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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

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. 

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.

The search for Enrique Granados’s lost opera, Maria del Carmen, has been a career-long obsession for US scholar, Walter Clark. Written when the Spanish composer was in his early thirties, it got lost as his fame took off.

Granados was killed when a German torpedo stuck his ship in 1916. The score was sold by his sons to a New York collector during the Spanish civil war. Later, it was reported to have perished in a warehouse fire. The diligent Clark kept looking.

He now has a full score and Spanish opera houses are eager to put the work on stage. More here.

Arthur Richard Itter, founder of Lyrita Recorded Edition, has died near his home in Burnham, aged 85.

He launched Lyrita in 1959 when UK recording was dominated by HMV and Decca, both with an international outlook. Richard sensed that those labels were neglecting mid-century British composers. Lyrita produced modern British music performed by British musicians.

Among its first composers were John Ireland and Gerald Finzi whose music often had its first recordings under Richard’s care. The label grew through the 1970s with premieres of symphonic works and concertos by Bax, Moeran, Alwyn, Bridge, Holst, Hurlstone, Rawsthorne, Rubbra and Sterndale Bennett.

Although keenly interested in music and in recording technology Richard was happy to remain in the background. His decision to hire Decca to provide all recording, manufacturing and distribution services was practical, and significantly gave him access to Ken Wilkinson, one of the most celebrated recording engineers of the time. Richard nurtured long relationships with the London orchestras, particularly the LPO.

The Lyrita label was virtually dormant in the decade 1995-2005 until a license agreement was signed with Wyastone Estate Ltd, the owners of Nimbus Records. Under this agreement every Lyrita title was reissued in time to celebrate Richard’s 80th birthday.

‘From the 1960s to the 1990s, those with a taste for obscure English classical composers, or for the obscure works of the well-known ones, needed only one port of call: Lyrita Records. For aficionados of the English canon the re-issue of this material is one of the great events in our musical history. It is like coming across long-buried treasure, and represents perhaps the finest exhibition our music has ever had,’ wrote Simon Heffer in the Telegraph.

New lab tests assess and address conductor pain. Check out the remedies here.

Meantime, anyone know a good clinic for writer’s shoulder?

Just listen to this, from the Schoenberg Centre in Vienna.