We are saddened to report the passing of Peter Katin, aged 84.

After a brilliant start and a flurry of recordings in the early stereo era, mostly on Decca, Katin suffered a dip in mid-career. In 1978 he migrated to Canada, returning to Britain in 1984 but finding himself even more out of touch.  ‘I picked up a copy of the Gramophone [magazine] and found naked ladies draped over the cellos,’ he lamented.

The vicissitudes of his career are documented in an excellent first obituary here.

Further to the stage accident suffered by Vladimir Ashkenazy on Thursday night, Derek Gleeson submits this evidence of some distress he suffered last year.

(c) Derek Gleeson/Slipped Disc; no reproduction without permission

Happily, says Derek, this was not during a concert. Derek is music director of the Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Barry Wordsworth has announced his retirement as music director from the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra, after 26 years. His will become conductor laureate.

Barry remains music director of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden.

By Sudic Bose, Managing Editor of the American Scholar:

Increasingly melancholy and reclusive in the last decade or so of his life, the composer only rarely ventured beyond his home overlooking the broad Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. Relations with his second wife, Emma, had long been strained, and he suffered almost constantly from hemorrhages and hemorrhoids, symptoms of the rectal cancer that had yet to be diagnosed. Always something of a penniless bohemian with wildly expensive tastes, he had been sinking even further into debt. He was also finding it difficult to compose—burdened not only by the weight of his past success but also by concerns of his place in a musical world upended by the emergence of Igor Stravinsky. Germany’s declaration of war on France in August 1914 brought greater hardships.

And then the offer of a summer home in 1915 yielded that phenomenal set of piano études. Read on here.

photo: Lebrecht Music&Arts