A lock of Wolfi’s fetched £35,000 this week at Sotheby’s. A snipping of Ludwig’s made just £8k.

Scarcity value, presumably.

What would people be prepared to pay for baldie Bruckner?

A former orchestra manager of the Bavarian State Opera has been found guilty of selling marijuana and ecstasy pills. He pleaded guilty and admitted to smoking up to 15 joints a day ‘but never at work’. He claimed to have bought the drugs from stagehands.

The manager was dismissed from his job in November last year. Yesterday, he received a suspended sentence of 22 months. Under German law, the man has been named only as Daniel M.

In 2002, the great tenor came to the town of Correggio, near his home in Modena, to reopen its Teatro Comunale Bonifacio Asioli.

Luciano died five years later. Every year since, Corregio has awarded a Pavarotti d’Oro prize to perpetuate his memory.

Among the laureates are Leo Nucci, José Carreras, Andrea Bocelli, Mirella Freni, Raina Kabaivanska, Saimir Pirgu, Daniela Dessì and Fabio Armiliato.

The 2015 winner has just been announced: it’s the Italian soprano, Desirée Rancatore.

The pianist Peter Donohoe has stepped in at very short notice for Louis Schwizgebel to play the Ravel G major concerto this weekend in Leeds. The marketing people got swiftly into gear.

Here’s what happened next, in Peter’s own words:

After a tweet by my management company, retweeted by orchestra, chorus, and venue, in which Ravel’s Concerto in G minor was mentioned, the following exchange took place:

me: @PeterHDonohoe: @ikonarts @BBCPhilharmonic @LFChorus @LeedsTownHall Dear esteemed management company, Ravel’s Piano Concerto is in G major…..

At this point, the originator of the tweet, realising the mistake, took it down, and the chorus for the concert took over and tweeted:

@LFChorus: @PeterHDonohoe will perform Ravel piano concerto with @BBCPhilharmonic and @LFChorus at @LeedsTownHall on Saturday.

So far, so good. However, Ravel’s Concerto is properly entitled ‘Piano Concerto in G major’ or ‘Concerto in G’, which provoked me into tweeting:

@PeterHDonohoe: @LFChorus @BBCPhilharmonic @LeedsTownHall Don’t get it. The title is Concerto in G. Are we to hear Walton’s Belshazzar’s Bunfight in part 2?

[You see what I did there?…. Because we seemed to have a problem actually calling Ravel’s work by its proper name, I thought it would be a good wheeze to do something similar with Walton’s ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’. Clever, I thought.]

This was what came back:
@LFChorus: @PeterHDonohoe @BBCPhilharmonic @LeedsTownHall yes, Walton is after the interval.

Where would we be without social media? How did the world manage without it? What an asset to society it truly is.

 

We’re delighted to report that the Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra is cancelling her winter 2015/16 global engagements in order to have her first baby.

Perfectly natural and unworthy of further comment except to wish Alondra all the best.

Well, just one comment: Ever since Andris Nelsons broke the mould and took paternity leave around the birth of his first child in 2011, we have not heard a further instance of a male conductor who asserted his family rights at childbirth.

They should. Let’s encourage them to do so.

At last year’s League of American Orchestras conference in Seattle, they put on a sexist rapper to entertain the delegates, many of whom declared that this was just what they’d always wanted from a symphony orchestra.

At this year’s gathering, the Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-Most performed the following programs:

1 Strauss: Daphne

2 Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony; Strauss: Symphonia Domestica

3 Messiaen Hymne, Chronochromie, followed by Dvorak 5th symphony.

Get the message? No frills, no spills, not even a star soloist. Just music at the highest possible level of execution, performed with passion, concentration and a sense of mission.

Get the message? Get serious about music, America.