leipzig stadium

 

The Gewandhaus announced its new season today. Highlights include US and European tours – plus a Riccardo Chailly concert for 40,000 spectators in the city’s soccer stadium. One the menu: Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang with a 1,000-strong chorus.

leipzig stadium

Check the movement title. Michael Shmith reports from Melbourne:

making money

The letters GFC, which stand for global financial crisis, are also notes of the musical scale. How appropriate, therefore, to combine the two. Meet a new 12-minute work by Melbourne composer Gawain Davey, called Symphony GFC.

Not that Davey thought of the idea himself. This is where business comes in, in the form of investment adviser and commentator Doug Turek, who commissioned the three-movement symphony. It was recorded in Melbourne last week by the 20-piece Orchestre Nouveau, conducted by Zach Tay, and will be released on Thursday – the fifth anniversary of the GFC.

The meeting of big business and high art is not exactly a novel concept. But this particular form of philanthropy – the musical depiction of the collapse of the international sharemarket – takes things to a new level. ”It was a difficult time that had quite an emotional impact on me,” Turek said. ”So I challenged Gawain, who’s a family friend, to put these emotions into music. To help, I gave him a chart of the sharemarket trajectory and a couple of movies about the GFC.”

Turek isn’t used to being a modern-day Medici. ”It all came together about three weeks ago and was a bit of shock,” he said. ”I didn’t realise what I thought was a simple music piece required more than 20 players. Each had to be paid, as well as hiring the venue. My budget blew out.”

symphonygfc.com

Mark Lawson has stepped down from Radio 4’s Front Row after 16 years. He has been rested on medical grounds for the past month.

The official story is full of smoke, mirrors and lawyer-proofed hints. The decision for Mark to leave was ‘a joint agreement with the BBC’.

I have known Mark for all the time he has been on Front Row and never had anything but agreeable experiences with him. At 52, he is a gifted commentator and interviewer who will soon find other outlets for his proven skills.

 

mark_lawson2

It’s only ten weeks, but there’s plenty of novelty. Can’t wait to see what Boston Brahmins make of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Offertorium, with violinist Baiba Skride, and John Harbison’s Koussevitzky said.

Look upon it as a wake-up call. Only ten weeks, though.

Full details here.

Andris Nelsons

Lieuwe Visser, who has died at 74, was a stalwart of the Holland Festival from 1966 in numerous premieres by Dutch composers. He worked closely in a wide range of roles with Gustav Leonhardt, Edo de Waart, Reinbert de Leeuw, Bernard Haitink, Bruno Maderna and Ricardo Muti. He sang with Joseph Malovany on the premiere recording of Noam Sherriff’s Mechaye Hameitim.

A popular figure, Visser taught at the Maastricht conservatory and chaired the Dutch Foundation for the Arts.

lieuwe visser

Ariane Todes is stepping down after 12 years at the magazine, eight of them as editor.

The move is described as a ‘restructuring of the team to separate the online and magazine sides of the brand’.

If that’s what it is, it’s a major brand error.

No music magazine has the trust of its sector as much as The Strad does among string players and sellers. Much of that trust as built by Ariane’s shrewd editoriship and advocacy. It will now have to be rebuilt from scratch.

Ariane, however, will go on to bigger and better things as a player, writer and editor. I enjoyed wiring for her as a columnist. Sad day for The Strad.

ariane todes

The Dutch orchestra which Bernard Haitink, 85, says he will never conduct again has responded with a terse comment to Het Parool:

Over the past five years the management, our planning department and Bernard Haitink have had contact on a regular basis. In the past years the flexibility which other prominent conductors offered to make concert sessions for Bernard Haitink has reached its reasonable

limitation.

Haitink_LFO0046P-lowres

The violinist Linus Roth, a protégé of Anne-Sophie Mutter, has joined the growing band of Mieczyslaw Weinberg admirers. He has a new recording out of the Weinberg violin concerto. He tells Reuters that it reminds him more at time of Schubert than of Shostakovich.

Kolja Blacher and Elisaveta Blumina have announced a forthcoming release of the chamber music.

 

blumina weinberg

And Gidon Kremer’s new compilation is my Album of the Week on sinfinimusic.

Weinberg is finally on the rise. I have been banging the drum for his music since 1991.

Mieczyslaw-Weinberg-persson-240x-A2F55EB4

The latest instalment of the late pianist’s estate sale at Christie’s New York includes his mother’s 1869 Bechstein.

van cliburn bechstein

Rildia Bee O’Bryan Cliburn was Van’s first piano teacher. They lived together in Fort Worth until her death, aged 97, in 1994.

The aim is to balance the budget – at least that’s the official line.

The layoffs were all in the sales department.

The Symphony still employs 79 full-timers and 80 part-time, not including the musicians.

Artistically, it’s on a high with the Austrian Manfred Honeck, undertaking ambitious tours. But someone has to mind the pennies back home.

pitts

It is a truth universally acknowledged that American critics have a cloth ear for the composer Harrison Birtwistle. They simply don’t hear what we hear – that Harry is one of the true originals, an inventor of languages of which he is the only speaker. Even Alex Ross struggled in The Rest Is Noise to get to grip with the grit of a Birtwistle score. It’s a cultural thing. British and European critics have similar difficulties with, for instance, Harry Partch, George Crumb or Robert Ashley.

So here’s an exception.

George Grella of New York Classical Review went to a Birtwistle concert and came away wondrously confused:

This is a difficult proposition in Western classical music, built on the premise that music moves through time to resolution. Birtwistle works with short phrases and patterns that do repeat, but the repetitions come after a complex sequence of events, and there is no explicit sense of progress leading from one to the other. Sometimes the phrases sound the same as before, sometimes they sound different.

Hearing these great compositions is like being lost in the woods, searching for a path, and finding oneself going in circles. But time has elapsed, so the landscape changes through each iteration.

Read the full review here.

Harrison-Birtwistle

Did the New York Times review this concert? Is it still, was it ever, a paper of record?

 

Erica Worth, editor of Pianist magazine, had her gig ruined last night by creepy silent texters. Isn’t it time for concert halls to segregate the active fingers from the contemplative? Hands up the first hall with a dedicated text zone.

Here’s Erica:

 

erica worth

 

I am angry! Last night I went to a chamber music concert that featured a pianist friend of mine as soloist (Tanya Bannister, you were wonderful….). Tanya lives in New York and I rarely get to hear her. The concert was in a lovely intimate setting – the Forge in Camden. First time I’ve been, and there’s a very beautiful-sounding Steinway grand (not D though) for anyone looking for a small venue to play in. 

All in all, I was very happy to be there. Lights turned down low, very cosy. Chopin and Schubert on the menu. I was really looking forward to hearing Chopin Piano Concerto No 2 in the rarely performed arrangement for chamber ensemble.

The couple next to me were on their iPhones, texting silently throughout the entire performance. The woman even showing the man her texts from time to time, giggling. The odd glare from me didn’t help. Is this ignorance? Is this disrespect? Why can’t people turn off their damn devices for just half an hour? It made me mad.

The string players and Tanya merged as one. They’d obviously performed together a lot. Tanya’s interpretation of the Chopin was fresh and not over-sentimental, almost feisty – a lot of vigour. Very clear playing and I loved her filigree passagework. Great to see her past teacher/mentor Christopher Elton at the concert. But can’t get those texters out of my head.