Time For Three violinists Zach De Pue and Nick were on their way to meet up with bassist, Ranaan Meyer, to play at a festival in Fayetteville, Arkansas when the captain and crew of a USAir flight in Charlotte, NC, told them that violins were not allowed on the flight!

‘They literally left us alone on the tarmac without any direction,’ exclaims Nick. ‘Are violins dangerous? It’s hard enough to make it as a classical musician. Cut us some slack, please…’

Cut USAir from your flight plans, please.

time for three

Happier times with Time for Three:

It’s Esa-Pekka Salonen and he’s selling i-Pads. But the ad is so ultra-cool and so close to musical process that it does almost as much to promote serious music as it does to sell gizmos. Watch.

esa-pekka i-pad

 

 

 

The pianist tweets:

Very excited to announce the launch of my first fragrance!! Will sell in Europe in the fall and China next year. 🙂

lang lang smells

Cleveland has plans for rejuvenating the audience. In an economy worse than Detroit’s that is quite a challenge, but executive director Gary Hanson and artistic director Franz Welser-Moest have some good ideas and a keen sense of mission. They have also found the money.

Cleveland’s leaders talked about the future to the New York Times video unit. Big mistake. The Times makes films like the French make tea – with an arrant over-confidence that masks rank incompetence.

Hard to imagine that an organisation headed by Mark Thompson, former BBC chief, can put out such numbskull, Fifties-style pap.

cleve

 

A confession from the Edexcel examination board:

What issue has been reported?

Following our GCE AS Music Technology Unit 2: Listening and Analysing (6MT02) exam we’ve been contacted by a number of students, parents and teachers who are concerned about the way the sound was presented on the audio CD.

Unfortunately, after investigation of these queries, we’ve discovered that some students were presented with audio CDs in mono rather than in stereo.

Are these examiners even basically competent?

exam student headphones

Tim Page, in a typically incisive essay for the New York Review of Books, remarks on the disappearance of Karlheinz Stockhausen who, along with Pierre Boulez, led the post-War avant-garde in European music.

Very little Stockhausen is available on record and scores are obtainable only from his estate at outrageous prices. Eead Tim here.

I happen to remember when the madness set in and Stockhausen began clawing back all of his music from publishers and record labels.

He was about to premiere one of the segments of his week-long Licht opera at La Scala in the late 1980s when a photographer approached me, saying the the great man had agreed to one session of portraits and a conversation with a journalist. Would I be up for it?

Like a shot. Nothing is more magnetic to a curious writer than a self-declared hermit with a built-in harem.

Then the conditions started coming in. Stockhausen demanded copyright in all photographs, because he was the ‘sole owner of his own image’. Not my problem, but the snapper looked worried.

Then he demanded physical ownership of any tape I recorded of him speaking. He was the owner of his own voice. I said I’d think about it.

Then he asserted copyright ownership over every word that he uttered and I wanted to quote.

End of conversation. Bye-bye Karlheinz Stockhausen.

stockhausen sweater

 

 

The Orchestre de Paris, preparing to enter its new Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette (pictured) in January 2015, is casting around for a different kind of audience than the old bourgeoisie who flocked to its old home, the Salle Pleyel.

So they’ve looked at how London does it and copied a few tricks (below).

Tricolors waving on the season’s last night?

nl-paris4

 

Des places de concert à 5€ et 10€
Le 24 juin, l’Orchestre de Paris donnera un concert exceptionnel dans la Grande salle de la Philharmonie au format “Proms” de Londres avec 1000 places debout à 5€.
Lors des trois week-ends thématiques, des concerts de musique de chambre par les musiciens de l’Orchestre de Paris seront proposés à 10€.

murdered at the museum

This is the couple who were gunned down in cold blood while visiting the Jewish Museum in Brussels on Saturday. They leave two daughters, 16 and 15 years old.

The attacker has not been caught.

They called him Great Bach in his time and forgot about him for the next two centuries.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, is, for most of us, an unopened book without title-page, index or much in the way of biographical information. I have been listening here and there to concert performances and record releases – notably to Mahan Esfahani’s remarkable debut disc – but have been struggling to find a key to the heart and soul of this important contributor to European civilisation.

Now I’ve found one. It’s my Album of the Week on sinfinimusic. Click here.

 

c p e bach

 

Eoin Andersen, principal 2nd violin of the Zurich Opera orchestra and a member of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Lucerne Festival Orchestra, has been named concertmaster of Andrew Davis’s Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

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The ex-KGB oligarchs, owners of London’s throwaway Evening Standard and once-Independent newspapers, have bought the lakeside Hotel Gütsch from which Arturo Toscanini founded the anti-Fascist Lucerne Festival in 1938.

You can sleep in the Toscanini suite for SFr 1,260 ($1,400) a night.

Sic transit…

hotel gutsch

If you think you know Mahler, try this. Strictly for the nerds.

mahler9