Hinse Mutter, double bass player and composer in Rotterdam, gathered local musicians of several nationalities to record a song he had written on the words of Stéphane Charbonnier, cartoonist and editor: ‘je préfère mourir debout que vivre à genoux’ (I’d rather die standing than live on my knees).
Fiona Maddocks has spotted significant trends today in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, with 163 players.
The NYO bucks the trend: 52% of the new line-up is female, including the leader (Stephanie Childress, 15). Section principals are equally divided between boys and girls. The orchestra was founded by a woman, Ruth Railton. Its patron, chair, chief executive, finance director and rehearsal conductor are women. The world premiere commission for the orchestra’s 2015 Easter concert is by Unsuk Chin, and three of the NYO’s own six young composer members are female.
Read more here.
David Stevens shares with many others the ability to identify any note by ear, and the inability to ensure anything that sounds off-pitch. Perect pitch is the subject of current research. We asked David to describe it from the inside.
It is the 1950s. I am seven years old and have just started to have private piano lessons with a local piano teacher. Whether my parents somehow saw evidence of musicality in me or whether piano lessons for their offspring was what many middle-class parents aspired to, I cannot now say.
Quite early on I became aware that I could somehow identify an individual note on the piano by its pitch. Not knowing what to make of this I once invited my mother to come and sit at the keyboard while I left the room, shut the door and went into the hall. “Just play me any note you like,” I shouted through to her “and I’ll come in and show you which one you touched.” To her astonishment and surprise I was able to go straight to the note she had played and play it too. We repeated the experiment a few more times, with different notes, just to establish that I wasn’t somehow pulling the wool over her eyes. She must have regarded it as some kind of musical sorcery, although we never actually discussed it at length. Of course neither of us knew what to make of this curious aptitude. I know now that it was evidence of the possession of a kind of perfect pitch. Although I went on to do music A-level and to read music at university I don’t recall the topic of perfect pitch ever being discussed.
I have sung in amateur choirs from my student days but it was not until I took part in a performance of the Bach B Minor Mass in 1983 that I came to question the desirability of having a degree of perfect pitch. The so-called early music revival was in full swing at that time and as soon the rehearsal started I realized that this performance of Bach’s masterpiece was, to my ears, in Bb minor. I was going to have to mentally transpose every note down by a semitone. In such complex, often chromatic and swiftly-moving music, the concentration involved in transposing was overbearing. I hadn’t (and still haven’t) developed the ability to transpose whole phrases into a new key – each note was having to be processed separately.
Since then I have tried to avoid performing in concerts where I know that the music will be played at so-called baroque pitch. I have taken part in workshops of Renaissance music where the music has been at a lower pitch but I have somehow been able to cope with the simpler textures, a more limited intervallic range and more straightforward rhythms. Today,
I find that “my” perfect pitch – never truly perfect, anyway – has deteriorated somewhat.
I sometimes test myself by singing the opening note of a piece, whose key I know, and which is about to be played on the radio. I am often close to the opening note, but not always close enough – usually I’m slightly lower.
However, my perfect pitch is still sufficiently intact accurately to identify the keys of most pieces of “classical” music which I hear, even of works I have never heard before, and the knack can be useful when trying to identify excerpts of music played in the weekday morning Brain Teaser slot on Radio 3’s Essential Classics, especially the one in which the music is played backwards. On the whole I am pleased to have such a faculty, but there are occasions when it is a curse rather than a blessing.
This is the torch song from La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini, written by Nino Rota in tribute to the heart-stopping beauty of Anita Ekberg, who died today, aged 83. It is sung by Katyna Ranieri, the first Italian singer ever to perform at the Oscars.
We have been informed of the shocking death of the tenor Carlo Scibelli, a few days after his 50th birthday.
Carlo, a much admired Manrico, appeared at San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Covent Garden and the Teatro Colon. In recent years, he was based in New York.
He was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital on 114th Street and Amsterdam the day after New Year’s in acute pain and diagnosed with pacreatitis. Surgeons removed several gallstones and he seemed to be improving, but the inflammation did not respond to treatment. He died on Friday night of acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Our deep sympathies to his family and many friends.
UPDATE: Carlo’s Aunt Carol has posted the following:
Chuck went to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital on 114th Street and Amsterdam last Friday, the 2nd and he was diagnosed with Pancreatitis – had seven gall stones removed – they were blocking his pancreas causing tremendous inflammation. It became ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome) He had trouble breathing and he was taken to ICU where they put him on a respirator and kept him heavily sedated so that his lungs, which were affected would heal and so that the inflammation would go away. His buddy Jon Rosen stayed with him almost continually – I joined him on Monday. We watched his ‘numbers’ go in the “right direction” but always were reminded by the doctors and nurses that “he’s not out of the woods yet.” Still, all was looking up until Thursday, the 8th when his fever shot up to 105 and 106.3 (not a typo) Anti-biotics had no affect because the cause was not infection – it was from the inflammation that we all hoped and prayed would subside. It didn’t and by Friday, January 9th, despite incredible care by the doctors and nurses, Chuckie’s blood pressure dropped dangerously low and all other organs began to fail. He was surrounded by family and friends when he passed at 8:57 PM that evening. It is beyond heartbreaking and also heartwarming to see so many people feeling such grief and love for Chuck. He will be cremated and brought to California where his mother lives and near his nieces Kelsey, Carly and Natalie and brother-in-law John and, where his beloved sister, Suzie is buried. His son Jordan is nearby in Seattle. Soon, in another month or so we will have a Memorial for his New York friends and family to honor and celebrate the man we all loved so much. Please know that any and are welcome. The only thing required is a love in your heart for Carlo…
The French conductor Frédéric Chaslin, music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, pulled out of last night’s performance of La Rondine in Tel Aviv after the company management refused to let him speak in memory of the victims of the Paris massacres.
Chaslin said he had intended to speak for thirty seconds and perform the national anthem, Hatikvah.
He had been dened that right on the grounds that ‘It would upset our audience’ and ‘It is against the management”s policies’. So he walked out.
He tells Slipped Disc: ‘The Tel Aviv Opera did not allow me to speak 30 seconds yesterday at the opera in homage to my French friends and citizens, including the 5 victims of the kasher store.’
Haaretz newspaper (in Hebrew) front-pages the story this morning.
Chaslin is quite right to be angry. This is not a major diplomatic incident, but a petty, stupid act of insensitivity and mismanagement at a company that veers from the despotic to the chaotic. Israel Opera desperately needs a change at the top.
Chaslin is conducting a homage to the victims with his own orchestra today.
