There’s been a rather tense meeting on the Green Hill of the Society of the Friends of Bayreuth. They have just found out that the main festival house is disintegrating. ‘Unless something happens soon, the building will fall down,’ said Wolfgang Wagner before his death in 2010. You might have thought he would have noticed the decay while he was still in charge.
They need 25 million Euros for refurbishment. My guess is that the Bavarian government will provide most of it, but do watch out for official looking letters with RW’s head on the front and a would-you-be-so-kind line inside.
The Society has commissioned – wait for it – a masterplan. From Die Meisterplanners, no doubt.
For a place in the orchestra. They’re allowed on the ship.
If you want to perpetuate institutional sex discrimination, do join the orchestra this July in the Mediterranean with conductor Herbert Blomstedt, singers Jessye Norman and Angelika Kirschlaeger, pianist Rudolf Buchbinder and others who ought to know better.
Oh, and you have a ‘Meet and Greet’ session with members of the orchestra. One sex fits all.
We know that because it was announced today at a press conference. But what does Herr Rilling make of it? He’s been threatening alternately to resign immediately or cling on forever if he doesn’t get the successor he wants, whoever that may be. Not Herr Rademann, by recent accounts.
It was all quiet on the Rilling front today. Perhaps not for long.
It has just been announced that Glass’s Kafka opera, In The Penal Colony, will be released next month on CD for his big anniversary.
It’s the Music Theatre Wales production from 2010 and it will appear on the composer’s own Orange Mountain label.
Details below:
CD Release: February 20, 2012 (UK)
Philip Glass – In the Penal Colony
Music Theatre Wales – Michael Rafferty
UPC 801837007824 – OMM0078
Music Theatre Wales’s UK premiere production of Philip Glass’s one-act opera, In the Penal Colony is released on CD on February 20, 2012.
This world premiere recording, conducted by MTW’s Music Director Michael Rafferty, is released on the composer’s own music label, Orange Mountain Music. It marks a further episode in the enterprising Welsh company’s deepening relationship with America’s most celebrated composer.
Philip Glass’ gripping one-act chamber opera, based on a story by Franz Kafka, was composed and premiered in 2000 by A Contemporary Theater in Seattle. The libretto is by Rudolph Wurlitzer.
Music Theatre Wales’s gave the UK Premiere performances of In the Penal Colony in 2010 in a widely admired twelve-date UK tour.
The story…
A condemned man is about to be executed. The Officer describes the execution machine to the Visitor, detailing its conception, its construction, and finally its method. The method of execution is the most horrific and inhumane imaginable. The Officer’s zealous dedication to this method is based on his belief that the machine has the power to bring about a moment of transfiguration in the victim, the moment they understand the crime they have committed. When the Officer realizes that his beliefs will no longer be accepted, there is only one course left. The real horror of the machine is now revealed.
Scored for string quintet (drawn from the Music Theatre Wales Ensemble) and two singers, this world premiere recording by Music Theatre Wales is under the direction of Michael Rafferty, with tenor Michael Bennett as the Visitor and baritone Omar Ebrahim as the Officer.
The studio recording was made at the Angel Recording Studios in November 2010.
The American tenor Paul Austin Kelly was asked to sing last week at the funeral of Martin Isepp, the unforgettable singing teacher and accompanist. Here is his account:
Martin’s widow Rose asked me to sing for Martin’s funeral. It was a small family gathering in a tiny stone church with a little pipe organ here in Sussex. She had asked if I would sing “Where E’er You Walk” and an acapella version of the hymn “God Be in My Head.”
Ten minutes before the service was to begin the power in the village went out. We did the service in the dark and everything was acapella. It was quite beautiful and I feel it must have been Martin’s doing. He never did like the organ.
RIP.
And here are Paul and Martin performing Schumann’s Dichterliebe.
Daniil Trifonov was an overwhelming winner of the piano prize at the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition. In case you wondered why, his producers have just put up on youtube a performance of Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations that he gave with the Israel Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta just after Christmas.
Trifonov hunches over the piano like an elderly Liszt but the showers of notes sparkle like stars in the desert night. A wonderful performance.
Part 1
Part 2
The pianist Andras Schiff has announced that he will never return to his Hungarian motherland.
Interviewed in Tagespiegel, he accuses the Victor Orban government of right-wing thuggery, racism, antisemitism and dangerous neo-fascism.
Schiff came under personal attack in Hungary after he published an open letter a year back in the Washington Post, denouncing state discrimination against the minority Roma. He now calls the country ‘not particularly European’ and is particularly incensed at the appointment of two openly fascist directors at one of Budapest’s most important theatres. Read on here (in German). See also here.
