Hugely popular wherever German is spoken and sung, Hofmann crossed all lines from opera to rock and enjoyed a stardom of almost Pavarotti-like dimensions.

Curly-blond and bubbly, he sang at Bayreuth in the Boulez-Chéreau centenary Ring in 1976 and appeared there also in Lohengrin, Tristan and Parsifal. His opera career took him to Chicago, London and Vienna. But he also starred in the Hamburg production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and kept up regular sessions with a rock band he founded while serving in the army. They scored a platinum album, Rock Classics. 
Married first to the American singer Deborah Sasson, he was diagnosed a decade ago with Parkinson’s. Two years ago dementia set in. Hofmann was 66 when he died, yesterday.

Hugely popular wherever German is spoken and sung, Hofmann crossed all lines from opera to rock and enjoyed a stardom of almost Pavarotti-like dimensions.

Curly-blond and bubbly, he sang at Bayreuth in the Boulez-Chéreau centenary Ring in 1976 and appeared there also in Lohengrin, Tristan and Parsifal. His opera career took him to Chicago, London and Vienna. But he also starred in the Hamburg production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and kept up regular sessions with a rock band he founded while serving in the army. They scored a platinum album, Rock Classics. 
Married first to the American singer Deborah Sasson, he was diagnosed a decade ago with Parkinson’s. Two years ago dementia set in. Hofmann was 66 when he died, yesterday.

The Grawemeyer award, the largest in contemporary music, has gone to the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen for his opera La Commedia, staged in 2008. 

The prize is worth $100,000, which was a life-changing amount when Witold Lustoslawski, Gyorgy Ligeti and Harrison Birtwistle won it in the mid-1980s but seems rather diminished today, not just in purchasing power so much as in the quality of its selections.

Based at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, the peer-given award rarely goes to world-changing works like John Corigliano’s first symphony (1991), Tan Dun’s Marco Polo (1998) or Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs (2008). A worthiness has crept in. Often as not it is given to eminent composers who are past ther best but have never won it before. What, we’ve never honoured Kurtag or Boulez? Let’s find a squib of theirs that justifies a prize.
No disrespect to Andriessen who is a jazz-inflected para-minimalist with a powerful, platonic view of human order that he expressed influentially in De Staat as far back as 1976. He is an excellent composer who should have won the Grawemeyer years ago. I doubt, however, that La Commedia is his finest work, or the best that has been heard anywhere in the past two years. Andriessen does not rank high among composers who will dominate the future. The Grawemeyer needs to take a stern, cold look at its short-term judgements.
Here’s the Grawemeyer announcement:
http://www.boosey.com/downloads/AndriessenGrawemeyer.pdf

The Rumanian soprano Roxana Briban has died in Bucharest, aged 39, apparently a suicide. 

Away from Bucharest, she sang in Vienna, Berlin, Toulouse and Amsterdam. Her husband said she had fallen into depression after being dropped last year by the Rumanian National Opera.

On the day of her death, she posted on her facebook site a clip of Verdi’s Traviata in which she, as Violetta, dies of a wasting disease.

More here (in Rumanian) and here (German).
And here’s Roxana singing in La Traviata
Roxana Briban – “Anima mia !”  Terzetto  IL TROVATORE -Verdi http://t.co/tp8TnV9 via @youtube

The Rumanian soprano Roxana Briban has died in Bucharest, aged 39, apparently a suicide. 

Away from Bucharest, she sang in Vienna, Berlin, Toulouse and Amsterdam. Her husband said she had fallen into depression after being dropped last year by the Rumanian National Opera.

On the day of her death, she posted on her facebook site a clip of Verdi’s Traviata in which she, as Violetta, dies of a wasting disease.

More here (in Rumanian) and here (German).
And here’s Roxana singing in La Traviata
Roxana Briban – “Anima mia !”  Terzetto  IL TROVATORE -Verdi http://t.co/tp8TnV9 via @youtube

Arts Council England, shambolic and barely coherent, are demanding a right of reply to my Standpoint essay proposing a root-and-branch reform of arts funding.

I shall post their letter here once it appears in print, but the tactic will be, as usual, more a matter of collective vindication than of substantive debate.
My essay has been for the past 24 hours the most-read article on the Standpoint site and I am told that its arguments have been received by the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and others in government. Let Dame Liz and poor Alan Davey have their say. It is a shame they have to fiddle around with face-saving phrases while the arts are suffering slash and burn.

Arts Council England, shambolic and barely coherent, are demanding a right of reply to my Standpoint essay proposing a root-and-branch reform of arts funding.

