The Russian starts at 2:00. He’s pretty good.
Enjoy.
In his dual role as Putin poster-man and the most influential musician in Russia, Valery Gergiev is said to be scheduling a Tannhäuser production at the Mariinsky – one that will not offend the Church and will generally cool tempers after the recent Siberian furore.
The production was announced by a member of the Russian Parliament, Vitaly Milon, who added a number of homophobic comments about the sacked Novosibirsk director, Boris Mezdrich.
Read here (in Russian).
Our social affairs editor reports that Osmo Vänskä, Minnesota Orchestra music director, married Erin Keefe, his concertmaster, on Easter Sunday.
They got engaged in January. All good wishes to them.
The night before the wedding, the bride played Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending in concert.
George Burt, a Ligeti disciple who founded the Syzygy new music ensemble while teaching at Rice University as well as California’s Notes from an Underground series, has died of cancer at 85.
He composed six feature films, of which the two most successful were for Robert Altman – Secret Honor (1984) and Fool for Love (1985), starring Sam Shepard and Kim Basinger.
His book The Art of Film Music (1994) is a widely used campus text.
The claim is made in a new campaign by Help Musicians UK, formerly the Musicians Benevolent Fund.
It comes with a case-history video.
The naked statistic cannot be true. It must apply only to those musicians who seek financial help.
How did a poor boy from Odessa lay hands on a Stradivarius in the grim Soviet 1930s? And another in the 1940s?
The story is told in Tarisio’s new digital exhibition on the instruments played by the great contenders, a series timed to concide with the LSO’s upcoming international violin festival.
Click here to read about Oistrakh’s Strad and sign up for the full Tarisio series.
It’s not all about knitting…
The English composer John McCabe, who died in February aged 75, was a formidable pianist who won fame in the mid-1970s by recording the complete sonatas of Joseph Haydn for Decca. Around the same time, less noticed, he performed the piano music of a Danish composer who had fallen out of fashion. In his 150th anniversary year, the piano music of Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) has been recovered from analogue tapes and revived for a very different era.
This precious retrieval is my Album of the Week on sinfinimusic.com. Click here.
Hilde Zadek, probably the last surviving member of Vienna’s golden cast of the 1940s, is back this week at 97, presiding over the 9th Hilde Zadek Competition for Voice.
A Hitler refugee in Jerusalem, Hilde returned to Vienna in 1947 to join a company that was dominated by unrepentant Nazis. She wa Vienna’s first-choice Aida for the next two decades.
Today, a little frail, she can still pick great voices from also-rans.
You can watch the competition’s final round live on Saturday, right here.
And dead at 44.
Slipped Disc editorial:
Opinion has split down the middle on the Toronto Symphony’s sacking of star pianist Valentina Lisitsa, whose social-media hostility to the Ukrainian government provoked irritation among Canada’s pro-Kiev lobby.
The majority of commenters on Slipped Disc take the view that Val’s much-tweeted propaganda is virulent and the TSO was right to sack her.
Most commenters on Toronto’s Globe and Mail take the opposite view, arguing that the TSO was wrong to cave in to pressure and that an artist’s politics have no relevance on whether she or he has the right to make music.
So who’s right?
From our perspective, Val’s politics are odious. She spouts the Putin line on the Ukraine, justifying the aggression of ‘pro-Russian’ citizens who are armed, trained, funded and supported by the Russian army. Everything she writes, from her US refuge, is cast in black and white: Russia is right, the rest of the world wrong. She has come very close to condoning some of the worst war crimes committed in Europe since the Serb wars of the 1990s.
However, that is no reason to ban her from a concert hall. If it were, then Valery Gergiev, Anna Netrebko, Dennis Matsuev, Yuri Bashmet and dozens more should have been excluded long ago from the world stage. No-one in their right mind would want that. In a free society we cherish the freedom of speech, even when we disagree to the point of revulsion with the sentiments expressed. Freedom of speech entails freedom of performance.
The Toronto Symphony has transgressed that principle by caving in to a small and noisy pressure group. It is one of the most cowardly acts seen from a music organisation in years (outside of Russia, where a cough from the Kremlin can cost an artist his job). The TSO’s gung-ho boss Jeff Melanson has made a terrible error of judgement.
