductor has written an op-ed for Haaretz today, attacking the new Israeli nationality law. He writes:

The founding fathers of the State of Israel who signed the Declaration considered the principle of equality as the bedrock of the society they were building. They also committed themselves, and us, “to pursue peace and good relations with all neighbouring states and people.” 70 years later, the Israeli government has just passed a new law that replaces the principle of equality and universal values with nationalism and racism….

We now have a law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid.

I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, on order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that.

That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today.

Read the full article here.

UPDATE: We are banned in the Middle East

From Anthea Kreston:

Please join us on our next Fortnightly Music Book Club adventure. One that will connect the broad and diverse Slipped Disk audience to great literature as well as give us a chance to engage with leading musicians of our time. The Fortnightly Music Book Club has a rotating, international group of hosts, and covers a wide range of topics.
Our next topic is the Curtis Institute of Music, with guest host Roberto Díaz, President and CEO of Curtis. A violist of international reputation, he maintains the dual life of performer/educator, and has brought about significant changes to Curtis during his tenure, including the new String Quartet Program, Curtis on Tour, a new building which doubled the size of the school’s campus, and the launch of Curtis Summerfest. What makes Curtis so successful? It has been a training ground for the elite in classical music since it’s inception, with a faculty comprised of the „who’s-who“ in classical music. Housed in a collection of historic mansions in downtown Philadelphia, we will be privy to interviews, video and voices from the present and past – a peek behind the curtain. We will be reading from Powerhouse (MacNeice/Bowen) to learn about the unique business structure (focusing on the introduction and Curtis chapter). Memoirs of Gary Graffman – I Really Should be Practing – and Rudolph Serkin – A Life, both former Presidents of Curtis, will give us historical perspective. All books are available on Amazon. Readers can choose which book/s interest them, and submit questions accordingly.
From our guest host, Roberto Díaz:
Hello from Nantucket, where I am in the midst of a week of performances with Curtis on Tour. Today it is my pleasure to introduce you to a book called Powerhouse: Insider Accounts into the World’s Top High-Performance Organizations, co-authored by Brian MacNeice, founder and managing director of Kotinos Partners.
I first met Brian when he came to Curtis in 2013 as part of a research project with his colleagues at Kotinos Partners aimed at uncovering the principles of high performance. They investigated organizations across many industries – business, sports, technology, finance, education, and the arts—to find out what they all had in common. Following this global survey, Curtis was one of only two cultural organizations in the world to be selected for inclusion in Powerhouse, and the only US educational institution. The school is profiled alongside 11 other top-performing organizations like the Mayo Clinic, New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Team, U.S. Marine Corps, Finnish State School System, St. Louis Cardinals, and others.
As you read this book, you’ll learn more about the special ingredients that contribute to Curtis’s success, and how the same universal principles can be used to spark high performance in any situation – musical or otherwise. I hope you enjoy this exploration and I look forward to answering your questions in the weeks ahead.
From our curator, Anthea Kreston:
Every other Sunday, look for a posting about the Fortnightly Music Book Club. We will hear from Mr. Diaz in 2 weeks. Please submit questions and propose future book titles in the comments section or here: Fortnightlymusicbookclub@gmail.com
See you in a Fortnight!

From

From the director Yuval Sharon in Bayreuth:

Marc Lowenstein playing Hatikvah on Richard Wagner’s piano in Bayreuth, an event that brings my mom to tears. Talk about repair on the highest symbolic level!

From Bloomberg News:

(Valentina) Carrasco has reimagined Carmen against the backdrop of America’s current immigration crisis. Her show is set at a Mexico-U.S. border wall and opens with children being torn from parents by ICE agents. There’s a dead border-crosser in a body bag, real-life radio broadcasts, and later, a torn-up American flag. It’s an astonishing, riveting production that addresses xenophobia, the #MeToo movement, women’s power, domestic abuse, and the more general issue of making opera relevant again…

Read on here.

photo: Yasuko Kageyama/Opera di Roma

People who keep count of such things have reported that Lohengrin will be Christian Thielemann’s tenth opera at Bayreuth.

The only other conductor who ever managed a full hand of Wagner operas at Bayreuth died in 1911.

His name?

British opera houses won’t put it on.

But we’ve got the broadcast from Bregenz.

Click here  (starts at 19.35).