In an outspoken interview with Amit Slonim in Mako magazine, the veteran music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra shares some grim thoughts about cultural isolation.

His exact words (as published in Hebrew): הבידוד של ישראל בעולם כל כך מדאיג אותי. ישראל מבודדת ברמה היומיומית. אני חושב שישראל כבר איבדה את אירופה. עכשיו היא נמצאת על הקצה של לאבד את אמריקה. אני קורא בעיתונים שהתמיכה בישראל אצל האמריקנים ירדה. חצי מהאמריקנים לא תומכים בישראל. זה לא היה ככה

‘I’m so worried about Israel’s global isolation. It’s happening on a daily basis. I think Israel has already lost Europe. Now it’s on the point of losing America. I read in the papers that support for Israel has declined among Americans. Half of all Americans do not support Israel. It didn’t used to be like that.’

He goes on to say that some musicians won’t come to Israel for political reasons, others due to the low fees paid by the IPO. ‘They have told me this to my face. Some years ago, there was a certain musician who, refusing to appear here, spoke just like Hamas. He said: I won’t come until Israel returns all its territory to the Arabs.’ He was a marvellous conductor.’

Anyone know who it might have been?

 

MMF concerto per Benedetto  XVI

UPDATE: A full translation of the interview has now been published here.

Stefan Arzberger, leader of the Leipzig Quartet who was found wandering naked in a New York hotel last week, is determined to prove that he was a victim of crime. He has appealed for  €15,000 to help with legal expenses.

As of today, he has raised  €9,054 from 104 contributors.

Help Stefan clear his name by giving here.

stefan arzberger

He tells Vienna’s Kurier that the art form is losing social relevance. Most young people consider it elitist and ‘belonging to the past’.

He has a book to plug, but no solutions to offer.

nagano book

 

Michael Fabiano stood in last week at the Met on less than seven hours’ notice after Joseph Calleja – the Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor – called in sick.

Fabiano, who caught a train in from Philadelphia, told reporters he had never seen the Met production, let alone rehearsed it. Now he has told the Telegraph newspaper that, unfamiliar with the stage, he suffered a serious accident.

‘I ran off stage and ran into a dark area and hit my head into a light, and really hit the deck,’ he said. Medics had ten minutes to patch him up before he was on again for the tragedy’s climactic scene.

‘I said I had to focus… I had to get ready. I had to think about the last scene, which again I hadn’t done for a year and a half. I needed to take two minutes to think about it.’

There was blood on his face in the closing scene. According to the Telegraph, it can be seen in Ken Howard’s production picture, below.

Michael_Fabiano_1_3256539b (1)

Is the Met safe enough for singers?

Gianluigi Gelmetti is on his way out of the Orchestre Philhamonique de Monte Carlo. He will be replaced in September 2016 as  Principal Conductor and Artistic Director by Kazuki Yamada.

Are we excited? He is: ‘I am thrilled to become the next Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of this wonderful orchestra. Since my debut in 2011, I feel that the orchestra and I have been on quite some journey together already. I look forward to shaping that journey with them even more during my tenure’.

Yamada was 2009 winner of the Besancon International Competition for young conductors.

Yamada_by_Borggreve

Agent’s publicity photo by Marco Borggreve

‘It’s boring and music is dead,’ says Brett Mitchell to camera, ‘but I’d appreciate it if you’d help them pay my salary’.

Brett is assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra and outgoing music director of the Saginaw Bay Symphony Orchestra. He was having fun at the local TV station trying to pull in the punters and asked the producer for a reel of his off-the-cuff quips.

Somehow, it got into the Cleveland newspaper.

Good to see a young conductor with a sense of humour. Go, Brett!
brett mitchell

Claudio Prieto, a quiet but influential voice in Spanish music, has died at the age of 84.

A student of Ligeti and Sockhausen at Darmstadt, he won a national prize in 1969 with ‘Solo a solo’ for flute and guitar and went on to compose four symphonies.

claudio-prieto01--490x276

Luca Salsi stepped in as Don Carlo in Verdi’s Ernani on Satirday after the Spanish singer failed to overcome a cold.

It sounds quite dramatic. Here’s Associated Press:

 

lusa salsi

NEW YORK (AP) — Luca Salsi was at the corner of Broadway and 72nd Street, taking a walk with his wife, when he got a call from Alvaro Domingo, son of the famous singer.

