Mariafrancesca Garritano, who also writes as Mary Garret,
has been sacked by La Scala for defamation after making repeated claims that one in five of the pupils at its ballet school were suffering from anorexia when she studied there, and that the wasting disease was common in the company. Some ballerinas, she said, could not fall pregnant as a result of the deprivation they suffered at school.
Several ex-colleagues have rushed to denounce her, reports Milan artsblog Gramilano, but other voices have been raised in support. Almost every fact in the matter is contested.
In ballet, as in fashion, the A-word is an unmentionable. It may well be that La Scala has shot the messenger and let the rot continue.
She lost her boyfriend the other week in floods of tears. But the self-styled ‘opera singer’ who has never sung an opera is never one to mope.
She was snapped in the wee hours clubbing with Becks and Prince Harry in a place no opera singer would knowingly be seen dead.
Andras Schiff asks the question in an interview with Salzburger Nachrichten.
His reply: ‘Bela Bartok was and remains my role model. As a musician and as a person. In today’s turbulent times, I think about him every day. What would he say, how he would react? The answer is clear: with integrity, honesty and purity.’
It never fails to amaze me that, nearly 60 years after Stalin’s death and 20 after Karajan’s, there are still music critics around who lavish conductors with the kind of superhuman praise demanded by the great dictators.
The objects of their admiration are, admittedly, fewer than heretofore but the hyperbole remains the same. It is founded on the assumption that a conductor is all-knowing, all-wise and all-loving. The most prevalent object of this false worship is Claudio Abbado, who has acquired something of the aura of a latterday saint (if not higher) since he survived a bout with stomach cancer. Abbado is a man like any other, faults and all. But you’d hardly believe it from his reviews.
A CD review in Friday’s London Times caught my eye. The paper is not online, so I shall not name the offending critic. The works on question are the violin concertos of Berg and Beethoven, played by Isabelle Faust in Bologna with the Orchestra Mozart guided by their artistic director Claudio Abbado, a great conductor whose ability to reach a work’s soul seems only to have increased during his ten years of battling stomach cancer (you can see where this is leading).
The critic continues: Time and again the ear is brought back to the burnished clarity of Abbado’s textures.
If they were so clear, they should be unobtrusive.
Each ghostly strand in the music’s web is picked out in tender pain.
How, exactly?
And it’s Abbado we must thank…
Does he mean God?
The luminous sound of Abbado’s orchestra, a continuing glory
a phrase taken whole from the lexicon of Karajan hagiolatry
infuses the concerto with a real sense of joy.
Either the composer wrote the joy, or it’s not there. It cannot be infused.
Faust is a wonder on this disc, but Abbado is even more so.
Oh, give over. He’s a conductor, doing his job and edited for the record. Nothing miraculous in that.
Abbado, unlike Karajan, never required a diet of hyperbole. So why write, or publish, such guff?
Roberta Flack (‘Killing Me Softly’) dropped off $500 to pay for the funeral of a Bronx teenager, Ramarley Graham, who was shot by a New York cop. More in the New York Post, an indispensable Sunday read.
A long, reasoned article by Geoff Edgers in the Boston Globe magazine today examines some of the causes for Benjamin Zander’s dismissal from the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra and the New England Conservatory but fails, on its own admission, to isolate why he had to be fired.
Zander and his supporters accept that it would have been right and proper to suspend him after a parent complained that he was employing a convicted – albeit rehabilitated – sex offender. He could then have been reinstated after a thorough investigation proved his innocence.
Outright dismissal, with its taint of personal disgrace and the destruction of his widely valued contribution, was excessive. Tony Woodcock, beleaguered president of the NEC, claims he had no alternative. He refused to comment on why Zander had already been forced to resign from the NEC or why his relationship with the conductor had turned from cordial to hostile.
No mention was made of the drinking allegations on the European tour. Woodcock did admit that he had been lax in pursuing other strands of sexual misconduct. ‘I take responsibility,’ he said.
But he remains in the job. Zander has been the victim of his mishandling of the case. The NEC board may need to draw conclusions if it wants to draw a line under this miscarriage of justice.
My own mailbox is full of testimonials to Zander from pupils past and present. None of them sound over-enthusiastic about NEC. I may publish them at some point. Meantime, the good news is that Zander is back conducting the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
Hat-tip to Geoff Edgers for a balanced feature that tamps down the Globe’s previous PR-driven hysteria.
