July 4, 2014 - Slippedisc

The music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus (and incoming chief of La Scala) has pulled out of the opening of next season after breaking the ulna in his right forearm. These things take a while to repair. Chailly will be replaced by New York Phil chief Alan Gilbert at the BBC Proms and in the opening two weeks of September. We wish him a full and speedy recovery.

UPDATE: Statement from the Proms: We are sorry to announce that, due to a fractured forearm, Riccardo Chailly has had to withdraw from all conducting engagements in the coming months, including his two appearances at the forthcoming BBC Proms festival. We are very grateful to Alan Gilbert who will conduct the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in its two Proms performances this summer.

Love those sideburns in the brass.

Long Yu, the most powerful conductor in China, has long been preparing a mighty bash for his 50th birthday. The first leg was in Beijing midweek, before Lang Lang flew off to Lebanon.

But the big event was aimed at his home town, Shanghai, presenting a new work by a Chinese composer played by Alison Balsom, a new American work by John Williams played by a Chinese pianist, and a new work from Tan Dun who straddles both worlds.

The open-air concert was to have opened the MISA youth Festival that Long Yu started with Charles Dutoit. But then the heavens opened.

So with lightning speed the event was moved to Shanghai’s yet-to-be-opened new concert hall, still in hard-hat state, and an audience drenched by the downpour. Quick thinking, maestro!

Exclusive video:

French and German media were shaken in rapid succession by the sudden deaths of Le Monde editor Erik Izraelewicz, aged 58, and the FAZ editor Franz Schirrmacher at 54. Today, we learn that Benoît Duquesne, editor and presenter on TF1 and Europe 1, has died at 57. He was one of the most familiar faces on French screens.

Dangerous age for senior journalists, the 50s. Keep taking the blood-pressure pills.

No idea. But you can cram two of them into a Wigmore Hall elevator, provided you leave out the Danish cellist.

Doric Quartet, Danish Quartet in a rehearsal crush

In 1993, after a prolonged absence from prime time screens, Rolf Harris was brought back to the BBC to host Animal Hospital. The series drew such high ratings that the incoming controller of BBC1, Lorraine Heggessey, commissioned him to present Rolf on Art, the channel’s only educational programme on the arts.

It was a significant act of dumbing down, from which the BBC has struggled ever since to recover.

I challenged Lorraine Heggessey at the time, in print, and live on BBC Radio, to explain what she was doing allowing a man of no attainments other than great fame for being famous, to usurp the role of Kenneth Clark as the man who opened the nation’s eyes to art.

She spluttered a bit and called me ‘elitist’. She had no other justification for employing Rolf other than his ‘popularity’.

I accept that many friends and colleagues knew nothing of Rolf’s dark side. But now that Harris, 84, has been sent to jail for five years and nine months, for indecent assaults on young girls, the BBC has two questions to answer:

1 Given that female staff commonly called him ‘the octopus’ for his roving hands, was any formal harrassment complaint ever made against the entertainer, and how was it handled?

2 Was any objection at a senior level to Harris being cast as an authority on art? Did Alan Yentob, now the corp’s ‘creative director’ register an objection? Did the present D-G Tony Hall, then head of news? Did anyone attempt to prick Lorraine Heggessey’s preposterous bubble that brought so much disgrace on an national institution? Or did everyone just look the other way?

Answers, please, Tony Hall.

Our man in the Kremlin is a little perplexed that the Vienna Phil have put themselves in the hands of a rock manager for future Russian tours.

Their next visit, with Riccardo Muti in April 2015, will feature two concerts inside the Kremlin, in a hall with poor acoustics that was built 40 years ago for Communist Party congresses.

In St Petersburg they will play in the main pops Oktyabrsky concert hall.

Wait til Muti hears that sound…. He won’t be happy.

Earlier this year, the Vienna Phil played a Beethoven cycle with Christian Thielemann in the outstanding Tchaikovsky Hall.

press release:

Six talented young composers have been announced as the winners of the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers’ Competition 2014 – the culmination of the BBC Proms’ annual scheme which gives the nation’s brightest young composers aged between 12 – 18 years old the opportunity to explore their musical boundaries and get a taste of what it means to be a composer in the 21st century.

Now in its sixteenth year, the competition continues to offer winners unrivalled opportunities to reach wide audiences on world-class platforms for classical music including the BBC Proms and BBC Radio 3, as well as receive a much sought-after BBC commission.

The entries were judged by a panel chaired by Fraser Trainer comprising composers Stuart MacRae, Anna Meredith, Martin Suckling, Judith Weir CBE, and Radio 3 Editor Jeremy Evans, who looked for pieces that were original, unique, and inspiring.

The winners of the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers’ Competition 2014 are:

JUNIOR CATEGORY

(12-16 years):

Harry Castle – La Trahison des Images

Rob Durnin – Study in Anarchy

Matthew Jackson – Mirror Mirror

SENIOR CATEGORY

(17-18 years):

Nathaniel Coxon – Two Cells

Anna Disley-Simpson – Underneath

Harry Johnstone – Dis-Pulsed

The city of Hamburg is so excited by the tercentenary of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach that it is building a museum courtyard for all the composers that ever lived within its hospitable society.

1 Johannes Brahms has a museum all to himself.

2 CPE Bach we’ve mentioned.

So who else?

3 Telemann

4 Hasse

5 Mahler (1891-97)

er…. and ….?

6 Ligeti lived there in the 1990s. So did

7 Alfred Schnittke.

That leaves….

Keep thinking.

All right, one more:

8 Detlev Glanert, composer of ultraviolent operas, was born in Hamburg, September 1960 (h/t: Karen Kamensek).

Here goes:

9 Sofia Gubaidulina (still living there)

10 Felix Mendelssohn,

11 Fanny Mendelssohn, both born there

12 Paul Dessau

13 Bertold Goldschmidt

Yep, I think we made ten,

Bertrand d’At was due to get married his weekend.

A protégé of Maurice Béjart, he danced and made ballets for the master’s company before branching out on his own, with a special interest in Chinese culture. His most eye-catching work was A Sign of Love, a blues fantasy set in Shanghai.

He moved to Sweden in the 1990s to direct the Cullberg Ballet, and went on to lead the Ballet du Rhin from 1997.

D’At, who was 57, was found dead in his Paris apartment. No cause has yet been disclosed.