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.
James Zimermann, principal clarinet of the Nashville Symphony, suffered the sudden, tragic loss of his wife, Candice, from a coronary incident on Saturday. Candice was 38.
She leaves James with two children, aged five and two.
Her funeral was held yesterday.
James tells Slipped Disc: ‘I have been very moved so far by the outpouring of support from the music community in Nashville. Our music director of the Nashville Symphony, Giancarlo Guerrero, served as a pallbearer at Candice’s funeral.’
Condolence messages continue to pour in. Our deep sympathies to James his family and friends.
Keith Buncke (r.) is the new Principal Bassoon of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, starting July 6, 2015.
Buncke, 22, was appointed principal bassoon of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra last year while still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music.
He may have failed to win the Berlin Philharmonic last week, but the Latvian conductor is earning rave reviews on his timely tour with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
This just in from Stuttgart:
Da ist er: Andris Nelsons, 36, weltweit zurzeit einer der gefragtesten Dirigenten, und schon beim ersten Stück seines Stuttgarter Abends beweist er, warum er zu den heißesten Kandidaten für das Amt des Berliner Chefdirigenten zählte und immer noch zählt. Genauer, detailversessener und interessanter kann man Beethovens Werk kaum darbieten, und spätestens wenn der Lette mit zwei Fingern seiner linken Hand einen Flötentriller nachformt, ahnt man, wie sehr er das liebt, was er tut.
Nelsons ist einer, der brennt. Ein Gefährdeter also, und es mag auch damit zu tun haben, dass er den renommiertesten Posten in der deutschen Orchesterlandschaft im Vorfeld ablehnte: Für die Berliner Philharmoniker, so sein offizielles Argument, fühle er sich einfach noch nicht alt und reif genug.
A quick summary: One of the hottest conductors on earth, he’s on fire.
Catch him in Dortmund tonight.
Simon Keenlyside has pulled out of Don Carlo in the Munich Festival at the end of July, extending the period in which doctors ordered him to rest his voice completely. He has barely been heard since December and is cancelling engagements month by month, as required. All in the opera world wish Simon a very swift recovery.
His Munich replacement as Rodrigo, Marquis de Posa is Simone Piazzola.
Jonathan Biss has pulled out of tonight’s Brahms piano concerto, and the rest of the weekend, ‘due to an arm injury suffered in a recent accident.’
He is replaced by Kirill Gerstein. The concerts mark conductor Susanna Mälkki’s debut with the NY Phil.
So here’s what happened.
Jonathan broke his arm last month. It has healed quite fast and he was able to play Mozart with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra last weekend, but not the Brahms D minor concerto in New York. As he puts it: ‘the Brahms D minor Concerto is nearly 50 minutes long and makes unusual demands in terms of power and stamina. My doctors and I felt that it would be safer to give my arm a bit more time before tackling such a mammoth work. The recovery is going very well, and I’m closer to full strength with every passing day!’
