Karolina Nadolska, whom many saw as Poland’s front-player in this autumn’s Chopin Competition, has been forced to withdraw.
She tells Slipped Disc: ‘ I have a problem with right hand… I was supposed to play on the 17th but couldn’t move my fingers. The organizers proposed me to try today but my hand is still in bad condition. Well… It is a bit better but still not good enough to play 3 Etudes.. That is why I had to resign…’
Karolina, 30, came second in the 2011 All-Poland Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition [redacted] in Warsaw and was expected to fly the Polish flag high again this year. We wish her a swift recovery.
Kathryn Enticott, formerly the go-to manager at disintegrating IMG Artists, has made her first signing as a boutique agent.
The artist is called Daniel Lozakovitj, he’s Swedish born and he studies with Professor Josef Rissin at Karlsruhe.
If the UK election campaign has been dull so far, it’s for want of musical commentary.
No more. Up pop’s our pal Melinda Hughes with her whip and her her both-ways swing…. Just gone live.
I am hugely taken with Stephen Hough’s new set of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces on Hyperion. It’s my Album of the Week on sininimusic.com.
But I’m still having to adjust my ears to the piano he chose to play. Read my discomfort here.
Pietari Inkinen, the young Finn who is stepping down as music director of the New Zealand SO, is to be chief conductor of the Japan Philharmonic. He has been principal guest with them since 2009.
Inkinen, 34, is also chief of the Prague Symphony.
Here’s an extract from this morning’s press conference.
It will be ten years next Wednesday since the channel went online and for much of that time – since December 10, 2005, to be precise – Stephen Malinowski has been giving viewers access to classical pieces through the medium of musical animation.
Inventor of the Music Animation Machine and a lavishly gifted musician, Malinowski has clocked up more than 100 million views. Each video, elegantly performed, comes with footnotes that tell viewers how they can perform the work at home.
These are the original December 10, 2005 set. Well worth revisiting:
And here’s how the animation is done, live in concert (with our pals Etienne Abelin and Dot Yeung).
Moses und Aron opened this weekend at the Komische Oper, but that’s just the prelude.
In September,the Berlin Festival will perform 19 works by Arnold Schoenberg, who lived in Berlin from 1902 to 1903, and again from 1926 to 1933 as masterclass teacher at the Prussian Akademie der Künste.
Among the festival works will be Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder), never finished and seldom performed. Details below.
For starters, see how many students you can identify in this masterclass picture.
press release:
Musikfest Berlin 2015 dedicates one of its festival focal points to composer Arnold Schönberg
Together with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Berliner Festspiele present the rarely performed oratorio “Die Jakobsleiter” by Arnold Schönberg in September as part of the Musikfest Berlin 2015. Schönberg the composer is among the thematic focal points of this year’s festival.
The Musikfest Berlin 2015 (2 – 20 September) presents Arnold Schönberg’s “Die Jakobsleiter”, an oratorio that was never completed, at the Philharmonie on17 September. The early counterpart to the opera “Moses und Aaron”, which celebrated its premiere at the Komische Oper Berlin on 19 April, represents Schönberg’s interest in Judeo-Christian spirituality, and is a milestone in his extensive oeuvre.
The work, which is rarely realized because of the elaborate production required, will be performed at the Musikfest Berlin 2015 by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the Rundfunkchor Berlin under Ingo Metzmacher, featuring soloists Thomas E. Bauer, Daniel Behle, Matthias Wohlbrecht, Martin Gantner, Boaz Daniel, Gerhard Siegel, Edda Moser and Daniela Fally, as well as over 200 performers. Ingo Metzmacher: “Even though ‘Die Jakobsleiter’ has remained a fragment and Arnold Schönberg never completed the work, it is a central piece that especially highlights the composer’s position. The work was written at a decisive time of change: during this period Schönberg departed conceptually from Mahler, and also from the idea of composing an even larger symphony in response to Mahler’s 8th, and in doing so took the decisive step out of this world. ‘Die Jakobsleiter’ is the first, independent work after this step was taken. What interests me the most in this piece as a musician is working with this giant machine, and that at the end the music disappears upwards into space like a soaring kite thanks to the implementation of music played by offstage ensembles – something we often realize with musicians in Berlin and not, as so often otherwise, with the aid of electronics. Content aside, this sonic process in space that Schönberg created here is something very new and visionary.”
