This is today’s audition set-up. Not exactly friendly.
We regret to report the sudden death of David Trendell, director of music at Kings College London and a widely respected scholar, performer and broadcaster.
This message has just gone up on the college board:
I am very sorry to inform you about the sudden death of David Trendell, who held a joint post within the Dean’s Office as College Organist and Director of Music for the Chapel Choir and as Senior Lecturer in the Music Department within Arts and Humanities. We do not have full details, but that it appears that he died in his sleep at home during Monday night/Tuesday morning, having conducted the Chapel Choir rehearsal on Monday evening. It is typical of David that his last act should have been part of his life-long desire to pass on his extraordinary musical ability to younger generations. We cannot even begin to imagine how much he will be missed by so many around the community of King’s College London, especially the Chapel Choir and Chaplaincy as well as his colleagues and students in the Music Department, not to mention all his wider links across the College and our alumni through special services, choir tours and broadcasts.
I have spoken personally with his family, but as yet we have no details about funeral arrangements, although we anticipate that it is likely that there will be a Memorial Service in the College Chapel in due course. In the meantime, we have placed a framed photograph of David in front of the altar in Chapel where there are also candles for people to light. All are welcome to visit Chapel to remember David or pay your respects. He will be remembered, and greatly missed, at our lunchtime Communion Service today, where members of the Choir are likely to still want to sing; all welcome.
King’s College Chaplaincy
K2.34 King’s Building
One of his singers writes: I had the privilege of singing with him on a couple of occasions, and found him not only to be an excellent scholar and conductor, but great fun on stage/in church and in the inevitable trips to the pub after gigs.
UPDATE: Telegraph obituary here.
Meet Francisco Vila. Every flight should have a resident cellist and beatboxer.
She’s singing the anthem tonight at the World Series. Couldn’t make it last night because she was working with kids at Carnegie.
What a (non)-diva!
press release:
Opera superstar and Kansas super-fan Joyce DiDonato sings US National Anthem to over 25 million viewers at World Series Final after worldwide social media campaign
Lifelong Kansas City Royals fan Joyce DiDonato sings the US National Anthem at the final game of the Major League Baseball World Series tonight, 29 October, where her home team meets the San Francisco Giants, attracting over 25 million viewers. This is the first time in 29 years the Royals have made the final, which will be played out in Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium.
Her appearance is the result of a spectacular social media campaign started by fans using the hashtag #letJoycesing, which gathered immense momentum, pushing DiDonato to the top of the poll. She was first asked to sing at Tuesday’s Game 6, but said her prior commitments teaching a master class to middle-school students in New York took priority, stating: ‘I thought about it for two seconds, but I just couldn’t do that to the students. If I was 13 like them and the class got canceled, I would cry for a month.’
DiDonato, who grew up in Kansas City as an avid baseball fan, remembers fondly her father taking herself and six siblings to watch the Royals play at home, for which her father had to save for months. ‘It was one of the biggest days of our lives as a family. It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it. Being able to sing if there’s a Game 7 and have a few of my siblings in the ballpark — it’s not just about the World Series; it gets very personal.’
In another twist, Joyce last night revealed that her new-born great-niece is the baby at the centre of the trending ‘world series baby’ story of a Kansas City couple who missed Game 1 to have their baby but returned to Game 6 with their new-born.
The coverage in the US starts at 19.00 (ET) on Fox Sport. In the UK it starts at midnight (GMT) on BT Sport Channel 1.
The two sides have resumed talks. Neither is saying much, but agreement should be close now that the musicians have caved in on minimum numbers. What’s lacking is any sign of mutual understanding.
The musicians have been decimated twice in as many years. It will take a manager of genius to restore their confidence in Atlanta.
A light world apart from the usual begging bowl, Hello Stage mezzo soprano Maria Weiss takes us gently into the process with a genuine, personal message. Take a look below. If you like, click here to subscribe.
Teodor Currentzis, 42, a Greek conductor working in Russia, is the last active baton on the Sony Classical label – and they are making the most of his charismatic appeal.
A freshly-made promo video for his recording of Cosi fan tutte puts all the spotlight on the conductor and none on the singers and musicians – for all that Currentzis claims to have fostered a new ‘ brotherhood’ method of making music.
It looks like a 20th century personality cult decked out with maestro clichés, some of the most alarming banality. It’s Karajan for the iPhone, faintly disturbing. Watch (for as long as your patience lasts).
Dr Michael Petch, a member of Britten’s medical team after his 1973 heart operation, has written in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that syphilis was ‘very much in the minds’ of his clinicians and that ‘we found no evidence’.
End of subject, you’d think.
Think again.
Paul Kildea, the official Britten-Pears Foundation biographer, continues to maintain his preposterous claim that Britten had the clap and his surgeon hushed it up to save his reputation – though not his life.
‘I worked hard and carefully to uncover the cause of Britten’s deterioration and ultimately found the witnesses and evidence that led me to my conclusions more plausible than the assertions that have subsequently appeared to try to counter them,’ he writes. Read here.
I had a call last night from Ivry Gitlis in the interval of a concert in Poland. ‘Must rush,’ he said, ‘we’re about to play the Enesco Octet.’
Ivry is 92. Today, he is visiting Auschwitz. Irrepressible.
Ivy, yesterday, with the pianist, Maria Szwajgier-Kulakowska (c) Aleksander Hanslik/Slipped Disc
I was meant to be seeing a preview last week of ‘Written by Mrs Bach’, a documentary claiming to prove that Anna Magdalena wrote some of her husband’s cello suites. The theory originates from Martin Jarvis, a professor at Charles Darwin University in Northern Territory, Australia.
It is disputed by John Butt and Ruth Tatlow and in the Guardian today by the cellist Stephen Isserlis, who writes: ‘Why am I so sure that Bach himself composed the suites? It is partly because there are countless connections between the suites and many of his other works; but even more because the language is so clearly his – that perfection of utterance that is pure JS Bach.’
UPDATE: Now Alex Ross picks the claim to pieces in the New Yorker, linking to the various manuscripts on which Jarvis built his hypothesis and unsnagging his flimsy fancy, strand by strand. Let’s hear no more of this Mrs Bach nonsense.
Ruth Tatlow has sent us a further demolition by Tim Cavanaugh, citing Tomita, Wolff and her own 2008 report: http://www.
It seems to be a textbook case of a film-maker pandering to what desperate media long to believe.
Here’s a trailer for the doc.
I didn’t attend the preview. Life’s too short.
The Belfast Telegraph reports today that ministers are having to trim £850 million from their departments by next week.
The Ulster Orchestra, facing insolvency within a month, may have run out of willing saviours.
If the orch survives, insiders say, it will be at most a chamber ensemble.
Stephen Sondheim sounds quite keen on the trailer. Can Meryl Streep sing?
You decide.
Click here.
Also starring: Blunt, Depp, Kendrick, Pine, Simon Russell Beale. Opens January.
