While Simon Rattle and the players are basking in London adulation, the Berlin Phil’s general manager Martin Hoffmann is demanding an increase in the funding the orchestra receives from the city/state of Berlin.

Hoffmann told Handelsblatt that the annual grant of 14 million Euros (US16 million) has scarcely changed in 13 years and all possible savings in the organisation have been exhausted. He has written to the new mayor, Michael Müller (SPD), and says: ‘I am confident he knows the global importance of the Philharmonic and its unbelievable publicity value (for Berlin).’

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Hoffmann also dropped a thick hint about the future, saying ‘Simon Rattle’s successor has already played with us.’  Surprise, surprise.

When the Hanover Band performs Bach’s St John Passion at St Andrew’s Holborn at the end of next month, all proceeds will go to London’s Royal Marsden Hospital, by order of the band’s founder Caroline Brown.

Caroline, a cellist, has been the Band’s artistic director for 35 years. In 2012, she began treatment for a rare cancer and underwent three invasive operations. During the third operation she was fitted with an external stoma bag, which meant she was unable to play the cello for three years – and was told she might never play it again.

Then she was transferred to the Royal Marsden where three surgeons reversed the stoma last November in an eight-hour operation. Thanks to their care, Caroline is back in action once more with the Band’s busiest programme for years. Still under treatment, she hopes to take up her cello again before Christmas.

And she’s undertaking charity walks for the Royal Marsden. To sponsor her, click here.

 

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When the dust settles from Simon Rattle’s blitz on British media – the latest roseate sample can be read here – will London get a new concert hall?

Let’s face the realities.

1 London needs a concert hall with good acoustics. No question.

2 No politician will promise one in an election year – there is no surer way to lose an election than by pledging a concert hall at the expense of public libraries, public health and public safety.

3 No elected politician will offer one after an election, either. The money isn’t there.

4  That leaves private money. An Emirates concert hall? An HSBC tax-dodgers hall? More questions here than answers. There is no moral solution.

5 London has the highest per–square-inch real estate value in Europe. There is no more expensive place to build a concert hall.

6 If by some miracle a clean-handed dotcom billionaire offered £500 million for a new hall, where would it be built?

7 Rattle’s allies – and the Mayor of London – are eyeing Olympopolis, the former 2012 Olympic village, far to the east of the city. But there’s no likely audience living anywhere near the site at present, and there won’t be one for the next 20 years.

8 So a new hall remains hot air, a Rattle-fuelled balloon that cannot get off the ground.

9 But London needs a new hall, every music lover knows that.

10 It will take more than a Rattle-dazzle to get one.

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Bob Simon, the veteran CBS war correspondent who was killed last week in a Manhattan car smash, will be given a private send-off from the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday. Bob, 73, was an avid opera-goer. Family and close friends will remember him at the place he loved best.

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More than 100 artists have launched a new cultural boycott of Israel, declaring that ‘we will not engage in business-as-usual cultural relations with Israel. We will accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to its government.’

Most are the usual anti-Zionist fanatics, led by Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Miriam Margolyes and Mike Leigh. No classical musician of international rank has joined (though some may yet do so).

What is interesting is the appearance in the list of Penny Woolcock, director of the defining film of John Adams opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. From its inception, all involved in making this opera have maintained that it took an even-handed position on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Ms Woolcock has now declared her bias: she is anti-Israel and her work on the opera was motivated by a one-eyed hatred of the Jewish state.

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