Louisville Orchestra musicians have shot down the latest offer. The players have been out of contract since May and the orchestra is trying to hire replacements. The musicians have asked the rest of the world to boycott any such auditions. Read on here.

Louisville… Philadelphia… Dallas… the list of US symphony orchestras that are gathering on the precipice of bankruptcy grows longer by the week.

Could Pittsburgh be next? Its president and chief executive, Lawrence Tamburri, walked out of a trustees’ meeting on Monday, saying it was ‘a good time for me to leave’. Right now. Without delay or explanation. That usually means trouble in store.

Tamburri, who had been in charge for seven years, was responsible for hiring the well-liked music director Manfred Honeck and for putting in place an economy plan to stop the constant drain of deficits – $2 million in each of the last two seasons. Honeck, a former Vienna Philharmonic player, told me this summer that as soon as he heard the musicians were being asked to take a pay cut he volunteered the same reduction in his own salary. And when one of his principal players was being lured to Los Angeles, he made damn sure that Pittsburgh matched the deal.

That kind of leadership is rare in US orchestras and, from what I can tell after several phone conversations, the mood in Heinz Hall remains both artistically and organisationally upbeat. Jim Wilkinson, who stepped into Tamburri’s shoes, is a vice-chairman of the board and a steady hand on the tiller. Financially, there is no immediate pressure.

So, why did the prez quit? No-one seems quite sure. Tamburri is a private man with a strong family life. It may just be that he assessed his priorities and decided that now, when there is no crisis and the plan seems to be working, was ‘a good time’ for him to leave. It sometimes happens that way.

 

When musicians in the Helsinki Philharmonic played through the newly discovered sketches of what may be a draft of Sibelius’s destroyed eighth symphony, one or two of them can be seen suppressing a yawn. it was not until they had played the music that all of the musicians were told what it was – and then everyone got their handkerchieves out and shared a historic snuffle.

Is this the sound of Sibelius's lost Eighth Symphony?

I mention this only because the authenticity of these sketches as part of the eighth symphony is not instantly apparent and cannot yet be determined with certainty. Listening for the fifth time to the run-through, I hear nothing that suggests Sibelius is heading anywhere untrodden in this work. It sounds familiar, it sounds like Sibelius. There is even a woody phrase that calls mid-period Mahler to mind.

A cache of letters, disclosed today by Vesa Siren in the Helsingin Sanomat, suggests that Sibelius may have been contemplating a choral part for his symphony – and that would have been a first. But all is haze and smoke at present. The discovery is momentous. Let us see where else is leads.

 

The London-based artist Katharina Lupnova has sent me a painting of Mahler that she made after reading my exegesis of the relation between Jacob wrestling and the angels and the composer’s core identity. I like the body language.

Yesterday’s photograph from Ria-Novosti flashed around the world, showing the more human side of Vladimir Putin. He’s visiting a hospital in Belgorod and horsing around with the Governor, Yevgeny Savchenko.

You don’t need to be a KGB analyst to read the unspoken subtext. ‘Keep on paying me the krysha,’ he’s saying, ‘or next time it’s without novocaine.’

The scene it calls to mind is Laurence Olivier with Dustin Hoffman in ‘Marathon Man’: the effortful extraction of unwilling information. Do floss thoroughly, tonight. You really don’t ever want to meet these guys.

Unhappy with performing the politically-correct unfinished version? Unhappy with the Süssmayr completion?

Michael Finnissy has a score for you. He has finished the work as Mozart might have done had he lived in 2011.

First performance this Sunday in Southampton. More here. The Finnissy edition will be published by OUP in 2012.