Click the word ‘post’.
Click the word ‘post’.
She was to have sung Carmina Burana in Orange in a fortnight, but the Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva has informed the organisers she is ‘awaiting a happy event’.
They’re advertising auditions for next season, if there is one. Click here.
In tough economic times, the Casa da Musica in Porto has landed an outstanding interpreter of modern works, Baldur Brönnimann.
The weekly Nielsen numbers are in and they are even worse than usual.
The top-selling album, with 1,789 sales, is Casey Cresczendo of The Dear (sic) Hunter with a release called Amour and Attrition. It is described as a symphony – and may even be one (we have not yet received a copy) – but its USP is rock musician doing his thing. It’s not classical.
The next two items, selling 253 copies and 173 respectively, are singing nuns.
Below that, peanuts.
A statistician would say that last week, measured by the usual minimal criteria, no classical music was sold in the United States of America.
First Vienna, then Chicago, now Berlin.
Barenboim’s State Opera has announced that it achieved 88 percent capacity across the season, attracting 183,000 visitors.
Still gloomy, Peter Gelb?
Nearly eighty years ago, in 1937, the Nazis confiscated Peters Edition in Leipzig from its Jewish owners, the Hinrichsen family, and handed it to one of their own, a man called Johannes Petschull.
Sixty-five years ago, the Communists confiscated what was left of the company’s property in East Germany.
The Hinrichsen family re-established Peters in London and New York, while Petschull carried on his dubious business from Frankfurt (you can read about some of the dodgy dealings in my book, When the Music Stops).
Now, after negotiating a minefield of legal and logistical tripwires, the three branches of the firm have been unified.
Yesterday, Edition Peters returned to Leipzig.
It’s Justin Way, a Covent Garden staffer with a mass of experience.
Other Proms changes:
Brigitte Fassbaender, the Octavian and Orlofsky of our times, is still hard at work as a stage director and coach.
Here’s her birthday interview with Sebastian Scotney.
photo (c) Lebrecht Music&Arts
Need a second viola for the afternoon session at Abbey Road? Extra bass for a wedding?
Georgia Meyers has launched a connection service for musicians who live and work in the north London borough of Brent. Cool idea.
Contact here.
The Wall Street Journal has been analysing the Met’s box-office take on recent productions. The widely-scorned and technically faulty Wagner Ring cycle, staged by Robert LePage, bombed on its return run, achieving just 48 percent of sales potential for Siegfried and 58% across the entire cycle, according to the WSJ.
‘We were up against Ring cycles all over the world that season,’ bleated the Met, a feeble excuse.
Full story and more stats here. UPDATE comparison here.
We’re quite excited, for purely aesthetic and intellectual reasons, about the forthcoming publication, due in mid October:
Charlotte Moorman was a prominent ornament of the John Cage/Nam June Paik avant-garde, who popped up naked on many stages. Since her death of breast cancer in 1993 she has vanished into the mists of legend. This book, with an intro by her roommate Yoko Ono, should ste things straight. Publisher’s blurb below (you can understand why they blurred the jacket). We’ve asked for an advance copy.
The Juilliard-trained cellist Charlotte Moorman sat nude behind a cello of carved ice, performed while dangling from helium-filled balloons, and deployed an array of instruments on The Mike Douglas Showthat included her cello, a whistle, a cap gun, a gong, and a belch. She did a striptease while playing Bach in Nam June Paik’s Sonata for Adults Only. In the 1960s, Moorman (1933–1991) became famous for her madcap (and often unclothed) performance antics; less famous but more significant is Moorman’s transformative influence on contemporary performance practice–and her dedication to the idea that avant-garde art should reach the widest possible audience. In Topless Cellist, the first book to explore Moorman’s life and work, Joan Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of an extraordinary American artist.
Moorman’s arrest in 1967 for performing topless made her a water-cooler conversation-starter, but before her tabloid fame she was a star of the avant-garde performance circuit, with a repertoire of pieces by, among others, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Paik, her main artistic partner. Moorman invented a new mode of performance that combined classical rigor, jazz improvisation, and avant-garde experiment—informed by intuition, daring, and love of spectacle. Moorman’s annual festival of the avant-garde offered the public a lively sampler of contemporary art in performance, music, dance, poetry, film, and other media.
Rothfuss chronicles Moorman’s life from her youth in Little Rock, Arkansas (where she was “Miss City Beautiful” of 1952) through her career in New York’s avant-garde to her death from breast cancer in 1991. (Typically, she approached her treatment as if it were a performance.) Deeply researched and profusely illustrated, Topless Cellist offers a fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious story of an artist whose importance was more than the sum of her performances.