Our colleagues at Chicago Classical Review were there:

On Saturday night, Michael Tilson Thomas … went offstage and emerged with two large handfuls of loose cough lozenges, which he tossed underhanded into the main floor audience seats.

What else happened? Read here.

michael-tilson-thomas

Angelo Campori, an associate of Leonard Bernstein who conducted at the Met and the Vienna Opera, has died aged 79. He had been weakened by heart disease for the past decade. Campori’s greatest nights, it is said, were in the Arena di Verona and in Verdi’s home capital, Parma.

Fabio Luisi tweeted the following tribute: Maestro Campori was one of the last Italian conductors who knew exactly what Italian opera means and how to conduct it…supporting the singers, understanding the big picture of an opera, feeling the true intentions of the composers.

campori-247x300

This is the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, not one of Mr Putin’s jails. It’s a transit facility.

The convicted fraudster and former opera philanthropist is being held while a judge hears his appeal against having his bail revoked, suddenly and without good reason. The original trial judge Richard Sullivan, still on his case, decided he was a flight threat even though Vilar and his former partner Tanaka have shown no inclination to leave a warm apartment and an occasional seat at the Metropolitan Opera.

The judicial system, say Vilar’s friends, sucks. The lawyer’s petition seeks Sullivan’s removal from future hearings.

alberto vilar met

Press release:

NOVEMBER 25, 2013 — The global music community has come together for the worldwide release today of a new compilation that features the biggest names in music to raise money for those affected by supertyphoon Haiyan in The Philippines. “Songs for the Philippines,” a unique collection of 39 chart-topping hits and classic tracks, is now available worldwide on iTunes (iTunes.com/Philippines).

 

The artists, record companies and music publishers who are collaborating on this project together with iTunes have all agreed to donate proceeds from “Songs For The Philippines” to the relief efforts of the Philippine Red Cross. “Songs For The Philippines” is available now globally through iTunes.

 

philippines

 

 

The “Songs For The Philippines” track listing is as follows:

1.       The Beatles – “Across The Universe”

2.       Bob Dylan – “Shelter From The Storm”

3.       Michael Bublé – “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You”

4.       U2 – “In A Little While”

5.       Bruno Mars – “Count On Me”

6.       Beyoncé – “I Was Here”

7.       Eminem – “Stan” (Live from BBC Radio 1)

8.       Cher – “Sirens”

9.       Adele – “Make You Feel My Love”

10.   Katy Perry – “Unconditionally” (Johnson Somerset Remix)

11.   One Direction – “Best Song Ever”

12.   Fun. – “Carry On”

13.   Lady Gaga – “Born This Way” (The Country Road version)

14.   Justin Timberlake – “Mirrors”

15.   Justin Bieber – “I Would”

16.   Alicia Keys – “New Day”

17.   Imagine Dragons – “30 Lives”

18.   Madonna – “Like A Prayer”

19.   P!nk – “Sober”

20.   Kylie Minogue – “I Believe In You”

21.   Enrique Iglesias – “Hero”

22.   Red Hot Chili Peppers – “Factory Of Faith”

23.   Linkin Park – “Roads Untraveled”

24.   Kings Of Leon – “Use Somebody”

25.   Muse – “Explorers”

26.   Lorde – “The Love Club”

27.   Josh Groban – “Brave”

28.   Kelly Clarkson – “Stronger”

29.   Paolo Nutini – “Simple Things”

30.   Ellie Goulding – “I Know You Care”

31.   James Blunt – “Carry You Home”

32.   Pitbull feat. Christina Aguilera – “Feel This Moment”

33.   Earth, Wind & Fire – “Sign On”

34.   Apl.De.App – “Going Out” feat Damian Leroy

35.   Sara Bareilles – “Brave”

36.   Jessica Sanchez – “Lead Me Home”

37.   Lily Allen – “Smile”

38.   The Fray – “Love Don’t Die”

39.   The Beatles – “Let It Be”

All proceeds from “Songs For The Philippines” will be directed to the Philippine Red Cross.http://www.redcross.org.ph/

The author, known to us, has never shared his story before. He is the second to post on Slipped Disc this week.

child-abuse-765x400

 

I was abused at a British music school from the time at which I entered the establishment aged ten, until the time I left aged sixteen.

It was, in that era, a boarding school so, aside from weekends off, the abuse was unremitting.

Six years of more or less uninterrupted hell. I have recently, through facebook, come into contact with a fellow student from those days who told me that two other boys, contemporaries of ours at the school back then, took their own lives subsequent, perhaps, to similar abuse.

I was lucky in that there were two academic teachers who seemed somehow to warm to me personally and, having maybe noticed the distress I was suffering, held out much-valued peripatetic hands of friendship, but I was generally unable to express my ongoing discomforts and, in the long run, they were unable to counteract the appalling mistreatment that I experienced from the Headmaster and the other staff.

I was a child. I should not have had to go through the degradation and abuse meted out to me. I do not want to re-live those years on Slipped Disc but you (and others) have started to open up an important subject area. My six years at that music school were profoundly disturbing and, in my adult life, I have as yet been unable to escape the powerful and tremendously negative psychological legacy they have left behind. A friend in the Antipodes was recently advised to send her 9 year old son to that particular place. Although the school has no-doubt developed in many ways, and simply has to have moved on from its 1980’s degeneracy, it was without hesitation that I advised her to look for any other option.

The Finnish coloratura soprano Anu Komsi saw people taking her picture during a concert in Oslo. What to do? Here’s what she tells us:

This is a modern story how to get a picture of a concert: I saw quite many people in the Oslo public taking pictures during the concert and I did not wonder because of the Edward Munch´s Solenuppgång was there behind the performers.

