A Paris appearance by the Orchestre National de Lyon was called off yesterday as a result of industrial action on the French rail network.
The Salle Pleyel concert, with Véronique Gens as soloist, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, had been built around a new version of Ravel’s setting of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Antar with texts by Amin Malouf.
Now Paris won’t hear it, dammit. There was no way for the Lyon musicians to reach the capital in time.
The rest of the National Chorus of Spain went on strike this weekend over pay and conditions. There were 66 absentees as the Madrid performance.
Joanna Wallfisch is a versatile member of a well-known family of London musicians. Her breath control is prodigious.
h/t: London Jazz News
Leon Spierer, who was a concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1963 to his retirement, is giving a Father’s Day concert at the University of Houston. Appropriately enough with his son. He has been talking to local media.
Spierer, Berlin born, grew up in exile in Argentina, before studying the Max Rostal in London. Before getting the call from Berlin, he was concertmaster in Nuremberg, Bremen and Stockholm. ‘My 26 years with Karajan were the best of my life,’ he has said.
The golden years for Berislav Klobucar, who has died in Vienna aged 89, were the brimful sixties.
One year he conducted Placido Domingo’s triumphant Vienna debut. The next he stepped on for Herbert von Karajan in Walküre at the Met. A Croat from Zagreb, Klobucar studied with Lovro von Matacic and Clemens Krauss.
He was an ever-reliable pit master who, away from Vienna where he conducted 1,133 performances between 1953 and 1993, he was also chief conductor in Graz and Stockholm.
He has earned his rest.
All perfectly decorous. You wonder why she did it.
Marcy Richardson’s her name, if you’re casting an athletic Handel.
It emerged during hearings today of two musicians accused of sexually abusing students that the double-bass player Duncan McTier has been suspended by the Royal Academy of Music after being charged last month with four offences. he has pleaded not guilty.
The conductor Nicholas Smith, also accused, did not enter a plea. His lawyer told the court he would plead not guilty.
The alleged offences date back in Smith’s case, to Chetham’s School in the 1970s and, in McTier’s, to the Royal Northern College of Music and Purcell’s School in the 1980s and 1990s.
A bigger tenor, off the ball
Classical Music magazine reports, quoting a BBC spokesperson, that the music station is about to suffer another ten job losses, mostly within ‘management, administration and support,’ whatever that means.
This will be the second round of cuts in as many years and, if one thing is certain, it will cull essential people rather than deadwood. BBC Radio needs to lose 60 jobs. Radio 3 must take its share.
In a move unusual for the discreet operations of German music, Stefan Blunier has made a public announcement of his resignation as general music director of the city of Bonn.
Blunier’s statement blames budgets cuts, ‘demotivating signals and the wanton destruction of yet another cultural institution.’
In Germany. Believe it.
His resignation takes effect two years from now.
Ich bedanke mich für die Unterstützung der Politik in den vergangenen 6 Jahren.
Nur durch die von der Stadt geschaffenen Rahmenbedingungen waren das positive
Erscheinungsbild und die Erfolge des Beethoven Orchester Bonn möglich:
Internationale Tourneen, Schallplattenpreise (u. a. vier ECHO KLASSIK Preise) und eine
momentane Rekordauslastung von 95% in den Konzerten. Ich wähnte mich auf einem
stringenten Weg im Hinblick auf die anstehenden Beethoven – Feierlichkeiten 2020, die
ich gerne mitgestaltet hätte.
Nun scheint sich aber ein politisch gewollter Umschwung zu konkretisieren:
Neben der erneuten Sparauflage in der Oper soll die Personalstärke des Beethoven
Orchester Bonn – einem Flaggschiff wie es Herr OB Nimptsch gerne öffentlich nennt – um
6 Stellen reduziert werden und auch dem Etat drohen weitere Einschnitte.
Dies kann ich nicht mit meinen künstlerischen Intentionen und meinem Sinn für Qualität
vereinbaren und werde deshalb ab dem Sommer 2016 als Generalmusikdirektor der
Stadt Bonn nicht mehr zur Verfügung stehen.
Die Nachhaltigkeit des demotivierenden Signals und die mutwillige Zerstörung einer
weiteren kulturell erfolgreichen Institution werden die Politik und die Verwaltung alleine
zu verantworten haben.
The cellist Alban Gerhardt has published a few tips on how a young string player should go about choosing and buying an instrument. There’s no general rule except: avoid sharks, frauds and dodgy teachers.
Alban’s father played in the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1950s when players were poorly paid and many of the instruments were matchbox. Then David Oistrakh came along and taught them a thing or two.
Read Alban here.
We cannot remember a greater spectacle on any London opera stage than ENO’s Benevenuto Cellini, which we saw last night. With more than 100 singers, jugglers, acrobats and children on stage and the chorus belting out Berlioz right into our faces, Terry Gilliam’s production flies so far over the top that it outsmarts and outbarnums any circus on earth – including Monty Python’s.
The jokes are, as you’d expect from a Python, sly and none too subtle. The singing is world-class – Michael Spyres in the title role, Corinne Winters as the hot-to-trot Teresa and Willard White as a magnificently political Pope.
Taking into account the scale of the production, the comic effects were timed to the nanosecond and brilliantly executed, both on stage and above the audience’s heads. Compared to the tawdry samba dancing we saw in Trafalgar Square for the soccer World Cup launch, this was a fantastical blending of high performance and high art – the kind of thing you see more in your dreams than on any stage. Truly, the greatest show on earth this month.
Fortunate audiences in Rome and Amsterdam will get to see the co-pro show next season. London tickets are all but sold out.
Now here’s a well-kept secret that slipped out last night between one interval drink and the next.
At the climax of the opera, Cellini has to forge the Pope’s new statue by dawn or be hanged by the neck until dead. Will he, won’t he? How do you get an audience to believe that the rising statue has been freshly forged in the burning fiery furnace?
Brows were furrowed, heads put together. ‘I know,’ cried someone. ‘Let’s talk to the guys who staged the spectacular show of the 2012 London Olympics. The one who made the towers of the satanic mills in the industrial revolution sequence.’
One call did it. Matthew Whitehead, an English designer who is Creative Director of Airworks B.V. in Amersterdam, came up with the perfect solution for the mighty statue. Shall we tell you how he did it?
No. Pity to spoil the illusion. It’s a fantastic climax.
