Slipped Disc was first to report that Yo Yo Ma nobly sat in for a sick orchestral cellist in a Vancouver Symphony Orchestra concert on Friday night. Now music director Bramwell Tovey gives his account:

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(I’m) starting to read several different versions of what happened on Friday when Yo-Yo Ma played in the Vancouver Symphony cello section for Dvorak’s 8th symphony. This is what happened.

When I entered the theatre around 7:45pm, I was told by Sarah Boonstra, our stage manager, that one of our cellists was ill and unable to play that night. The musician concerned (who was devastated to miss this concert, of all concerts,) is a fabulous cellist, completely dedicated to the VSO who also happens to teach my daughter, Emmeline. His wife is a key member of our administration and was backstage with me just before the concert, at 7:59pm. Joanne Harada, VP of Artistic Administration was also present, as were Sarah and Dale Barltrop, our concertmaster. Yo-Yo, was also there, socializing as he so often does before a concert.

Yo-Yo is a tremendous colleague who often plays in the orchestra for the second half when he’s played a concerto before the intermission – there are several other soloists who are similarly generous – James Ehnes and Gil Shaham come to mind, but to play in the first half when the second half contains a concerto as mammoth as Dvorak’s for cello, well, that’s unheard of in my experience.

So, we were gathered at the side of the stage, hemmed in by the staircase which was recently re-decorated when used as a film set for “If I Stay.” The lugubrious colo(u)rs brought drama to the movie and somehow enhanced the conversation we were having.

yo yo ma exchannge

I told Yo-Yo of the poor musician’s plight and jokingly (really, honestly, just as a joke) asked if he’d deputize. He was already dressed. Without demur, almost anxious to play, he went downstairs to fetch his cello (the Stradivarius that Jacqueline Du Pré played on her first recording of the Elgar cello concerto.)

Dale suggested we get Yo-Yo onstage at the end of the brief Slavonic Dance that opened the concert. So that’s what we did. Yo-Yo moseyed on, almost incognito as I was introducing the symphony to the many young listeners present.

In the second half Yo-Yo played his heart out in the Dvorak concerto, following with a movement from Saygun’s Partita as an encore. Post concert he was incredibly generous with his time at a reception, visiting with fans and talking and even more impressively, listening to everyone. He made a wonderful speech to the assembled crowd.

Yo-Yo gave a brilliant young local cellist, Tate Zawadiuk, the chance of a lifetime – he invited Tate to play his cello while he, Yo-Yo, took in the reception and the crowd of fans who were assembling. The next day with the VSO Music School Sinfonietta, he gave a masterclass on Elgar’s Serenade forStrings which lifted and inspired everyone present.

Last August, my own daughter, Emmeline had been given the same opportunity to play the same cello in a similar situation when Yo-Yo and I performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Saratoga.

Yo-Yo’s a great man and a great musician. Unfailingly generous, always keen to give as much as possible, frankly, I don’t know how he sustains such genuine bonhomie without letting up on his musical intensity. He’s the real deal, the full circle. Whether talking with him privately, one on one, or listening to him address the crowd, he is the same person.

In Las Vegas yesterday, two men hammered each other with increasing violence until one was declared a winner with a prize of millions. At the VSO Music School Yo-Yo Ma taught a room full of people how to think bigger, realize possibilities within themselves, at the end of which, everyone won.

The bigger riches were in Vancouver. Hopefully, what happened in Las Vegas stays there.

Thanks Yo-Yo. We love you – please come back soon.

yo yo ma in the wings

photos (c) Vancouver SO

Andrew Powell, a well-informed voice in Munich, has been sounding out players on the Berlin Philharmonic election. In a blog for Musical America, Andrew confirms our assessment that Christian Thielemann has the largest, best organised group of supporters in the orchestra but is still probably short of an outright majority.

However, if the Thielemann bloc holds firm in subsequent ballots there is no standout candidate who could rally support from all factions. Except one, perhaps.

He’s Russian, lives in Berlin, and will be conducting there the night before the election.

His name has not been mentioned before as a candidate.

He might just be a contender.

jurowski

The Prokofiev scholar Simon Morrison has written a long essay in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, turning back the clock on a generation’s assumptions that Tchaikovsky was homosexual and that his death was not caused by drinking cholera-infected water.

Morrison is aware that he may give comfort to current Putinist musicology which (using the accusatory headline above) seeks to ‘cleanse’ the composer of the Putinist crime of gay sex, dismissing the aspersions of homosexuality and violent death as western inventions.

Morrison is exceptionally harsh on the British biographer David Brown, who ‘imagined (Tchaikovsky’s) life from having listened to the music.’ His critical argument, however, is with both sides, east and west, for trying to find the key to Tchaikovsky’s music in the circumstances of his life’s conflicts. Somehow we have all climbed into bed with him, wondering what went on in the great composer’s boudoir and whether or not, for the sake of his reputation and Russian culture in general, the linens should be sent to the cleaner.

Read the full, illuminating essay here.

trucking with tchaik

 

Distressed this morning to receive news of the death on Friday of Paul Myers, an engaging character who was head of CBS Masterworks and, later, a driving force at Decca. Urbane, engaging and vastly well informed, Paul was a man of the world in the manner of his CBS role model, Goddard Lieberson. He helped me with much background when writing my history of the classical record industry and I commissioned from him an outstanding, intimate and critical biography of Leonard Bernstein, with whom he worked and clashed for many years.