I shall post their letter here once it appears in print, but the tactic will be, as usual, more a matter of collective vindication than of substantive debate.
My essay has been for the past 24 hours the most-read article on the Standpoint site and I am told that its arguments have been received by the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and others in government. Let Dame Liz and poor Alan Davey have their say. It is a shame they have to fiddle around with face-saving phrases while the arts are suffering slash and burn.

Alex Ross in his new collection, Listen to This, makes reference to ‘a secondhand LP of Leonard Bernstein’s Eroica Symphony (which) ignited my love of classical music.’

As I read that paragraph, an email dropped from an archivist friend in Vienna, informing me that some of his old Bernstein vinyls fetch thousands on ebay. Apparently, they never pressed that many, especially of Lenny with the European orchestras. Thomas Hampson singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Bernstein and the Vienna Phil went for well over $2,500. The so-called Concert of the Century at Carnegie Hall is presently offered on www.abebooks.com for the same amount.
In pristine condition an old LP can be a thing of beauty, an artwork for the wall. But I can’t quite see its unique collectible value – except, perhaps, to those trufflers who amass old beer cans and cigarette packs to satisfy a hunter-gatherer need. Like most music lovers, I got rid of my vinyl for next to nothing 25 years ago when CDs took over. Don’t regret it, never will.
But if Alex has still got his Lenny Eroica, he might like to test the market. 

Alex Ross in his new collection, Listen to This, makes reference to ‘a secondhand LP of Leonard Bernstein’s Eroica Symphony (which) ignited my love of classical music.’

As I read that paragraph, an email dropped from an archivist friend in Vienna, informing me that some of his old Bernstein vinyls fetch thousands on ebay. Apparently, they never pressed that many, especially of Lenny with the European orchestras. Thomas Hampson singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Bernstein and the Vienna Phil went for well over $2,500. The so-called Concert of the Century at Carnegie Hall is presently offered on www.abebooks.com for the same amount.
In pristine condition an old LP can be a thing of beauty, an artwork for the wall. But I can’t quite see its unique collectible value – except, perhaps, to those trufflers who amass old beer cans and cigarette packs to satisfy a hunter-gatherer need. Like most music lovers, I got rid of my vinyl for next to nothing 25 years ago when CDs took over. Don’t regret it, never will.
But if Alex has still got his Lenny Eroica, he might like to test the market. 

In the new issue of Standpoint magazine, I examine what has gone wrong with arts funding in Britain and propose ten concrete measures for redeeming it. Contrary to popular myth, I do not advocate the abolition of Arts Council England,  alien though it has become from its Keynesian core purposes.

However, if Maynard Keynes’s vision is to be renewed in an era of financial strictures, the Arts Councils that he invented will need root-and-branch reform in order to be fit for their chartered purpose. Heads will have to roll. More importantly, priorities will need to be rewritten.
Ten ways to save arts funding. 
You can read them here – http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3578
though I’m sure you’ll be far happier if you subscribe to Daniel Johnson’s excellent magazine.

In the new issue of Standpoint magazine, I examine what has gone wrong with arts funding in Britain and propose ten concrete measures for redeeming it. Contrary to popular myth, I do not advocate the abolition of Arts Council England,  alien though it has become from its Keynesian core purposes.

However, if Maynard Keynes’s vision is to be renewed in an era of financial strictures, the Arts Councils that he invented will need root-and-branch reform in order to be fit for their chartered purpose. Heads will have to roll. More importantly, priorities will need to be rewritten.
Ten ways to save arts funding. 
You can read them here – http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/3578
though I’m sure you’ll be far happier if you subscribe to Daniel Johnson’s excellent magazine.

BBC News
Greg Wood, News Correspondent for the BBC, is to join Centrica in January as Head of Corporate Media Relations and will report to Mish Tullar, Director of Group Media Relations. In his new role, Greg will help embed Centrica’s growth story across the media highlighting its significant upstream investment programme in gas, nuclear and renewables and the transformation of British Gas from an energy utility to an energy services business. Prior to returning to London in November 2009 to take up his post as a BBC News Correspondent based at TV Centre, Greg was with the BBC in New York covering the US economy over the 2008 presidential election. Before this he was a Business Correspondent on the BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. Until he leaves in January, Greg can be reached atgreg.wood@bbc.co.uk


Hallo there! Significant upstream investment programme? What language are we speaking here? And the difference between an energy utility and an energy services business is what, exactly?

The business of these people is to obfuscate, not communicate. So why hire a journalist? To ’embed Centrica’s growth story’. Obviously.