Time was when every London musician could name the concertmasters of the major orchestras – Hugh Bean at the Philharmonia, John Georgiadis at the LSO, Rodney Friend at the LPO and Erich Gruenberg at the RPO. Big players, each and every one.

Erich will turn 90 this Sunday.

Among numerous achievements, he premiered concertos by Goldschmidt, McCabe, Holloway and more… and played on several Beatles records.

Happy birthday, Mr G.

gruenberg davis tippett

BBC photo l-r: Colin Davis, Michael Tippett, Erich Gruenberg


Pedro Halffter has been reappointed in Sevilla.

Despite a fierce campaign by the musicians and their union, the well-connected Halffter has got to keep his job. He will resume as music director of Real Orquesta de Sevilla and Teatro Maestranza at an eye-watering salary.

Report here.

halffter pedro

At the instigation of Mahan Esfahani, we’re presenting an upbeat alternative to yesterday’s list of downers.

Mahan’s choices of works that deserve more attention:

1. Handel, “Almira” (his first opera, and in German!)
2. Telemann played by top top top players. It can really sparkle if it’s done well. 
3. Mascagni, “Iris” (deal with it)

iris mascagni

4. Pretty much anything by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, but especially the cantatas on sacred subjects, like “Judith” which is a total masterpiece.

5. Franz and Georg Benda. Not a weak note in either brother’s output. Try Franz’s violin concertos – unbelievable.
6. JS Bach Bwv 1044, Triple Concerto. Seriously, this is a rare item in the concert hall.
7. The e minor string quartet by Verdi (again, deal with it)
8. Schoenberg, Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte
9. Webern, transcription of the 6-part ricercar from Bach’s Musical Offering. It is damned good.
10. Haydn in general, actually. I’m tired of hearing that programmers are afraid that he isn’t box office draw. There’s no such thing as too much Haydn when played and sung well.

 

Slipped Disc’s set:

1 Zemlinsky’s 2nd string quartet (sadly overshadowed by Schoenberg’s)

2 Martinu’s rhapsody-concerto for viola and orchestra

3 Karl-Amadeus Hartmann’s Concerto funèbre

4 Berthold Goldschmidt’s 2nd string quartet (probably the best work written anywhere in 1935)

5 Louise (the ultimate Paris opera)

 

Louise_Opera_By_Charpentier

6 La Juive

7 Birtwistle’s Endless Parade

8 Dvorak’s Requiem (why always Verdi’s?)

9 Spohr’s nonet (anyone’s nonet, actually; we love nonets)

10 Miaskovsky

miaskovsky

 

 

Playing in Union Station with network TV coverage made Joshua Bell’s Bach release the top-selling US classical release of the week, according to Nielsen Soundscan stats.

joshua bell metro

It sold 1,700 copies, exactly the same number as a surprise riser, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean from the Seattle Symphony Orch (with some help from NPR). Lang Lang’s Mozart album comes in third with 594. Anne Akiko Meyers is 4th with 496.

Are classical sales finally starting to pick up a little?

The conductor’s wall-to-wall schedule almost came unstuck today when his charter flight from Vladivostok to Tokyo was overbooked.

In order not to miss his first Tokyo concert, Gergiev summoned up a Gulfstream private jet and flew ahead with a small group of musicians. It appears that this flight was forced to make an emergency landing at Narita due to the lack of a chassis lock. Details here (in Russian).

gergiev airport

 

The website of the Donbass Opera has announced the sudden death of its director general Vasily Ryaben’kii. No cause is given.

‘We are all orphaned,’ the company says.

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In one of those corporate gestures that either capture the public imagination or fall into a blancmange of embarrassment, the BBC has blazed across all its networks a compilation recording of the Beach Boys hit involving an ill-judged plethora of British performers.

BBC - The Impossible Orchestra

 

You can watch the compilation here.

The Guardian has entertainingly run down most of the stellar cast-list. We find it musically uninteresting and the corporate hype asphyxiating. Compared to the BBC’s Just a Perfect Day in 1997, this veers more towards blancmange than inspiratio.

