Malcolm Layfield, who was forced to resign last year as head of strings at Royal Northern College of Music during police investigations of historic sex offences, has finally been charged with one count of rape.

The charge relates to a woman of 18, allegedly assaulted in 1982 when Layfield was teaching at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. Layfield, 62, is due to appear at Manchester City Magistrates’ Court on 14 August 2014.

malcolm layfield

The liquidation of Rome Opera – music director: Riccardo Muti – has been called off. For a month, at least.

A peace deal has been put on the table for the unions to consider in a referendum. There will be cuts, but not as deep as feared. For the moment.

Report here.

riccardo muti

 

Renato Fresia-Verdino, who coached singers at Opera Australia for 25 years, died suddenly on Sunday of a heart attack. He was 64.

Renato had also taught singers in New Zealand and Wales. A a kid in Rome, he played crowd scenes in Ben Hur.

Tribute here.

 

Renato-Fresia-with-Simon-Hewett

Giorgio Gaslini, the Italian jazz pianist who composed the soundtrack for Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (The Night, 1961), has died, aged 84.

He was the first teacher of jazz at Rome’s Santa Cecilia Academy.

giorgio gaslini

I was asked the question yesterday by a Classic FM camera team at the opening of the Bristol Proms, an event that is trying to break the straitjacket formality of concertgoing.

The answer that sprang to mind was: ‘if classical music is dying, then you’re doing it wrong’.

If the audience wont’ come, choose another audience.

If the hall is morbid or forbidding, change the venue.

And don’t – whatever you do – call it classical music.

Every label you attach to music diminishes it. Genre is history. People in the 21st century talk of ‘my music’, not some marketing category.

The global interest in music has never been higher – this website is proof of that. Just get out there are bring makers of music together with those who crave it.

Here’s the impromptu interview.

Bristol Proms carousel

 

We’ve had sight of a letter sent by an eminent American soprano to a number of her colleagues, asking them to join her in reducing their fees by 12.5 percent in order to help the Metropolitan Opera balance its books.

Hers is an honourable, heartfelt suggestion and one which takes an admirable degree of personal responsibility for the art of opera and one of its leading institutions.

The diva claims that several of her colleagues have already agreed to her suggestion and the tone of her letter indicates that she has bought into the Peter Gelb narrative without benefit of independent assessment.

Admirable as her sense of responsibility may be, it will be seen by colleagues in the orchestra as a rejection of their argument – that the Met’s problems are caused by Gelb’s economic inefficiencies – and a  betrayal of their campaign for a just and sustainable pay deal.

We have withheld the diva’s name in order not to inflame an overheated situation. But we suspect the Met may publish it.

fat singer

fat singer

Michael Haefliger has made such a success of the Lucerne Festival that his name has been linked as a possible successor to Clive Gillinson at Carnegie Hall or Peter Gelb (after Götterdämmerung) at the Met. Today, however, Haefliger signed a new Lucerne contract, taking him up to 2020 and ruling himself out of US contention.

michael haefliger

 

 

 

Press release:

Lucerne, 29 July 2014. Michael Haefliger, Executive and Artistic Director of LUCERNE FESTIVAL, is extending his contract until the end of 2020. Haefliger has been leading the Festival in this capacity since 1999. Since he began his tenure, Haefliger has significantly shaped and advanced the Festival’s profile through such initiatives as the founding in 2003 of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA with Claudio Abbado and of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY with Pierre Boulez. In recent years he has enhanced LUCERNE FESTIVAL’s international reputation through tours undertaken by the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA and Claudio Abbado to the United States, Asia, and Europe. In the fall of 2013, together with Anish Kapoor and Irata Isozaki, Haefliger launched the innovative social project LUCERNE FESTIVAL ARK NOVA, a mobile concert hall that was presented as  a gift to the population in Japan’s earthquake-stricken Tohoku Region. Most recently, he has inaugurated pioneering approaches in Lucerne with such projects as the new concert formats represented by the LUCERNE FESTIVAL 40min and LUCERNE FESTIVAL Young Performance series.

