The conductor Mikel Toms and I share a personal acquaintance with Edwad Elgar’s late godson, Wulstan Atkins.

Which, by a circuitous twist of conversation, set Mikel off on a wild centaur chase in an ancient English cathedral.

You can read about it here.

 

centaur

Years of persuasion and deliberation ended today in total defeat.

Bavarian Prime Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) and Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) announced together that a new concert hall for Munich was absolutely not going to happen.

Instead, the 30 year-old Philharmonie am Gasteig, a sonically ghastly hall that was hated by musicians from the day it opened, will be gutted and refitted to produce an ‘acoustically perfect’ hall. Yep, Ghastly rules.

Mariss Jansons, who was promised a new hall for the Bavarian Radio orchestra, will be personally gutted. The decision may well accelerate his departure from Munich.

 

gasteig

A few days ago I started hearing of a new release that was flying out of the stores – not to the so-called fans of so-called classical stars but to hard-core record buyers who have got everything in triplicate and never want to buy another.

Then I asked what it was. Turns out it’s a horn of plenty, no valves. The soloist plays a so-called natural horn, a big round bit of tin that is about as organic as cow dung on a turnip. Whether it’s musical is another matter. 

Curious? Click here.

 

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It’s already sitting on EMI Classics, Erato and sundry brands from a 1990s buying splurge, but this is a company that can’t resist a bargain.

Today, it gobbled up the debt-burdened Polskie Nagrania for 1.9 million Euros.

PN is the oldest Polish label, with almost a century of Chopin interpretation and a vast amount of interesting artists and repertoire.

Good to see it remerging.

 

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polskie

Backstage at the Royal Opera House, for Andrea Chenier. Lovely, unforced selfie.

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The British pianist Mark Bebbington has sent us his memories of a phenomenal artist who encouraged him to pursue little-known repertoire. Aldo Ciccolini died this weekend at the age of 89.

I first met Aldo when I won a scholarship to study at the Ravel Academy in the south of France. Aldo was a regular summer school teacher  there. I was uncertain whether I would even have the chance to study with him but was immediately put in his class. I was the rank outsider, the class being mostly populated with his Paris Conservatoire students who knew what to expect. I was very much an Anglo-Saxon pianist with the Royal College of Music training (good though that was). I was completely mesmerised by him. By the colour, not only in his own playing but the colour that he encouraged from all of his students.

This emphasis on richness of dynamic range and colour was new to me. He would explore with us the most subtle nuances of a dynamic perspective within say the dynamic level of a piano or a pianissimo – the ranges of timbre possible within those two dynamics. It was incredible.

He would put great emphasis on touch and mechanism of arm and shoulders linked together and the way that created the sound world. There was huge focus on the maximum use of fingers. After the way he had studied at the masterclasses of Artur Schnabel and it was Schnabel’s way of teaching and thinking, of using weight – arm and shoulder and body weight – that evolved a way of playing and teaching for Aldo that to my mind combines the best of the French school with the best of that kind of Viennese German tradition. He was a rare master of all pianistic traditions. We think of him more as a French pianist, but it was rather to his chagrin that this kind of Saint-Saens piano concerto label dogged him – at times he would get annoyed at that, because he would be teaching, say, the late Schubert sonatas with an insight that was second to none.

 

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photo (c) Thierry Martenot/Lebrecht Music&Arts

Imagination was everything to him. He always said that the most important sound was the sound he heart in his head before he actually created contact with the keyboard. So lessons with him were almost philosophical in nature.

Even though I was the outsider, confronted with this glamorous virtuoso pianist, yet Aldo recognised something in me and said that he would like me to come and study at a private academy he was starting in Italy. I would have moved heaven and earth to study with him for longer. The classes would alternate between French, Italian and English. And he could be formidable to those who didn’t do the work. He set the highest possible standards for himself and then inherently expected the best of his students. You would be expected for instance to learn a piece very fast, even if the period of the ingestion of the work would take longer, you had to know the notes. I never felt his disapproval because I always gave everything I had, but he taught according to the European Conservatoire tradition that you teach a class rather than a single student. So there could be 15 or 20 of us in the class and if any of our colleagues came below the standards he set, there would suddenly be a glacial half-hour.

