The headline quote is from Gustav Mahler, Symphony #4. The rest is vish fulfilment.

We lost a great entertainer this week.

The great Fairouz turned 80 last month. Her work used to be disseminated across the Levant by EMI Greece. Halcyon days.

Denmark Radio’s chamber orchestra will cease to exist next week. Canada’s Orchestra London will be wound up some time next month after the city shut down funding.

OL is giving a free concert next week at London Airport in a bid to raise funds and profile.

The Danish orch has launched a kickstarter campaign to raise three million krone ($490,000) to secure an independent future.

So far, 322 backers have chipped in 218,615 Kr.

Click here to support.

Just in from LL.

AFP reports from La Scala, quoting the Italian news agency, that Monday night’s Schubert recital was disrupted by a photo flash in the audience. Daniel Barenboim stopped playing, turned to the audience and said ‘whoever is taking photos has been badly brought up.’

He went on to say: ‘Madam, I am trying to give of my best, but you don’t respect it.’

Report follows in French.

We have been informed of the death, early today near Lausanne, Switzerland, of the Polish-born French conductor Jerzy Semkow. He was 86.

A student of Erich Kleiber, Bruno Walter, and Tulio Serafin and assistant for two years to Evgeny Mravinsky in Leningrad, Semkow started out in 1959 as artistic director of the Warsaw National Opera. He was principal conductor of the Danish Royal Opera, 1966-76 and music director of the St. Louis Symphony 1976-79. He went on to conduct most of the major US orchs and recorded copiously on several labels, notably Russian repertoire for EMI.

Three days after John Freeman, who elicited Otto Klemperer’s most famous interview, we learn of the death of Jacques Chancel, the gentle inquisitor of Radiocopie and  Le Grand Échiquier on France’s Antenne 2. He was 86 and a national institution. President Hollande called him ‘the incarnation of public service broadcasting.’

Chancel’s subjects included Truffaut, Godard, Chagall, Brassens, Slava, Karajan, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Juliette Gréco, Guy Bedos, Brassaï, Barenboim and more over 20 years and 6,000 broadcasts.

This is Eyvind Rafn, principal flute of the Royal Danish Orchestra, in a cigarette advertisement, dated 1967. Rafn made several such commercials for the Chr. Augustinus tobacco company during the 1960s. He did so in exchange for tobacco funding for orchestral projects.

But a new history of the orch, which considers itself the world’s oldest, maintains he never inhaled. In fact, Rafn never smoked at all.

So who was being screwed here? We need a moral philosopher to sort out the ethics of the transaction.

Anne Midgette comes down hard on the Amazon-made TV series based on Blair Tindall’s memoir of an oboist’s life on the New York freelance beat.

Her plot summary of the first episode: The conductor calls an audition! He hires Hailey on the spot! She messes up, so he makes her his assistant instead! This leads us, within a couple of episodes, to a fictional world with a strong similarity to The Devil Wears Prada.

Anne adds: It is remarkable to me that no one bothered to run the script by anybody who could point out its significant divergences from fact or, at the very least, show (Gael Garcia) Bernal how to hold a violin (there are close-ups of him “playing” one, bow high up on the fingerboard).

It’s odd, because the show seems to have ambitions and glimmerings of quality, and the acting, outside of the toe-curlingly awful dialogue, is not bad at all. Peters and Bernal, in particular, can almost convince you through sheer magnetism that you’re watching something credible.

The show airs on Amazon Prime from Tuesday. Not sure if it’s available outside the USA.

There’s a fascinating set of Messiah reflections from leading singers on the AskonasHolt site. Among others, John Mark Ainsley recalls:

A few years ago, I did a staged version of the Messiah at the Coliseum with English National Opera, and the one thing I found absolutely extraordinary about every single performance was when we all sang the final chorus. Normally, as a soloist you’re stood apart from the chorus, but in this production the soloists were distributed amongst them on the stage, and standing in the middle of that great wedge of sound that an operatic choir can produce is the most extraordinary feeling: it’s like the whole thing is going through you.

photo: Tristram Kenton

The British baritone has pulled out of a January 21 concert at the Liceu in Barcelona, citing ‘diary issues’, according to a report from the opera house in the Spanish press. He was invalided out of the opening of Vienna’s Rigoletto last weekend and may need time out to recover. He is down to sing Rigoletto again on December 27 and 30.

UPDATE: The Spanish press reports are incorrect. It’s the Liceu that cancelled, not the singer. Here’s what Simon tells us through a mutual friend: ‘They wrote very nicely to say that in recent times they just cannot sustain and sell recitals of songs in the opera house and so they are cancelling the series…. but they were so nice and offered to collaborate with an orchestral programme of something else that might be easier for them to sell.’

The credit rating of the Metropolitan Opera was downgraded last night after a year of conflict and losses. The ratings firm Moody’s gave it a negative outlook. That will make it harder for the Met to borrow money on, for instance, pay day.

The Met operating deficit hit $22 million last July, up from $2.8 million the previous year. They must be doing something wrong. Read here.  Even tougher here.

Then be warmly reassured that they’re doing everything right, here.

Someone’s not facing up to hard truths.