It’s been a while since the Deutsche Oper last saw Rienzi, and April 20 seemed a good date to launch the house’s centennial season.
But then someone remembered that Wagner’s first opera used to be Hitler’s favourite, and April 20 was his birthday.
Oops. Seriously oops. More here.
The harpsichordist Janos Sebestyen – a national treasure – has died at 80.
A student of Zuzana R?ži?ková, Sebestyen established the first harpsichord class at the Academy of Music in 1970 and taught there until 2009. He made 80 recordings, was a senior producer at state radio and wrote the biography of the film composer Miklos Rozsa.
Here he is, playing Prokofiev on the harpsichord:
1 http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/01/shit-conductors-say.html
3 http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/01/how-gustavo-dudamel-spends-his-sunday.html
5
Rodolfo Cazares, 35, conductor of the Municipal Theatre in Bremerhaven, was kidnapped last July by a drug cartel in Mexico.
Although a ransom has been paid – apparently four times over – the abducted conductor has not been returned and his wife has gone public on the case. Latest here in Die Welt. UPDATE: here.
The young French conductor Lionel Bringuier, just 25, has been standing by through old-man Dudamel’s Mahler cycle in Los Angeles, ready to help out with anything from score markings to full-scale, stand-in performance.
I’m seeing him in London next week, when he conducts a Rebecca Saunders premiere with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Before leaving Los Angeles, Lionel, wrote a short reflection on the Mahler experience with two very different orchestras.
The Brahms Albumblatt that caused so much media fuss the other week was no world premiere. The piece had, in fact, known about for a couple of years and received its first known performance in Germany in 2011.
But the conductor Christopher Hogwood, who started the fuss, is continuing to assert ownership of the story. Scholars are unhappy. He ought to back off.
Read on. UPDATE: The whole truth here.
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