The renewed attack from an artist as renowned as Schiff makes it all the more perplexing that the classical music business – under its IAMA umbrella – has chosen to stage its 2012 conference in Budapest. IAMA should be having second thoughts.
2 Was there, perhaps, an element of age discrimination?
3 Why, after privately ending his contract, did you then link him in public to the presence of a former – indeed, reformed – sex offender who was employed at rehearsals?
4 Were you aware that the offence took place 21 years ago, that the offender is fully rehabilitated, and that raising the issue now is both morally dubious and legally contestable under statutes of limitations?
5 What have you got against Benjamin Zander?
6 What are you going to tell the students?
7 Should supporters be worried about the authoritarian regime at the New England Conservatory?
Answers on a postcard, please.
best regards
Norman
The Hong Kong Philharmonic has announced its choice of music director to succeed Edo de Waart.
It’s Jaap van Zweeden, the Dallas chief, who gave a pair of trial concerts in November. You can watch the press conference here.
UPDATE: At the press conference, he announced a competition for young indigenous composers to write wiorks for the HK Phil & said he would commit personally to promoting new Chinese music.
Once the New York Philharmonic confirmed to its press department, otherwise known as the New York Times, that the identity of the ringphone offender was exactly as described on Slipped Disc, there was no more to say about the incident except to declare one clear winner.
The general consent is that Alan Gilbert handled the matter well. He was right to stop the orchestra when the phone was louder than the strings and right to wait until the offender had shut it down.
His interviews with the New York Times – other media were denied access – struck the right blend of resolution and regret. He has emerged a more credible music director than before.
In short, Alan Gilbert has bought himself a lease of life. He remains a pallid imitation of a great conductor, a pretender to his rank. But the phone affair has shown that he is not a wimp and that he possess the resilience to hold onto his job for the immediate future. Sometimes, one phone ring is all it takes to make a leader.
Oh, and there was also a big loser: the Times was fully half a day behind eyewitness blogs. They reported the incident so vividly that print media were left quoting and requoting sources they would rather suppress.
Tony Pappano went to Rome this weekend to conduct his Santa Cecilia orchestra. Since he last stood in front of them, he has become Sir Antonio in Britain’s New Year’s Honours. Well, Italian musicians know how to handle that…. right? Watch here
After diplomatic waltzes between Simon Rattle and Daniel Barenboim over who conducts an Elgar oratorio with the Berlin Philharmonic, David Haslett has sent in to Slipped Disc his first-night review of Barenboim’s performance of The Dream of Gerontius.
I was at the Friday performance. Revelatory. All in all the best Gerontius I have heard live and I have heard about a dozen going back 30 years, mostly in London. There were a few imprecisions such as will happen in live performance and Barenboim’s tempi and his use of rubato did mean that orchestra and chorus had to be on their toes. Barenboim is improvisatory in performance which is why we in Berlin adore him. No two performances are the same. But the quality of orchestral playing and choral singing meant that this was a Gerontius way above and beyond any standard performance in the UK.
Barenboim’s tempi were idiosyncratic with regard to what one is used to. The prelude was much slower than usual but had a hushed intensity I have never before encountered. Otherwise tempi tended to be on the fast side. The demons’ chorus did have loads of rubato – the orchestra visibly loved it and the choir followed him every step of the way. Quite simply, I have never heard a better choir in this music. But then Simon Halsey is incomparable as a choir master.
Storey, in his first Gerontius, was extraordinary. He has reclaimed the role for the heroic tenor after a long tradition of King’s College alumni. The Tristan of our age brings all his experience in that role to bear on the ravings and sufferings of Gerontius. How often do we find an heroic voice that can sing softly? Without resorting to crooning or falsetto this was a Gerontius who coloured and lived the role with a searing intensity. I am not sure I will henceforth be able to accept a lyric tenor’s ‘Take me away’. This was a really generous performance, alert to the idiosyncrasies of his Maestro, and unstinting in outpouring of passionate tone.
I have heard better Angels than Anna Larsson. She is an intelligent singer but the voice is not inherently beautiful and she was stretched by the part.
Kwangchoul Youn impressed. Few can encompass the demands of the high flying Priest and the more bass-like Angel of the Agony but he pulled it off, and in creditable English.
I think this was an important performance, not only in bringing Elgar’s masterpiece to a German audience in resplendent form, but also in revealing the work as a restored painting. Everything was approached anew. A reading which had only Ian Storey as an English element. It presented Elgar to the world.
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