“Daddy doesn’t feel very well,” Salsi remembered hearing.

Salsi had 30 minutes to make the nine-block trip to the Metropolitan Opera, get in costume and replace Placido Domingo as Don Carlo in Saturday’s performance of Verdi’s “Ernani,” which was broadcast on radio around the world.

Salsi already was scheduled to be on the Met stage that night to sing Enrico in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.”

He had a quick telephone chat with Met music director James Levine, whom he had never met, got in costume and went on stage in time for Don Carlo’s first-act entrance.

The 40-year-old baritone from Parma had no chance to review the score….

Salsi had last sung the role in Rome in December 2013 with conductor Riccardo Muti.

“When you do something with maestro Muti, after you will remember very well the score,” Salsi said.

Full report here.

Sal Licata, who was president of EMI Records in the US, from 1987 to 1992, has died from injuries received in a fall. Sal, who was 77, was a label butterfly who moved on every few years. His biggest gift to EMI was the Pretty Woman soundtrack.

sal-licata-chrysalis-emi-650

A piece I wrote for this weekend’s JC magazine

 

When Swiss Cottage spoke German

© Norman Lebrecht, all rights reserved

 

By the time my generation moved in, not much was left of the Emigration beyond a tinkling of pianos in Canfield Gardens and a daylong cluster of grey heads in the Cosmo restaurant. The Emigra-zion, always capitalised, ending in a Hebrew-German twist, was made up of Jews who fled Europe between 1933 and 1939, settling in a triangular axis around an Alp-themed pub on a busy North London thoroughfare. What drew the refugees to Swiss Cottage is uncertain, but they gathered in such critical mass that bus conductors would shout, as they neared the pub, ‘this stop for British West Hampstead!’

 

Ranging across two postal districts, NW3 and NW6, they included the founder of psychoanalysis, a future Nobel Prize winner for Literature, the pioneering chronicler of Britain’s buildings and any number of artists, scientists and musicians. Hitler’s loss hit England’s Lane. So close a concentration of great minds was never equalled in any other time or place. It would be too easy to fill this article with uplifting tales of displaced celebrity, but nostalgia serves no purpose. What concerns me today about the Emigration is how massively it transformed a humdrum part of London and how productively it assimilated.

In the early 1980s I got to know Berthold Goldschmidt, a composer who arrived from Berlin in 1935 and spent the rest of his long life in a one-bed, cold-water flat on Belsize Park Gardens. ‘It was cheap,’ said Berthold, ‘and close to the concert halls.’ Culture, I was given to understand, was an existential necessity for the Emigration.

As soon as exiles had saved a few pennies from their desperately menial work as domestic servants and factory workers, they descended on Queens Hall and the Royal Albert Hall for a full symphonic immersion. It was not uncommon after concerts for conductor and soloist to ride home to Swiss Cottage on the same bus as half the audience. Sir Thomas Beecham, ever the entrepreneur, moved his Royal Philharmonic Sunday concerts to the Odeon cinema behind the pub.

A Freie Deutsche Kulturband was formed in Hampstead by, among others, the best-selling writer Stefan Zweig and the film director Berthold Viertel. They performed English plays in German and staged art exhibitions. An Anglo-Austrian Music Society was founded with Ralph Vaughan Williams as patron. A Blue Danube club catered to cabaret. Goldschmidt wrote a song, The Ex (Der Verflossene), for his wife’s girlfriend to perform there. Decades later, Ute Lemper recorded it for Decca.

berthold goldschmidt

Copyright lawyers called the composer, asking where he had found the text. In a Berlin magazine in 1928, he replied. The lawyers called again. They could find no trace of the poet, Alice Eckert-Rotholz. ‘Have you tried the London telephone directory?’ said Berthold, assuming that anyone who wrote for a non-Nazi Berlin paper would wind up in Swiss Cottage. Sure enough, Alice was found to be living two streets away from him.

Although just 60,000 refugees were admitted to the UK in the 1930s, it seemed as if an entire civilisation had been transplanted. The newcomers soon left their mark on the environment. A Bauhaus residence was built on Lawn Road, a modernist penguin pool at Regents Park Zoo. Bookshop windows were enlivened by elegant new covers, designed and published to continental standards.

