A Spanish journalist has been arrested in Israel in connection with the death of a remarkable pianist in Jerusalem.

Julio de la Guardia is suspected of hitting Haim Tukachinsky with his car and driving off.

Tukachinsky, 30, came from an ultra-orthodox family but left his yeshiva to study music at the Rubin Academy. His gifts were widely praised and he was preparing for a major recital when he was killed while crossing a road.

 

Haim was also gaining recognition as a composer.

Report here (in Hebrew).

The Camerata of Léman turned up at Geneva airport to be informed by Easyjet that their 10am flight was delayed.

They did not take the news sitting down.

Vivaldi puts a spring in the Easyjet day.

Opera Queensland is advertising for 200 women to appear naked in the finale of Don Giovanni.

Director Lindy Hume says she wants to end the opera differently in the #MeToo era.

If you’re interested, apply here. No singing required.

The director will be clothed.

 

Manfred Honeck has renewed as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra until 2022.

He has held the job since 2008 but the latest renewal is somewhat shorter than most, perhaps because Honeck is suddenly a contender for the vacant Concertgebouw orchestra.

Our friend Pascale Bernheim has founded an association to research and recover thousands of musical instruments that the Germans expropriated from France during the Second World War.

Read more about it here.

The last chapter has yet to be written in the story of the German despoilation of Europe.

 

Joe Horowitz has his doubts:

Ormandy’s recorded accompaniments to Rachmaninoff’s First, Second, and Fourth Piano Concertos are merely supportive: they give the soloist nothing to work with. (My pianist friend George Vatchnadze, describing the Rachmaninoff-Ormandy relationship, calls Ormandy a “puppy” and a “servant” — apt adjectives.) Stokowski’s accompaniment to the Second Concerto is unique. The signature lava flow of his magnificent Philadelphia strings is not only memorably ravishing; it is acutely calibrated in dialogue with the composer/pianist. It is not for nothing that Rachmaninoff called Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra the greatest orchestra that had ever existed.

If you want to hear what I’m talking about, listen first to the passage from the First Concerto that Vladimir Horowitz once identified as the only instance of RCA adequately conveying Rachmaninoff’s art. This is the piano solo beginning at 12:52 here. And observe how the intrusion of Ormandy’s generic accompaniment cancels the abandon of Rachmaninoff’s playing, with its untethered rubatos and magically layered dynamics….

Read on here.

Scenes from BSO Resound, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s disability ensemble. The challenges range from autism to blindness to multiple sclerosis and other physical disabiliti4es.

BSO Resound played at the BBC Proms this summer.

Be moved.

We counted them:

2 in Chicago (including principal Cynthia Yeh)

1 in Philadelphia

1 each in Hawaii and Rochester.

This looks like a closed shop.

We also hear that the number of young women inducted into the New World Symphony has been falling year by year. The orchestra does not use a screen for auditions.

 

 

Charles Gounod’s opera La reine de Saba received its US premiere last night in Boston, in the original, unseen five-act version.

Any good?

First review here.

There’s a warning that more Gounod will hit Boston next month.

 

 

 

The pianist and composer Piotr Lachert died on September 18, days after his 80th birthday.

He lived in Abruzzo, Italy, for the past quarter-century and will be buried there.

Lachert composed some 200 works and claimed to have 1,500 students.