Boycotts are bad. They don’t work, and they hand moral advantage to those whose views they try to silence. Toronto has got it wrong. The TSO board needs to convene in emergency session and revoke Melanson’s rash decision.
Stats are out for the festival, Peter Alward’s last as manager, and the indicators are all pointing upwards.
Ticket sales hit 94.2 percent, up from 88 last year and the highest since 2002. Revenue was up 14.4 percent to 3.4 million Euros.
Alward, a former EMI Classics boss, was brought in by a panicked Eliette von Karajan and Simon Rattle after the previous festival boss was run out of town on charges of fraud that have never come to trial.
Rattle and the Berlin Phil defected soon after to Baden-Baden in a major moral and commercial error. Alward brought in Christian Thielemann and the Dresden Staatskapelle to replace them.
The results speak for themselves. Against 75% for some Rattle/Berlin productions, the Easter festival has become a hot ticket once more and Peter Alward can toddle off to his Schloss, job well done.
In the press release(below), Thielemann fails to offer a word of thanks.
The Staatskapelle Dresden and Christian Thielemann, the artistic team in residence at the Salzburg Easter Festival, conclude their third season on 6 April 2015 with the opera performances Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci. This year’s Festival has been both artistically and economically extraordinarily successful.
The new productions of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci directed by Philipp Stölzl and conducted by Christian Thielemann were acclaimed by both audiences and critics alike as highly convincing and impressive. Jonas Kaufmann, who led a starry international cast of soloists, achieved huge success in his role debuts as Turiddu and Canio.
Thanks to our media partner Unitel, this production will also be televised worldwide and issued on DVD. Broadcasting times: Cavalleria rusticana: 6 April 2015, 10pm, ORF 2 and 23.15, ZDF. Pagliacci: 6 April 2015, different times, Classica (pay television) in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Mongolia, Poland, Philippines, Romania, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan. Cavalleria rusticana/Pagliacci: 11 April 2015, 20.15, 3sat; 6 April 2015, 9pm, Classica Italia
Earnings from ticket sales increased by 14.4 percent compared to last year, which represents a new record income of 3.4 million Euro. This outstanding development contributes considerably to the fact that the Easter Festival continues to achieve an extremely high self-financing ratio of 88 percent.
18,900 tickets (last year: 16,400) were sold for the 2015 Salzburg Easter Festival and the overall seat occupancy factor was 94.2 percent (last year: 88 percent). This percentage has not been achieved since 2002. The opera performances, the Choral Concerts and the Concert for Salzburg were completely sold out. The number of patrons rose by 17 percent compared to last year, meaning an increase of 300 members with a total of 2,100.
The international media interest in the Salzburg Easter Festival remains on a high level: 114 journalists from 13 nations filed reviews about the festival.
This season ist the last for which Peter Alward and Bernd Gaubinger take responsibility as managing directors.
Peter Alward, Managing Director and Intendant, says: „Both the artists and the artistic administration of the Festival are particularly gratified by this year’s success. We are also very proud of the fact that, following some turbulent times, the Festival is now moving in calmer waters and that artistic matters now stand in the forefront. It is a particular source of joy that the Staatskapelle Dresden and Christian Thielemann have positioned themselves so convincingly as our new artistic leaders.”
Bernd Gaubinger, Managing Director, points out: “We were expecting an increase in ticket demand for the 2015 festival, but this excellent result has clearly exceeded our expectations. This success impressively confirms the fact that the Salzburg Easter Festival is travelling in the right direction. We feel justified in stating that we are handing over a commercially secure and successful festival. We would like to thank all those who have supported us on this journey in the last six years and wish both the Easter Festival and Prof. Peter Ruzicka continued success in the future.”
Christian Thielemann, Artistic Director of the Festival and Principal Conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden, says: ”The last days have given me particular happiness. The Staatskapelle has managed to establish itself firmly in the last years in the hearts of our festival audiences. The reactions that every concert seems to inspire are simply overwhelming. Salzburg has become a second home for us and I am already looking forward to the coming years. I would like to express our thanks both to all the artists and to all the staff of the Festival without whom this would not be possible.”
A wonderful clip from Stephanie Argerich’s film, Bloody Daughter, now on UK release.