“I am extraordinarily delighted with regard to this extension,” observes the Chairman of the Board  Hubert Achermann. “Michael Haefliger is an intendant full of energy and inspiration who values the great latitude to design programs at LUCERNE FESTIVAL and who moreover uses it with the greatest creativity – and obtains outstanding results, artistically and economically speaking. Together we face the challenge of ensuring in LUCERNE FESTIVAL’s future that, alongside the highest artistic quality, there is also continuity in times of change.”

“I am delighted and also very proud to be able to continue to set the course for LUCERNE FESTIVAL’s future in my role as Executive and Artistic Director”, Michael Haefliger explains. “Both for the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA and for the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY, the challenge now is to create exciting new perspectives and to further develop their profiles. The realm of youth-oriented programs known as the Young series will also be expanded as the third main pillar of LUCERNE FESTIVAL. We need to attract new target audiences through such efforts as new concert formats and innovative and experimental approaches. Continuing international activities for the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA and the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY and projects like the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ARK NOVA are important to further establish the Festival’s global reputation. Following the great success in 2013, there are plans for a second realization of the ARK NOVA in the fall of 2014 in Japan, and we are also working on bringing the mobile concert hall to New York and of course also to Switzerland in the coming years. The plans for a new music theater in Lucerne represent a hopeful new perspective for LUCERNE FESTIVAL. The latest developments in the legal proceedings involving the funds of the Salle Modulable make me optimistic about the path toward making the new performance space a reality.  It is important for me to integrate LUCERNE FESTIVAL into this planning process as optimally as possible in the coming years and to contribute to building up the realm of music theater for LUCERNE FESTIVAL.”

 

This is a meeting yesterday of the directorate of the Friends of the Bayreuth Festival. Not much to laugh about.

katharina wagner thielemann

l-r: Business director Dieter Sense, Christian Thielemann (back to camera), Katharina Wagner and Wolfgang Wagner. Photo: Dr. Klaus Billand

The internationally performed French composer Eric Tanguy has lost both of his parents over the past three weeks, to separate heart attacks. His father, Dr Alain Tanguy, was eminent in cancer research. His mother, Thérèse, raised six children and was active in music education. They opened their home and their hearts to innumerable musicians.

When Eric was just 14, they took him to meet Olivier Messiaen in Caen. Alain later became friendly with Henri Dutilleux, with whom Eric worked closely. Eric says: ‘I have especially strong memories of them attending some of my most special concerts such as the cello concerto with Rostropovich and Seiji Ozawa in 2002 at Carnegie Hall and also the premiere of my last orchestra piece in January at Salle Pleyel with Paavo Järvi.’ One of Alain’s last phone conversations this past week was with Ivry Gitlis.

If you know Eric or the Tanguy family, please send him your sympathies and memories.

eric tanguy

From the Salzburger Nachrichten review of Ildebrando dArcangelo’s performance in the festival’s Don Giovanni:

Die langen schwarzen Haare nach hinten gegelt, in schwarzer Hose und Hemd und Schlangenmustermantel zeigt er bodygebuildete Muskeln, die gut und gerne darauf schließen lassen, dass er auch Ähnliches in der Hose haben könnte. 

His long black hair slicked back, sporting black tights and shirt and a snakeskin print jacket, he displays body-builder muscles, which are pretty good and which makes one happy to conclude that he may also have similar attributes inside his pants.

The critic’s name is Karl Harb. There may be more sensitive ways of making his point.

Friends and colleagues have reacted with shock and dismay at the death of Tommaso Zuccon Ghiotto, a talented violinist from Vicenza, who was found dead over the weekend at his home in via Napoli.

He was 27.

Tommaso had won an audition to play in Enrico Morricone’s Sinfonietta Italiana.

After studies at the Zurich conservatoire, he was entering international competitions and achieving good placements. At this stage, there is no known cause for his death.

Our sympathies to his loved ones.

tommaso zucchon ghiotto

Samuel Tan, from Singapore, took first prize in the 2014 Andrea Postacchini International Violin Competition in Italy. He beat 130 violinists from 39 countries, aged up to 35.

His parents explain how, in first interview here.

samuel tan

His success will reignite the debate over the value, standards and impartiality of many international competitions.