Worse, it looks like a Big Brother operation. Until now, only the death of a monarch or the outbreak of war was supposed to broadcast across all networks. Now, the BBC seems prepared to use that prerogative for its own propaganda and the glorification of its damply reorganised executive structure. We fear for the future of music on the BBC.

 

God Only Knows stars

The Opéra of Montpellier, serving th southwest of France, could be shut down in as little as three weeks, Figaro reports.

The regional council of Languedoc-Roussillon has failed to pay a promised 4 million Euro subsidy. The company is 716,000 Euros in debt, facing creditor demands. The auditor has warned that unless funds are raised within weeks he will have to shut the company.

The Opéra runs on a 22 million Euro budget, employing 242 staff. Plans to reduce the orchestra have met stiff resistance. The director general, Valérie Chevalier, has been in the job for less than ten months.

montpellier opera

Lawrence Foster was music director until 2012. No music director is presently listed on its website.

The $1 million Birgit Nilsson award is given to an eminent musician, who usually donates it to a worthy cause.

The Vienna Philharmonic will receive the prize in Stockholm tonight.

It will donate the prize to its own archives – a resource it has used astutely for seven decades to conceal its activities in the Third Reich.

brigit nilsson prize

 

Andreas Grossbauer, the VPO President said: ‘The Vienna Philharmonic believes that you ensure your future by remembering and documenting your past. Given the historic significance of the Vienna Philharmonic in music history and the historic significance of Birgit Nilsson herself, the Vienna Philharmonic has unanimously voted to use the entire one million dollar Birgit Nilsson Prize to expand its Historic Archive and to make it more easily accessible.

‘It has long been a dream of the VPO to have a transparent archive which is more accessible and more readily open to the public, to entice young people to view and study this history of almost two centuries, and to provide an environment conducive to scholarly research. This Prize will enable the VPO to establish a permanent home for its vast archive, which has grown appreciably over the past decades. As the VPO moves forward into the next century, its historic context and legacy will now be assured.’

The Vienna Philharmonic gives masterclasses in facing both ways.

Jacques Lacombe has done his best with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra over the past five years. He will tell them today he’s not prepared to renew in 2016.

Lacombe, 51, raised the organisation’s morale after a series of disasters involving dodgy Stradivari and short-stay chief executives. He has been getting better dates in Boston and beyond. Time to move on.

jacques lacombe

Even in an age of political correctness and mind control, this ban takes the breath away.

A planned production of Bizet’s Carmen at the State Opera of West Australia has been pulled by the management because it conflicts with a two-year $400,000 partnership with the State Government health promotion agency, Healthway. Carmen is set around a cigarette factory.

Carolyn Chard, West Australian Opera general manager said the decision was “not difficult”.

She added: ‘“We care about the health and wellbeing of our staff, stage performers and all the opera lovers throughout WA, which means promoting health messages and not portraying any activities that could be seen to promote unhealthy behaviour.”

eno carmen

What next – a soft-drinks Meistersinger? Condoms in Lulu?

A new French biography of an anniversary composer delivers a musicological bombshell.  Sylvie Bouissou, author of a 1,166-page Fayard door-stopper on the life and works of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), argues that his was the hidden hand behind the ever-popular nursery-rhyme song.

Her evidence: 
1 The tune appears in a manuscript of 86 canons, assembled by a collector Jacques Joseph Marie Decroix and kept in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Decroix, who is the source of many Rameau scores, attributes Frère Jacques to Rameau.

2 A violinist called Francoeur who played in the Paris Opéra orchestra in Rameau’s time while his uncle was director, mentions this canon on ‘Frère Jacques’ in another manuscript found by Ms. Bouissou at the BibNat and ascribes it to Rameau.

The tune was first published in 1811 by the “Société du Caveau”, (a group of composers founded in 1720 with Rameau as a prominent member. Where else could they have got the tune?

Too late to claim royalties from the Mahler estate?

Read more here.

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