They may refer to it in future as the day the music died, but this weekend’s concerts by the locked-out musicians are the hottest date in the state. Read more here.
1 From Munich, a live Wozzeck on Sunday with Keenlyside and Denoke. Click here.
2 Does Jonathan Franzen understand Karl Kraus? Read here.
3 The art of Soviet cooking. Sniff here
4 Picture of the Week: The day Sweden changed from driving on the left, to driving on the right (1967)
5 Try this in shul
6 And if you liked that, click here for more.
Paul Keating, the former Labour prime minister, is not one to pull punches. The most classically attuned of Australian pols, he hates the uses of Sydney harbour front as a place to stage outdoor operas.
A “mindless quest for promotional funds” he calls Carmen on the Harbour.
More here.
London’s annual Battle of Ideas is tackling the crisis in music teaching in the aftermath of multiple English sex scandals and police investigations. Can a lone musician be trusted to teach a child unobserved? That’s the burning question.
For speakers and booking click here.
For a dissenting view of the premise of the debate, read Ian Pace here.
This is the editorial line from Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist, James Lileks. Here’s more:
I’ve been to a few orchestra concerts, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing to this conducting racket. You show up, raise your arms to start and then you play Air Orchestra for half an hour. You point at the brass when they’re supposed to come in, like that’s a big surprise to them. Thanks for the heads-up, chief. Only been practicing this one for six weeks.
You make these little shh-shh gestures when the oboe’s too loud, never thinking we might want to hear more oboe. You act like you’re in charge, but you don’t even have any paper in front of you. Then you turn around at the end and bow like you’re personally responsible.
It’s like a guy who stands in front of a newspaper box muttering for an hour, then expects us to think he wrote every work in the latest edition. C’mon.
Why, you wonder, does anyone publish such piffle? Is it mean to amuse? If so, it fails. Provoke? Sigh, sigh, sigh for Minnesota.
The column would hardly be worth drawing to your attention were it not for striking similarities with a Daily Telegraph headline earlier this week:
US orchestras are greedy and overpaid
making you think there is something in the zeitgeist. The Telegraph article, by the way, drew a series of bizarre and misplaced comparisons – apples compared with eggcups. We live in interesting times.
Slipped Disc exclusive video:
You can watch an English version here.
Next Monday in Berlin, the great violinist and a number of friends will play a concert in support of the innocent victims of violence and human rights violations in Russia, in solidarity with all who care for that country’s future.
7 October was the day in 2006, on which the renowned journalist and human rights activist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in Moscow. Thise joining Gidon Kremer include Daniel Barenboim, Martha Argerich, Emmanuel Pahud, Sergei Nakariakov, Katya Buniatishvili, Giya Kancheli and Nicolas Altstaedt.
Here, in an exclusive video for Slipped Disc, Gidon explains his reasons for putting on the concert.
Watch, and learn.
If you prefer, you can watch him in Russian here.
The British composer Iain Bell shares the excitement of staging a new opera in Vienna:
In the glamorous life that is that of an opera composer, I am currently writing this blog (#2) while seated on what resembles a park bench (painted in blue gloss for that added je ne sais quoi) in a laundrette in Vienna, waiting for my now-weekly load to finish drying in the tumble. Yup, I can hear the sighs of envy all these miles away!
Our rehearsals for A Harlot’s Progress have now moved from the studio complex in the outskirts of the city to the theatre. Whilst I miss the village-hall ambience the studio had grown to acquire, as well as its free coffee machine and wifi (though access to the latter could only be gained by standing on a particular spot just outside of the ladies’ loos – awkward for all concerned, believe me), being in the opera house is infinitely better.
Rather than the previous fifty-minute long train-train-tram trek to get to the studios, in a mere twenty-minute stroll I am there. During this time, I amble through the streets with my iPod playing something to clear my ears before the operatic bombardment that awaits. My current aural palette-cleanser of choice is the choral music of fourteenth-century English composer Dunstable; obsessed is not the word. On the assumption I have arrived at the theatre without getting lost (and one must NEVER assume this, my sense of direction is beyond shocking, more of that later), I am then ready for the rehearsal session that awaits.
During the previous month, I had enormous sympathy for the team of tech-guys and stage/set crew who were obliged to attend rehearsal and look on in silence as the cast and directing team got to grips with the piece. I would have been on Facebook/Twitter in minutes but they showed far more patience and grace. It is now a real joy to see them do what they love doing in an environment that is as familiar to them as sitting behind a piano is to me.
I cite the piano as a place I am familiar because the ‘otherness’ of the rehearsal spaces within an opera house remains utterly alien to me. Until now, my sole relationship with such buildings has been as an audience member, so to be inside an environment that is usually so shrouded in mystique and secrecy feels akin to trespassing in the private apartments of a stately home or the inner sanctum of a temple. I am always expecting that tap on the shoulder by the management asking me to leave. I must stress that this is absolutely no reflection on the people here. The friendly, village hall atmosphere of the studios has travelled with us on our operatic caravan to the theatre. It is just because everything is so new to me, it is hard to fathom.
This is very much compounded by my awful sense of direction. I am forever getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors of this two-hundred-year-old theatre on journeys as short as a thirty-second walk and have resorted to leaving certain rooms only when I spot someone else is leaving and heading in same direction. Yup, that bad…
That said, as soon as I see the cast on stage it starts to feel so much more ‘home’. On that note, tonight is first stage run through with full cast and chorus. I have a feeling I will have a word or two to say on the matter.
Francis McPeake, a well-known folk musician and teacher in Northern Ireland, stands accused of abusing a child under the age of 16, between 2009 and 2010. Local BBC story here.
After three years of cancer treatment and many setbacks, the maestro is looking forward – to next year’s Saito Kinen festival, and to getting back on the box again with a baton in his hand. “What is necessary for me most at the moment is to restore my strength. I will take a rest for the remainder of the year and then will gradually start performing again.” He has a date with Beethoven Fourth in January.
Read the full Japan Times interview here.
