In 1945, German Diez received a letter from the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau, granting him a scholarship to study in the US for the next ten years. Aside from Arrau and his assistant Rafael de Silva, Diez also took lessons with Carl Friedberg and Eduard Steuermann.

He became a distinguished teacher in his own right at Greenwich House Music School, Bard College and SUNY Purchase.

The London opera singer Elizabeth Meister is offering to cut off all her hair to raise money for cancer care.

She’s doing it in memory of her wonderful, widely-mourned teacher, Elizabeth (Liza) Connell, who died two years ago of the disease.

Read Liz’s blog. Then help Liz and Liza, if you can, by clicking here.

Nessun doormat?

At least it wasn’t ten-or.

h/t: Max Waller

The young singer insists that the voice and the sound are hers, all hers. Autotune quote at 1:47.
Take that, Britney Spears.

Wolfgang Rihm is 25,000 Euros richer this morning.

Shouldn’t there be a limit on how many prizes an already successful musician can accept?

The conductor Owain Arwel Hughes is having to offer a personal guarantee to pay musicians’ fees at this year’s Welsh Proms if ticket sales fail to meet expectations.

The Welsh Proms, which Hughes founded in 1986, lost their funding from Cardiff Council this year in a wave of local authority cuts.

The concerts are not connected to the BBC Proms.

More here.

The lamentable state of the so-called international conductors competition in Cordoba, which we exposed yesterday, has been defended by the orchestra in a letter to local media.

Its argument, apparently compiled by lawyers, states that the orchestra was not obliged to present a full jury at the early rounds. All it needed was the principal conductor (Lorenzo Ramos) and a few principal players to decide whether a candidate was worth advancing or not. Full defence here (in Spanish).

They may be within their rights to state that, but this is not a serious competition of international standard. Our complainant is a viola player in a London orchestra. He knows how professional conductors and players are meant to behave. Readers are  strongly advised to avoid the Cordoba contest.

Yesterday, we brought you Drew McManus’s annual earnings list of chief executive pay in US orchestras.

Today it’s the turn of the maestro.

Drew points out that in the year reported, 2001/12, several orchestras (notably Boston and Detroit) deliberately withheld the pay of their  music director from the IRS form. Others paid their music director as a private contractor in two or more payments to maintain maestro secrecy. If this trend grows, donors will soon start asking questions.

The top payers were:

1 Chicago Symphony, over $2 million

2 San Francisco SO, also over $2m

3 National Symphony (just under $2m)

The rest can be studied here.

James Levine’s pay at the Met still outstrips the rest.

Tannhäuser is to be screened on August 12, the festival has announced. No details of participating cinemas. The insurance giant Allianz is picking up the tab.

Details and promo video here.

It’s the time of year for consultant Drew McManus to produce his annual compensation reports on US orchestras. Today it’s executive directors, tomorrow music directors.

The data are based on tax returns for 2011/12 and are therefore a little behind the times, before the Minnesota debacle.

Average chief executive wages rose 5.81 percent in the 2011/12 season.

The top three executives earned:

1 Los Angeles Philharmonic (including Hollywood Bowl): $1,751,039

2 New York Philharmonic: $912,858

3 San Francisco Symphony: $638,857

Read all the rest right here.

Peter Gelb at the Met, by comparison, is on $1.8  million this year.

Laven Sowell died last November, aged 80, having given 34 years of his life to Tulsa Opera as its chorusmaster.

Today, it emerged that he had left the company a handsome $600,000 foundation. Story here.

It’s no secret that most pop singing is fake. The producers fiddle around to keep the stuff generally in tune.

Evidence of their ma nipulation has landed in the form of a leaked video of Britney Spears singing without the benefit of computerised voice correction. You don’t need to listen to much. It’s horrible.

 The producer William Orbit, who worked with Spears, has published an excuse on Facebook: ‘I have heard that Britney vocal link that everybody’s been discussing. It has been impossible not to… I’d like to affirm that ANY singer when first at the mic at the start of a long session can make a multitude of vocalisations in order to get warmed up.’

Oh, yeah?

This ought to be the moment for the world to acknowledge the extreme thrill and high risk that opera singers deliver every night.

Will it? Probably not. The world is deaf and is constantly being dumbed down.

Here’s the full text of Orbit’s statement:

Dearest Music Lovers, I have heard that Britney vocal link that everybody’s been discussing. It has been impossible not to as there have been many comments directing my attention to it. [I won’t re-posting it here]. I’d like to affirm that ANY singer when first at the mic at the start of a long session can make a multitude of vocalisations in order to get warmed up.

Warming up is essential if you’re a pro, as it is with a runner doing stretches, and it takes a while to do properly. I’ve heard all manner of sounds emitted during warmups. The point is that it is not supposed to be shared with millions of listeners.