After a season when the company teetered on the brink of shutdown, the music director has given up.
Sovrintendente Carlo Fuortes communicates with great regret that the Maestro Riccardo Muti has decided to give up the leadership of the two operas Aida and The Marriage of Figaro in the next season of the Teatro dell ‘ Opera. Maestro Muti attributes this painful decision in his letter to a “persistence of the problems that have emerged during the last few days.”
Italian source here.
JinJoo Cho of South Korea is the winner of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis.
She was one of six finalists, all women, five from South Korea, four of whom were students of members of the jury.
One judge, Miriam Fried, stood down for the final (or was asked to stand down), after half the contestants turned out to be her students.
The winner is a student of the jury president, Jaime Laredo.
If ever there was a time to reform the competition industry, now is it.
The Brussels Philharmonic has announced the death of its long-standing principal horn, André Van Driessche. He was Belgium’s most influential horn teacher and can be heard on many recordings.
Increasingly creepy, underhand and paranoid, Arts Council England (ACE) is inserting a new clause into its National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) contracts for 2015-18, warning that applicants may lose their grants if they speak or act in a way that has a ‘detrimental effect… on its [ACE’s] reputation as a distributor of public money or as a Government sponsored body.’
Happily, despite the Arts Council’s best efforts, England remains a democracy and arts leaders continue freely to leak their concerns to sites like ArtsPro and Slipped Disc. We’ll keep telling you what’s really going on.
Meantime, word is that chief executive Alan Davey’s desperate bid to grab the BBC Radio 3 vacancy may signify some deeper misunderstanding with his heat-seeking chairman, Peter Bazalgette, whose first executive act was to slash the grant of English National Opera, the company on whose back he rose to the ACE chair. Deeply creepy.
The ACE’s official line on gagging: “Regarding any actions that the Arts Council might wish to take to manage a reputational risk – we fully support artistic freedom of expression and would certainly not consider that using public funds for a play critical of the Arts Council would lead to any breach of our Funding Agreement, but an organisation undertaking any activity which was in breach of any legislation would of course be an entirely different matter.”
They pay people to write such things. They pay them with your tax money.
The suspension of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra may be an inevitable consequence of the parent organisation’s war on its musicians, but it is hitting students and parents hard.
Paul Murphy, a viola player and spokesman for the musicians, said: ‘We relish and take equally serious our roles as teachers, mentors, and coaches to our young musicians, and we are heartbroken that we are unable to work with them as a direct result of the WAC/ASO’s refusal to extend negotiations and subsequently locking us out.’
This is 16 year-old Rachel, who was desperate to learn and play Shostakovich 4th symphony. More here.
Marian Kouba, who sang 60 roles in Pozan and Warsaw and guest-lead in Berlin and on US tours, has died at a formidable age.
He was famed at home for Radames, Pinkerton and the male lead in Moniuszko’s Halka.
We have also been informed of the death in a New York hospital of the US tenor, Gene Bullard.
A sheriff’s court in Hamilton has found that Graeme McNaught did act in a threatening and abusive manner towards his former partner, the author Janice Galloway. McNaught, 54, had threatened to expose naked pictures of his ex-partner, taken while she was pregnant with their son.
The sheriff declared that he was satisfied five charges had been proven against McNaught after the trial was suspended over fears for the defendant’s mental health. He was found unfit to be given a criminal conviction and will face the court again in a month’s time.
McNaught, a concert pianist, is a lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Read full court report here.
This is a Riverdance rehearsal for the current tour with Igudesman and Joo, posted by LPO cellist Elisabeth Wiklander.
Click here to enjoy.
There has to be a comeback from the LSO….
We hear from Amsterdam that every available ticket for the premiere run of Gurrelieder has been sold.
It is the first time Gurrelieder has been staged as an opera and the first time – surely – that Arnold Schoenberg has sold out a run in a national opera house. Apart from the seats behind the cameras on two TV nights, every single space in the 1,600-seat house was either sold at full price or allocated to press and management for Pierre Audi’s production. The run opened on September 2 and closes this Tuesday after seven performances and a public general rehearsal.
These are exceptional results – historic, you might agree.
The French tenor says he’s discussing a Lohengrin at Bayreuth, with Anna Netrebko, conducted by Christian Thielemann. ‘If he thinks I can do it,’says Roberto, ‘it’s going to happen.’
He adds that his partner, the international Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, has been helping him with his German. ‘It’s great to have such a fantastic wife,’ he exclaims, in a Vienna tabloid interview.