 

Phaidon, the Viennese art publisher, resumed operations in Hampstead. Its best-seller, the Story of Art, was written by Ernst Gombrich, of Briardale Gardens. In a cottage near the Heath, Nikolaus Pevsner wrote The Buildings of England. Accustomed to the woodlands of Berlin and Vienna, exiles foraged Hampstead Heath for birdsong, wild flowers, berries and mushrooms.

cosmo_exterior_1965 (1)

Cosmo served schnitzels and strudl to the dispossessed. Sigmund Freud, in his last year of life, would totter in for coffee and goulash. After the war, the manager in charge hung Jung’s portrait on the wall.

 

In a corner sat Elias Canetti, his masterpiece Auto-da-fe fully formed and not a word of it written down. Canetti conducted a busy love-life in the locality with, among others, the writers Iris Murdoch and Bernice Rubens. His Vienna friend Anna Mahler, the composer’s daughter, sculpted in a studio close to her mother’s ex-lover, Oskar Kokoscha. Past connections were maintained with incestuous intensity.

 

Most studies of the Emigration focus on the creative community, to the exclusion of social and religious groups. The celebrities were, to be sure, far removed from their Jewish heritage, but the bed-sit majority were very much in need of the consolations of faith. So much so, that they set up no fewer than three synagogues, each with its distinctive brand of worship. The Liberal synagogue, ultimately on Belsize Square followed the moderately reformed liturgies of Vienna and Berlin, the melodies of Sulzer and Lewandowski. Orthodox worshippers, cold-shouldered by the grandees of St John Wood, formed a United Synagogue at South Hampstead. The ultra-Orthodox established an Adath Israel on Canfield Gardens. Kosher butchers, bakers and Sabbath candlestick makers abounded. The lingua franca was German, never Yiddish.

 

By the time we arrived, as young-marrieds in 1979, the last of the continentals were leaving. We had a marvellous emigré health visitor for our first baby and an electrician who knew how to instal a Sabbath clock. Our daughter went to Anna Freud’s nursery. My first book editor was Pevsner’s son, Dieter. Penguin Books was run by Peter Mayer. Tom Maschler, an Anschluss child, turned Jonathan Cape into the premier literary imprint.

 

Goldschmidt, in his 80s, enjoyed a double apotheosis. His student Simon Rattle was the number one new-gen conductor and his own compositions, stuck in a drawer for half a century, were recorded on several labels. His one-bed flat now had hot water. I would drop by for Jause, four o’clock coffee and cakes, and draw deep on his impeccable memory of the world between two wars.

 

All gone now (except the shuls and the shrinks). The coffee grinder on Finchley Road became a Snappy-snaps. The wall plaque commemorating Cosmo was removed.

swiss cottage 1930s

Yet their disappearance is no cause for regret. On the contrary, the ease with which the Emigration blended into London life is testament both to its open-mindedness and to the benign nature of British society.

 

By uncanny symmetry, the scale of Jewish influx matches the 60,000 Asians who arrived indigent from East Africa in 1973-74 and who, one generation on, form a vibrant part of our country. The triumph of the Emigra-zion lies less in its cultural distinction than in its assimilation. At a moment when the political process is being outshouted by fear of foreigners, the time when Swiss Cottage spoke German serves as proof positive that there is nothing to fear from aliens, only to gain.

NL

 

Norman Lebrecht is a writer, broadcaster and cultural commentator. His first novel, The Song of Names, is set largely in the streets around Swiss Cottage.

 

For your Easter amusement, from Ilias Chrissochoidis:

accordion bus

More psychoanalytic reflections on the troubled life of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa. Dr Ruth McAllister, a forensic psychoanalyst, thinks he had relationship difficulties.

gesualdo torture

 

Aurelia d’Errico, a former mistress of his, was brought to trial with an associate in 1603, accused of witchcraft against him. Gesualdo was chronically unwell. His doctors gave evidence that, as his illness did not respond to normal remedies, it must be supernatural. Aurelia confessed, but under torture, which of course means no reliance can be placed on a single thing she said.

Inquisition torture

She claimed she had been involved with the Prince for ten years but he had given her up. She used sorcery to try to get him back. She claimed she had given him a love potion of her menstrual blood to drink, among other things. This was believed to be a poison at the time. The women were convicted in an ecclesiastical court.

Read the full essay here.

And the first part here.