Schönberg’s music has been made a festival focal point at this year’s Musikfest with the performance of 19 of his works in 16 of the 30 concerts in total. In doing so, the music of the “Second Viennese School” – following the “Berg Festival” at the Staatsoper Berlin in February 2015 – will be presented in a concentrated form once again and freshly illuminated in the context of works by Beethoven, Mahler, Nielsen, Berg and contemporary composers. On 3 September Daniel Barenboim and his Staatskapelle Berlin open the Musikfest Berlin 2015 with a pure Schönberg programme: “Verklärte Nacht” for string orchestra op. 4 (1899/1917), Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 16 (1909) und Variations for Orchestra op. 31 (1926-1928) are on the programme, three works from Arnold Schönberg’s central phases of creativity. Daniel Barenboim: “Only a handful of composers in the history of classical music had the ability to not only summarize the developments of an entire era of composition, but also to bring it to its apex – and at the same time to show the way to a radically different paradigm or style. Beethoven and Schönberg are without a doubt among these few individuals.”
Also participating in the large-scale Schönberg cycle are the Berliner Philharmoniker with Sir Simon Rattle conducting (18.-20.09.), as well as composer Matthias Pintscher as conductor (12./13.09.), the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin with chief conductor Marek Janowski (16.09.) and guest orchestras such as the San Francisco Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas (04.09.), the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra with Zubin Mehta (06.09.), the SWR Sinfonierorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg with François-Xavier Roth (07.09.) and the Royal Danish Orchestra with Michael Boder (14.09.).
Find The One is a 3D animated TV promotion for Triumph female underwear.
It’s winning all sorts of attention on European launch this week for its sophisticated, post-Disney screen tech.
But the most extraordinary part of the process is that the music was composed and recorded before a fram was shot.
Prima la musica… here’s how.
The pianist and former president of the Curtis Institute has joined our debate on music education with some trenchant, painful observations.
Further to Robert Fitzpatrick’s observations regarding the unhappy state of arts education in the USA and his comments that events of the last 45 or 50 years in our country “have led to a decline in the quality of education in general, and an abandoning of the arts and arts education in particular”.
I couldn’t agree more. (Full disclosure: Bob was Dean at The Curtis Institute during my 20 years as head of that school, so we have griped about this subject on several occasions.) However, I’d like to add that this diminishment of ALL education in the USA over two generations might help to explain – and perhaps even partially excuse – the uninformed utterances emanating from the mouths of too many of our elected representatives, as well as their complete lack of knowledge or interest in anything to do with the arts. In fact, it would not be at all surprising if many of those representatives who received our typical public education during the last four or five decades have hardly ever, if at all, chosen to visit an art museum or to attend an opera, the ballet or a symphony concert.
According to all the global education ratings and indexes that I have seen, the USA lags behind many nations. But as these charts are almost exclusively based on math, reading and science, this is just the tip of the iceberg. For if the arts were included in such ratings, the standing of the USA would plummet even further. (Of course, there are a significant number of outstanding American schools – public as well as private – that teach and produce students on the highest level. But the number of young people who are fortunate to receive such an education is a very small percentage of the total, resulting in the formation of a sort of cultural oligarchy.)
Given this pervasive decline of general knowledge in the USA, it becomes quite understandable that some of our elected leaders have become today’s equivalent of those 17th-century individuals who, decades after Galileo, still insisted that the sun circled the earth.
Obviously, I agree with Bob Fitzpatrick that the NASM should re-examine its current mission and should lobby relentlessly to see that American public education– including arts education – should be funded satisfactorily. But I fear that until such time as some of our important American public figures make this issue a major, life-or-death matter (which it is), the dumbing-down of the USA will continue unabated. This, of course, would be tragic. But it would also be stupid, because a fine, well-rounded education for all is one of the few issues that could re-unite United States, since it would clearly benefit everyone.
It will be ten years this week, April 23, 2005, that Youtube went live, and a while longer before it changed our lives.
Started by three ex-PayPal guys — Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim – it drew 65,000 videos in the first years and was sold to Google for $1.65 billion in November 2006.
The inaugural video was posted by Karim.
The next dozen were gloopy home vids.
When did classical music make it onto Youtube? Quite soon. We found this from Julianna Yau in September 2006.
And this from Mi-Young Lee two months later.
The first professional concert may have been the winner’s recital at the 2005 Chopin Competition.
Does anyone know of any earlier classical postings on Youtube?
The first classical Youtube star, Valentina Lisitsa, did not upload until April 2007, when the network was two years old. She said: ‘The first video I posted was of Rachmaninov’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Etude and it was made by a group of video students. It was basically a class project for them.’
UPDATE2: But here another 7-million player from Ana Vidovic, dated December 2006.
1 Maurice Ravel on the go
2 Puccini lighting up
3 Mahler has a pull, in New York
4 Gershwin can’t compose without it
5 Not in rehearsal, Lenny, please…
6 Debussy, always at it
7 Arthur Honegger smoked a pipe
8 Arnold Schoenberg inhales
9 Sibelius, with cigar
10 DSCH gets a light
all pictures from LebrechtMusic&Arts
On Friday, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra launched its new season in front of a tiny gathering of hand-picked hacks. Most local and all international journalists were excluded.
