The Memphis Symphony has been in trouble a long time. Now the waters have risen above chin level.

The musicians, facing oblivion, have agreed to take a reported 38% cut for the next year in the hope of keeping the struggling ensemble alive.

It’s the biggest employer of musicians in the city. It’s looking grim.

Mei-Ann Chen, music director

Slowly, date by date, Vienna is filling the 32 holes left in its season by Franz Welser-Möst’s spetacular walkout as music director.

This morning it announced Mikko Franck has agreed to take over most of next April’s new Elektra, with a cast of  Nina Stemme, Anna Larsson, Anne Schwanewilms and Falk Struckmann. Franck had a hit last season with Lohengrin.

Box ticked. Next…

Our publisher friend Martin Anderson has been producing for Toccata Classics in Évian, at the Grange au Lac, built in 1993 for Mstislav Rostropovich in the manner of a massive Russian izba, peasant house – entirely constructed of wood, and sitting in a natural woodland.

However, there was a price to pay. Martin found that while ‘an all-wood building provides a marvellous acoustic, as you’d expect, it also came with an unexpected drawback: on several occasions during the recording we had to wait until a woodpecker had finished trying to drill holes in the top of the building. Lesser spotted, before you ask – I went outside afterwards and caught it having another go.’

This may be the first recorded instance of a woodpecker – Picoides minor halting a recording session. The outcome will be heard – or unheard – on Toccata’s production of Vadim Repin and Murad Hüseynov recording the Violin Sonata and 24 Preludes by Kara Karayev.

Knock, knock…

The League of American Orchestras has just announced pairing grants for 12 composers and orchestras. Good idea. Helps get the new music out there. But the amount is just $7,500 per orchestra. Barely enough to pay for one extra orch rehearsal and a new outfit for the composer… Is that going to make a difference?

The ‘lucky’ comps and orchs are:

press release follows

Anna Netrebko and Piotr Beczala have discovered they live back to back in both New York and Vienna.

Must make morning warm-ups a whole lot easier.

Atlanta’s principal flute Christina Smith, locked out by her symphony bosses, has flown off on tour with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra after semi-detached Mathieu Dufour decided he did not want to blow out his last weeks with the CSO before joining the Berlin Philharmonic.

Here’s a first pic of Christina, rehearsing with Chicago principal oboe Eugene Izotov in Warsaw on Monday.

photo: (c)  Todd Rosenberg

h/t: Dianne Winsor

The second Toronto International Piano Competition opens next week. Juilliard’s Yoheved Kaplinsky is chairing the jury once again.

Five out of 24 contestants are her students; three belong to fellow-judge Fabio Bidini.

Kaplinsky’s students:

Maxwell Foster

How fair is that?

Meet Ann Meier Baker. She’s the new director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts, starting January, announced today.

Until then she is president ad CEO of Chorus America. Be nice to Ann. Be very nice.

The musician is sure he knows the law. The cop is sure he knows better. This is only going one way, and that’s down.

In a video uploaded to YouTube on Saturday, Lawrence and Leigh musician Andrew Kalleen is seen being assaulted and arrested by NYPD- even after knowing his rights and proving to the officer that he had not broken any laws. More here. Anybody want to bail him out?

Almost half a million people have watched by now.

We have first-night reports from our intrepid New York operagoers, Elizabeth Frayer and Shawn E Milnes. For once, they had no trouble at all getting a premiere ticket.

Elizabeth writes: I was left with a great respect for the performers for persevering over a great deal of pressure and objection from the public, but an uncertainty on how I feel about the piece itself.  What put me at ease a bit at least, was seeing an Orthodox Jew in the lobby as we left explaining to other operagoers “No it isn’t supposed to be an actual retelling of the death of Klinghoffer, it’s an art meditation on the events.”  I appreciated seeing someone who I would have assumed was against the opera actually evaluating and appreciating the work.

Shawn writes: The only real disruption of the performance came during a brief break about 20 minutes into act one.  A single man somewhere down in Orchestra Left began screaming, “The Murder of Klinghoffer Will Never Be Forgiven!” over and over until he was ejected or left of his own accord.  I did find it of note that he waited until a musical break in the opera to stage his protest. As undisruptive as a disruption can be really.

Read their full reviews here.

The cellist Matt Haimovitz has sent us his experiences playing with the locked-out musicians of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. read and reflect.

photo (c) Mark Gresham

Hearing that I would be in town for a residency at Emory University, the musicians of the Atlanta Symphony reached out to me with the idea of an impromptu concert together. I have never before taken sides in a labor dispute, but my gut said, “Yes! In tumultuous times we need music more then ever, for the musicians, for the community, for music’s sake.”

Before confirming my participation, I polled some music industry folks whose expertise and opinions I respect. Nearly across the board I received stern warnings against participating in such a concert and “appearing to take sides” in the dispute. I was told “if you do this, you will never again be hired by a major symphony orchestra.”

I have never made life or artistic decisions based on that kind of consideration, so the warnings sounded hollow to me. … I do not profess to have any knowledge of the orchestra’s budget or deficit. Clearly there are issues to work out with the model. Will any symphony orchestra look the same 20 years from now? I doubt it, and I hope not. But I am a musician who is concerned about the priority and state of culture in our society today. If that debate were taking place, in good faith, with the musicians of the Atlanta Symphony, I would not have played. But it is not, and the decision to join them and make music was an easy one.”

I told my fellow musicians before we performed J.S. Bach, Osvaldo Golijov, David Sanford, Billy Strayhorn, Richard Prior, and Joseph Haydn, and I say it here: I am with you. Stand strong and lead us into the future as a role model for orchestras around the country. Stand up for the importance and relevance of music and culture in a time filled with the deafening noise of fear and mediocrity. I heard your voices and so did the audience on this night.

The evening following the performance with the musicians of the Atlanta Symphony, I was rehearsing a new concerto by composer/conductor Richard Prior at Emory University with the Emory Symphony Orchestra. Meters away, Amber Vinson, nurse-turned-Ebola-patient from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, was being escorted to the university hospital, by a surreal display of space-age sterility. On stage were young college faces concentrating on the shifting meters and new melodies of a freshly inked cello concerto, as just outside, a nurse was wrapped up in a cocoon, infected by a plague that could potentially kill millions. The proximity of a natural plague put everything that I had experienced the night before in a whole new light.

We need music more then ever to appeal to the better side of our human nature. We need music to replace fear with hope, silence with harmony, to lift our spirits, to open our minds and hearts to the world around us. Music of all the art forms is where we can hear so many voices simultaneously come together as one whole. The fight being fought by the Atlanta Symphony is not only about the lives and livelihood of 100-or-so musicians. It is about the struggle to lift our culture out of the black hole of bottom lines. This should not be a fight between an accountant and a musician, or a corporation and orchestra. It should be a discussion about what the symphony orchestra can be as an integral part of the community’s consciousness. I am with you Atlanta Symphony.

(c) Matt Haimovitz/Slipped Disc

Liliana Perna, 46 was recovering from surgery when she suffered cardiac arrest at her home in Chieti.

She danced and choreographed with many Italian companies and at the Sanders Theater in Boston.