Well I asked the orchestra administration would it be possible to get a picture for myself, because the venue and event were exquisite. They found this one on TWITTER!!! Oslo Phil just asked in Twitter has anybody got a picture and there this was. Have no idea of the photographer, but got permission to use it anywhere I want. Contemporary times !

anu komsi

December 1963 saw the deaths of two German composers who, each in a different way, stood up against their country’s Nazi government.

Paul Hindemith left the country in 1935 once it was made clear to him that his music would not be performed again.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann (pictured) made a principled decision in 1933 that his music would not be played in Germany so long as Hitler was in power.

Hindemith, after a period teaching in Turkey, found a comfortable exile at Yale.

Hartmann, who revived modernism in Munich after the War, has never achieved recognition outside his native land.

His second string quartet is my album of the week on Sinfinimusic. Read here.KarlAmadeusHartmann

This year, as the world celebrated centenaries of Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi and Benjamin Britten, Germany, Italy and England swelled with cultural pride and added a bit of swagger.

France, too, had a bicentennial composer but opted to keep quiet about him.

The Saturday, November 30, is the 200th anniversary of the boirth in Paris of Charles-Valentin Morhange Alkan, the foremost French piano virtuoso of the first half of the 19th century and a composer of exceedingly difficult works. Liszt and Chopin, it was said, lived in fear of his skills.

In mid-life, denied the post of head of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, Alkan withdrew from public performance and became a recluse.

His exclusion was, to a degree, founded on anti-semitic prejudice. We wonder what the excuse was for forgetting his bicentenary.

 

alkan

A colleague and friend remembers Conrad Susa, who died last week.

 

Conrad Susa (1935-2013): An Appreciation by Byron Adams, Professor of Music, UC Riverside

conrad susa

 

Conrad Susa was born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, the child of Slovakian immigrants to the United States. As a boy, he played the piano and organ, served as an usher in a local movie theater, loved popular music, and evinced an extraordinary intellectual curiosity. He attended Carnegie Mellon University studying with Nicolai Lopatnikoff. A gifted pianist, he was appointed as the staff pianist for the Pittsburg Symphony Orchestra (1957-8). He earned a master’s degree at the Julliard School of Music, studying with William Bergsma and Vincent Perischetti; one of his indelible memories of Julliard was a fleeting introduction to Dmitri Shostakovich, who was on one of his rare visits to America.

 

In 1972, despite growing fame in New York, Susa left the East Coast to live in San Francisco, a decision that reflected a tenaciously independent streak in his nature. He was not interested in pursuing a conventional career through conventional means but rather sought to realize fully an inimitable, and constantly evolving inner world. He embarked upon a career writing incidental music for theater companies, a wonderful apprenticeship for an opera composer. For Susa, words, drama, and literature were the foundation of his art: instrumental pieces, although lively and inventive, were few and far between.

 

His first opera followed shortly after his settling in San Francisco. Still the most often produced of his operas, Transformations (1973) takes as its text Ann Sexton’s post-Freudian and contemporary re-telling of Grimm’s fairy tales. It should be stressed, however, that although the poetry is by Sexton, it was Susa who shaped her words into a subversive and original libretto, dealing with, among other topics, intergenerational same-sex desire. (Sexton was thrilled.)  While he developed and inimitable modernist style that never abandoned the use of either lyricism or tonality, Susa’s operas are radical by virtue of his original treatment of their subject matter. His second opera, Black River: a Wisconsin Idyll (1975, extensively revised in 1981) is an unsparing look at small-town America that culminates with an onstage self-immolation.  With a libretto based on a play by Garcia Lorca, The Love of Don Perlimplìn (1984) is a tragicomic meditation on the incompatible demands of love and honor.  A contemporary mystery play, The Wise Women (1994), subverts the traditional Christmas narrative by focusing on the inner lives of women and by broadening its religious context to include a group of wildly funny tantric angels. Finally, The Dangerous Liaisons (1994), based on the epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, is a darkly voluptuous grand opera that looks unwaveringly of the destructive violence at the heart of erotic desire. Never has there been such a coldly unsentimental dissection, expressed though music of aching beauty, of the calculating power relations and duplicity that passes between lovers.

 

Conrad Susa was surely one of the most uncompromising and courageous composers of our era. Susa was openly gay: he composed the first piece ever commissioned by a gay men’s chorus, Chanticleer’s Carol (1983), at a time when such a gesture still raised eyebrows and kindled prejudices. By living in San Francisco and remaining unashamed of his sexual identity, Susa removed himself from the East Coast establishment that controlled the big composition prizes and commissions. He could not have cared less: distaining mere fashion, he remained true to himself. Brusque, insightful, and possessing a rapier-swift wit, Susa did not suffer fools gladly and had no compunction about telling them so to their face. Those whom he loved, he loved with an exasperated tenderness and a fierce devotion. He was selflessly dedicated to his art; to the constant expansion of a formidable compositional technique; and to his colleagues and students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he was a beloved teacher. Conrad Susa’s life was consecrated to music. To quote Stephen Spender, he was one of those special beings that “left the vivid air signed with their honor.”

 

Byron Adams

Professor of Music

UC Riverside

This is Louis Schwizgebel, a BBC New Generation Artist. (His other piano’s a Porsche.) Watch.

Louis-Schwizgebel-piano-Edkin01-150

‘Its a damned difficult role,’ says the diva, who has announced her separation from baritone Erwin Schrott. In a huge bustle, she’s made to look a great deal larger than life.

Watch a five-minute report here.

Netrebkoomingo-300x168

 

mortier

He’s battling cancer and he divides opinion wherever he goes, latterly as director of the Teatro Real in Madrid. But music would be a duller, poorer universe without Gerard Mortier and we expect most readers will join us in wishing him a happy day and a speedy recovery.

Here’s a tribute in the FAZ.