It’s a familiar scenario.A player is taken ill just before a concert. An announcement is made to the audience while upstairs everyone hits the phones to call in a substitute. After an hour or so, the concert commences.
Not in the Malaysian Philharmonic. The orchestra has been so depleted by unfair dismissals of European and American players that, when one of its players fell sick on his way to a Claus Peter Flor concert, no substitute of equal standard was to be found in the entire country. We have not yet been informed which instrument was vacan.
We warned that Malaysia was on the verge of becoming a sick musical joke. Here’s the proof.
The audience, by the way, were not offered full refund for the cancelled event, just free tickets for the next concert.
Sources close to the conductor Riccardo Chailly inform us that, not for the first time, the Italian media has inflated whisper into history. A leak to Corriere della Serra from the incoming general manager Alexander Pereira that Chailly would become music director in 2017 took the conductor by surprise, they say. Nothing has been settled. As in any good commedia dell’arte, the outcome could go either way. We should have been more careful before believing what appears as fact in print media.
Trouble last night in Valencia, where the tenor Ivan Magri started the performance with an inflammation of the vocal cords that got progressively worse. He was replaced on stage by a stage manager in costume who went through the moves, and offstage by another tenor plucked from a Walküre rehearsal. The show went on. Read here.
The sbustitute was the Austrian tenor Nikolai Schukoff. The stage manager has not been named
The widely-hyped and widely-disputed violin that supposedly went down on the Titanic has fetched $1.45 million in a country auction. The buyer is said to be British. Most other items in the smallhouse sale went for two and three-digit sums. The auctioneer’s efforts over seven years have plainly paid off. This is, however, unlikely to be the end of the controversy.
