Not my description – it’s what Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau called him in a Lebrecht Interview four years ago.
Who did he have in mind? Thomas Quasthoff.
The diminutive baritone, bodily disabled but spiritually immense, talks on next Monday’s Lebrecht Interview about music and life.
In the past year he has suffered a double loss – his brother died and his marriage foundered. Against this backdrop he has been thinking harder than ever about the emotions he conveys in the act of singing.
We talked for two hours, one of the most intense conversations in the series.
It’s on Monday at 10pm here, and streamed online for a week. Don’t miss it.
Claudi Solti’s debut went down a treat in St Pete, according to Moscow Times.
Sir Georg’s girl directed Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream with Willard White as Bottom and Valery Gergiev conducting. I’m not sure it was the Queen’s English with all the dipthongs sitting easily in Russian mouths, but it was very brave of them to try.
And good to see Claudia clear the first career hurdle without mishap.
photos: V Baranovsky, for St Petersburg Times
Simon Stockhausen is co-writing a contemporary Wagner tribute opera for the Neuköllner Oper. The multilinear plot goes something like this: Bolivian journalist interviews capitalist crook-turned-philanthropist. In Naples, a 14 year-old immigrant is robbed of his ornaments. In Bombay, a temple prostitute sings.
This is supposed to represent Rheingold. It might take a leap of imagination on the audience’s part.
Details:
Ein Wagner Wiedergänger von Bernhard Glocksin und Simon Stockhausen
Inszenierung: Lilli-Hannah Hoepner
Musikalische Leitung: Lam Tran Dinh / Tobias Bartholmeß
Ausstattung: Markus Meyer
Dramaturgie: Bernhard Glocksin
Uraufführung am 18. August 2011, 20 Uhr
The Vienna Philharmonic are making him an honorary member after Muti announced he’d never conduct another opera in Salzburg. Apparently. Actually, he confided his plans a couple of months back to Andrew Patner in Chicago.
Slipped Disc does not like to fall behind the story. So we’ve been shopping hard and this is what we’re putting beside the birthday cake:
1 The earlobes of the last two producers to cancel his record contracts (they freely donated the lobes in preference to other parts).
2 A leather-bound copy of Il Mito del Maestro.
3 Wiped VHS copy of The Philadelphia Story (he won’t want to remember that place).
4 Framed photograph of Chicago in winter:
5 And a really nice Hallmark card signed ‘tanti auguri, Claudio.’
Tanti auguri, Maestro! One of the few at your exalted level who have kept a sense of perspective and humour.
The British advertising watchdog has banned airbrushed photographs of aging models for giving the false impression that certain creams can make any woman look 28. Julia Roberts and Christie Turlington (below) are among those being taken down.
Forces in the music industry are proposing that the same principle should be applied to recordings of elderly, talentless and half-trained artists whose recordings are pieced together with microsurgery to cover the false notes and dullness. ‘So many artists and OCD producers cannot make a
classical recording in less than five hundred takes and a thousand edits – then denoising, then covering in phoney reverberation,’ laments one leading producer.
No names, though we all know who they are. But maybe this should be one of Placido Domingo’s first campaigns in his new glove-puppet role as president of IFPI, the industry’s anti-theft and fraud organisation.
PD as The Home of Seville (c) Simpsons