 

bernstein bio myers

As a very young man, Paul was a civil servant – principal private secretary to the prime minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where one of his duties was to make sure no snakes and rhinos invaded the Cabinet Room. Passionate about symphonic music, he was recruited by Epic Records to produce Georg Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. Unlike many others, he tapped into great warmth and affection in Szell and maintained his contract through years of poor sales.

As head of Masterworks, he recruited Lorin Maazel from Decca and scored massive successes with the young guitarist John Williams, wih Murray Perahia and Yo Yo Ma.  After upeavals at CBS (you can read about them in The Life and Death of Classical Music) he returned to England and worked for Decca. When that label went into tailspin, he was responsible for a vertical rise in production standards at Naxos.

Constrained by kidney failure in later years, he was sustained by a happy marriage and a sea-view retirement on the English south coast. Paul was 83, bless his memory.

 

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photo: producer Paul Myers, Szell, Cleveland concertmaster Rafael Druian (standing), Samuel Barber, and soloist John Browning

Clarice Carson, who has died at 85, sang leading roles in the late 1960s and 1970s at the Met, Covent Garden, La Scala and other big stages. Among many career highlights, she sang Desdemona to Jon Vickers’ Otello.
clarice-carson

The Leipzig Quartet has issued a statement in response to lurid claims made in court at the pre-hearing for violinist Stefan Arzberger on charges of attempted murder, assault and strangulation. The Quartet say:

To whom it may concern: We know our colleague Stefan for more than 20 years. He never needed to meet prostitutes or transsexuals – that is bullshit. But he likes to talk and to meet people. Learning by talking, all over the world. We played in more than 60 countries, trusting each other.. So what happened to him that he could lose the control for the rest of the night? And for sure HE is the victim if you stay away from media nonsense and look to the whole story. But we believe that there are strong signs that he will be ruined and destroyed at the end of the way through US court system – unless he will be found NOT guilty by the people of a jury! Immanuel Kant suggested to use your own brain. Please do so!

The judge is expected to decide today (Monday) whether to restore Stefan’s passport and allow him to resume his place on tour at the head of the quartet.

leipzig quartet

But not quite yet.

There will be a funeral ceremony in Germany, followed by cremation.

Then the ashes of the great ballerina will be kept in the family until the death of her husband, Rodion Shchedrin, after which both will be distributed across the homeland.

File photo of Vladimir Putin clapping for prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow

A BBC film about conductors, made in the immediate aftermath of The Maestro Myth, has shown up on Youtube. It’s rather better than I remembered it on first screening – and the best of it is watching so many people I have known (self included) as we were in 1992.

Interviewees include Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Georg Solti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Franz Welser-Most, Mariss Jansons, Klaus Tennstedt, Christoph von Dohnanyi and Leonard Slatkin. Other contributors include Norman Lebrecht, Rodney Friend, Hugh Canning, John Wallace, Gilbert Kaplan and Humphrey Burton.

Lorin, as always, took no prisoners.

The conductor from hell? Players describe a few of them.

The producer was Kriss Rusmanis.

No way would the BBC make such a programme today.

maestr myth russian

Lee Henderson was an independent voice of reason during the 16-month lockout, a lawyer who (perhaps unusually) rejected confrontation and urged collaboration. Eventually, his arguments prevailed.

His sudden death at 59 has stunned the Minneapolis music community. Read here.

He had planned to escort the orch on its ice-breaker trip to Cuba.

lee hende

The Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford will graduate its last organ student this month.

It has sold the pipe organ to a church on Long Island.

Declining interest, perhaps. But why sell the organ? Some day, some student might need it.

hartt organ

Claire Jackson has resigned as editor of International Piano magazine, a monthly that she made livelier than it had been before. She had been in the job four years.

We hear that Claire has got a better paid position as Senior Editor at the Centre of Education Research and Practice at the University of Surrey. We hear also that Rhinegold, the owners of Int’l Piano, have decided to save her modest salary by divvying up her duties between the editor of Opera Now and other editors in the group.

INTERNATIONAL-PIANO_MAY-JUN

Ian Campbell shut down San Diego Opera, saying it was no longer viable. Some members of the board rebelled and he was fired. Now the board has paid Campbell and his ex-wife Ann more than $1m to go quietly, according to tax documents made public on Friday.

The board said: ‘A friend of the Opera, who has chosen to remain anonymous, donated the funds with the specific instruction that they be used to resolve all issues with the transition in leadership so that no other donors’ funds would be used for this purpose.’

ian campbell san diego

For a shaprer view, here’s Nicolas Mansfield, director of Netherlands Touring Opera:

To us Europeans this is a wild and unbelievable story about a man who headed an opera company for 31 years (with his ex-wife), tried to close it down and moved to New York to start a new life. San Diego Opera gave around 16 performances (not productions) per year, for which his annual salary was around one million dollars. One anonymous donor funded his payoff and as cherry on the cake he gets free tickets for every San Diego Opera premiere for life.

Here’s wishing my friend and colleague, David Bennett, all the best in opening a new chapter for this fabulous opera company.