The Residentie Orchestra of The Hague has announced a new chief conductor. It’s Jan Willem de Vriend, who is already chief of the Dutch SO, an ensemble embroiled in a bitter legal battle over its name.

The two orchestras have – unusually – agreed to share Vriend’s services. They are in different parts of the (small) country. Let’s see how that works.

From the bleak and surreal Fishkinet.

Orch insiders tell us that Christoph Eschenbach’s contract as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra is to be renewed tomorrow.

Eschy is the third highest paid maestro in the US, on $1.93 million a year. He has received some of the worst reviews of any top stick this past year. A sizeable part of the players are fed up, especially with his pals-for-soloists program. Local critics have lost faith.

But the outgoing Michael Kaiser, having hired Eschy in the first place, is not going to dump him now, we hear. Can the incoming Deborah Rutter unpick that contract? If not, Washington could face more washouts.

In the 2014-15 season, the so-called National Symphony is not playing a solitary note of American music.

Tales of Hoffmann went ahead without Giuseppe Filianoti for the above unusual, cryptic reason. Do they mean he can’t sing the role? Or passed his sell-by?

Either way, the stand-in tenor was a flop and the production staggered. David Fleshler was there for SFCR. Read his review here.

It’s unmatched for short messages and instant snaps, but the #Twitter Music stream has not fulfilled expectations.

The Twitter-powered app aimed to help people find music based on who they followed. A trendy idea, but dumb.

The Twitter #Music app has been removed from the Apple App Store, and the rest of the service will be shut down on April 18, a year to the day from its launch.

A new exhibition, borrowed from London’s Jewish Museum, opens this week. It underlines the singer’s ethnicity.

It was one of the best places to work, says Richard Leech in his open letter, and Ian Campbell was the best of bosses. Such a shame it had to go. More lament than protest. Here’s his letter.

One of our readers has noted that San Diego’s budget of $15 million equates to the annual turnover of an average supermarket. One difference, though, is that the supermarket manager and his wife do not, on the whole, trouser five percent of turnover as salary.

There is more to this abrupt closure than has yet met the public eye.

h/t: Ron Ephrat

We’ve been sent rehearsal footage from the upcoming French multimedia opera, Steve Five (King Different). Its creators are Roland Auzet and Fabrice Melquiot and it opened on the fringes of Lyon this week.

With singing lines such as ‘on part maintenant à New York’, it certainly is different from the original pomme.

The US classical charts have been dominated for a month by Decca’s Benedictines.

Now Sister Cristina Scuccia is storming The Voice of Italy game show.

Whatever happened to the virtues of solitude?

We hear that the Russian journalist named in the new list of the west’s unwanted is Dmitry Kiselev, head of the Russia Today media group, mouthpiece for Vladimir Putin. Earlier this week Kiselev said on Russian television that Russia was ‘the world’s only country that is ready to turn the USA into radioactive ash’.

The Staatsoper was cast in gloom today as Genia Kühmeier attended the funeral of her husband, Martin Siebzehnriebl, who died on March 14 after a severe illness.

The Austrian soprano has been obliged over recent weeks to cancel international engagements. Colleagues and admirers may wish to send condolences to her Facebook page.  Our sympathies to the artist and her family. We will intrude no more on private grief.