He would always say that the score was the thing, and returning to the score would always reveal everything, but if he saw that a student had natural musical intelligence, he wanted them to follow their own lines of thinking. That’s an arduous way of teaching but he had the ability to bring it off. So all of his students are completely different kinds of pianists, there is no Aldo Ciccolini stamp immediately recognisable in their playing.

He loved to discuss language and literature. Italo Calvino was a great favourite of his, Umberto Eco he knew and admired. He loved novels that bordered on the surreal – Love in the Time of Cholera was a work that was much talked about. And in some ways that world of reality bordering on unreality was actually the world in which he lived, not least in his music.

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photo (c) Marion Kalter/Lebrecht Music&Arts

He was rather fascinated by my move into exploring lesser-known Englsh music. These weren’t pieces that he knew, but he loved the idea. He would tell me how he had almost whimsically decided to record the music of Satie for EMI at a young age and that led to an explosion of interest in unusual French piano music and opened up a glittering career for him.

So he always thought that doing something similar in English music was a good idea for me. And he was very practical when it came to questions of what would sell. He would say, “The record industry does not need a Schubert sonata cycle from me, let alone from a young pianist!”

He became more than a teacher for me, he was a mentor. And it developed over time into a real friendship. He had an ongoing interest in everything that I did and was even gracious enough to make concert opportunities available to me in France whenever possible. He was such a great artist, such a marvellous teacher with such generosity of spirit and time. He was, in short, an astonishing man.

 

Mark performs a recital of 20th century rarities this Wednesday night, including music by a noted composer’s mistress, at London’s Central Synagogue. Details here. Aldo would have loved it.

There’s a sordid little court squabble going on in New York between a pair of magnates who want to own the assets of City Opera, which went bankrupt in October 2013.

NY City Opera died of all too natural causes. It had a weak board, useless management, no discernible strategy and a subscriber base that lost patience. Way back, it had history. The history is what the scavengers want to own.

In a forensic analysis this morning, our regular commentator Shawn E. Milnes demolishes the rival claims and calls for dead dogs to be let lie.

Preamble: The façade completely crumbled on September 9th, 2013, two weeks before the opening of Anna Nicole, when General Manager George Steel announced (in a dear-god-help-us-the-sky-is-falling email) that the company needed to raise 7 million dollars in three weeks or else cancel the rest of the season.

Read here.

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I used to argue with Michael Kennedy, who loved both, that you cannot split your loyalties between Mahler and Strauss. When push comes to shove, you either take the high mind (Mahler) or the low (Strauss). Michael confessed that, at the crossroads, he’d go with Strauss.

Since his recent death, I had begun to fear that there was no-one left to fight with vigour for the man of seven veils.

Happily, into the ring springs my friend Tim Page with a robust pro-Strauss diatribe in NYRB. Read here, enjoy, dispute.

Tim and I will slug this out somewhere public, some time.

Richard-Strauss mercedes

 

The pianist Choong Mo Kang, suspended ten days ago and reported to the New York police for alleged sexual misconduct, has given an interview to Korean media about the charges. He says:

‘Julliard is a school that teaches dance and music, so there are stringent rules on physical contact. The rule says that ahead of any physical contact, I need to ask the student’s permission, and I didn’t know this.’

Kang went on to say that he touched the student’s fingers and hands while instructing on the piano.

‘The student, who I have taught for two years, stated humiliation as the reason for the report. I’ve taught for 20 years this way, and never has this kind of contact surfaced as an issue.’

He added: ‘I have not resigned from Julliard. I have been suspended as per the rules, and the investigation is ongoing.’

 

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The Rochester Symphony (Minn.) has suspended its president, Jeffrey Amundson, 44, after he was charged with stealing money from a vulnerable adult, for whom he held power of attorney.

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Cute little promo from the Detroit Symph.

Other orchs take note…. your trailers are just so … you know.
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Charlotte Higgins, in a thoughtful analysis of the ENO crisis this morning, suggests the artform itself might be the problem:

Opera just does not feel as if it is the artform that speaks most urgently to British audiences at the moment. Spend a night in the Coliseum and then go to the Young Vic in London, or to a National Theatre of Scotland or Wales show. One can feel it: there’s an air of inquiry, challenge and excitement around British theatre that seems absent from opera.

She may well be right. But no company has done more than ENO to infuse opera with the brightest talents from British theatre and film. If opera is to regain an extraneous frisson – one unconnected to the thrill of great singing and total music theatre immersion – it is more like to happen at the Coliseum than in any other house in the land.

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