Remember this album?
That frozen moment of eternal innocence? Well here they are today, still together after 46 years.
Nick and Bobbi Ercoline married two years after Woodstock, have two sons and live not far from the concert site.
Marriage must have something going for it.
In an address to the Classical Next conference in Rotterdam, the Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin called for ‘new venues, new dress codes and maybe also an entirely new repertoire’.
You can watch his speech here.
Announcing next year’s Salzburg Whitsun Festival today, the Italian mezzo said she will sing Maria in a new production of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.
UPDATE: Norman Reinhardt will sing Tony. Gustavo Dudamel will conduct the Simon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra. The director is Phil McKinley.
The musical fits into a Shakesperian theme that Bartoli has been running at the festival.
We reported last weekend that players in the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn voted 98-2 in favour of Jun Märkl as their next music director, only to be overruled by a committee of three, including Nike Wagner (below), that chose Marc Piollet.
Now both of those choices have been set aside by the city’ political leadership.
How they proceed from here remains unclear. ‘The reputation of Beethoven’s town has been harmed,’ said one functionary. Latest here.
Per Boye Hansen signed on for five years as artistic director in 2011. He was told today his contract will not be renewed.
‘It is with a heavy heart I must announce that my term at Norwegian Opera & Ballet will not be prolonged,’ he announced this morning. It appears he had a falling out with the chief executive, Nils Are Karstad Lysø. The company is also presently without a music director.
Hansen, 58, was previously head of the Bergen Festival and, before that,co-director at the Komische Oper, Berlin.
There are times when it seems that classical music is overrun with artists from a state of barely two million souls.
It could almost make a Gershwin patter song:
Jansons, Nelsons,
Skride, Skride, Skride
Galante, Garanca
Kremer, Maisky, Vasks… (to name but a few).
Plenty, too, from Estonia.
But what of neighbouring Baltic state, Lithuania? Why so quiet?
Sophie Dartigalongue, a bassoonist in the Berlin Philharmonic for the past two years has won the audition for principal bassoon in the Vienna Opera orchestra. She succeeds Professor Michael Werba in September this year.
Sophie, 24, French-born, played in the Orchestre des Pays de Savoie and the Orchestre de l’Opéra Lyon before upgrading to Berlin.
She becomes an automatic candidate member of the Vienna Philharmonic, though whether they can overcome embedded prejudices to give her full membership remains to be seen.
Berlin’s loss is Vienna’s gain.
The Berlin Philharmonic, setting aside other distractions, is dedicating this weekend’s concerts to the memory of Leo Borchard, who conducted its first post-Hitler concert on May 26, 1945, standing in for Wilhelm Furtwängler who had fled to Switzerland.
Borchard, 46 at the time, had been born in Moscow to German parents and lived in Berlin through the Nazi era, doing his best to help fugitives by furnishing them with false papers.
On August 23, 1945, returning home from a concert, Borchard’s British army driver misread a ‘halt!’ sign from an American sentry, who shot the conductor dead.
In September 1995, Claudio Abbado inaugurated a Berlin tradition of remembering the shot conductor.
An exhibition on his life opens tomorrow at the Philharmonie, marking 70 years since his death.
The German Bild tabloid has an ‘exclusive’ splash today, claiming that Riccardo Chailly will leave the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 2018, two years before his contract expires.
Chailly, 62, took up additional duties this month as principal conductor (a less demanding role than music director) with La Scala, Milan, where he was born and bred.
However, a source close to Chailly tells Slipped Disc: ‘Chailly is not planning to leave earlier, this is just speculation.’ And Andreas Schlz, the Gewandhaus director, tells Bild: ‘He will not conduct one concert less than his contract.’
What is true that the orchestra has begun to discuss a successor for 2020, given that Chailly’s name is being linked both to Berlin and to the vacancy at the New York Philharmonic. Leipzig has begun to look to its medium-term future.
Daniil Trifonov has pulled out of the Kremerata Baltica’s Mieczyslaw Weinberg weekend at the Vienna Festival next month. Daniil received a summons from Valery Gergiev to play in Moscow at the opening of the Tchaikovsky Competition, of which he is the most recent winner. It’s the kind of offer you don’t refuse.
What to do? Not many famous artists will learn a new score at short notice.
Gidon Kremer made a call. ‘Luckily,’ he tells Slipped Disc, ‘Martha agreed to step in and to play with me the planned Weinberg Sonata Nr.5-one of 12 works by M.Weinberg we will perform together with Kremerata Baltica in 4 concerts at this intense Musikverein weekend on June 13/14.’
Can anyone recall a higher-calibre substitution?
P J Paparelli, artistic director of the American Theater Company and an award-winning director of new plays, has been killed in a car crash while on vacation in Scotland. PJ, who was 40, was one of the most vibrant figures in new American drama. Tragic details here.
