A no-punches-pulled piece by Ian Penman in the London Review of Books:
As with Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker, you feel Destiny’s real leg-up was provided by the ferocious will of Sinatra’s mother. Most people seem to have regarded Dolly as the real man about the house: Sinatra’s father, Marty, an easy-going ghost, barely registers in most biographies. As an Italian-Catholic working-class woman, Dolly Sinatra née Natalina Garaventa had innumerable counts against her. Yet by fair means or foul, she charmed and blustered and backhanded her way through until she was as near to a female version of a ‘man of honour’ as made no difference. Dissatisfied with the doll’s house limitations of conventional wifely behaviour, she successfully hijacked the rough, violent and Irish-dominated world of local Democratic politics. She also dabbled on the side as the local Hoboken abortionist….
… With bittersweet songs like these, Sinatra never drags you down and empties you out. It’s only in the closing years of his career that he brushes against a deeper sadness; there are moments on later albums such as A Man Alone (1969), Watertown (1970) and She Shot Me Down (1981) that do skirt some kind of awful resignation. But if Sinatra can deliver a suicidal lyric without making you feel at all suicidal, it was something he first learned at the feet of his idol among vocalists, Billie Holiday. From Holiday, Sinatra learned a whole new grammar of pause and air: singing aimed not at the big empty auditorium of old but a hypothetical low-lit 3 a.m. room. They were both drawn in song to a certain borderline mood or place: dusk and dawn, beaches and docks, empty streets, lonely horizons. The falling dark, and the becoming light. Songs that map some in-between state close to sleep but wide awake.
Read the full essay here.
This sign has just gone up.
It says: ‘There are no more tickets for Tchaikovsky Competition. None at all”
Drew McManus has come out with his annual lost of US music director earnings, drawn from IRS Form 90s. There is always a delay in the system, so the wages below apply to the 2012/13 season.
Three music directors made more than $2 million. You may well wonder why.
Two maestros took a significant pay cut, reflecting recessionary woes.
After you study the list, do read Drew’s commentary on the lengths some orchestras and agents go to keep maestro pay under wraps.
1 National Symphony: $2,728,671 (41.02 percent increase)
2 Chicago Symphony: $2,504,336 (15.65 percent increase)
3 San Francisco Symphony: $2,364,775 (16.64 percent increase)
4 New York Philharmonic: $1,717,814 (28 percent increase)
5 Dallas Symphony: $1,505,052 (82.57 percent increase, but previous season compensation was only for partial season)
6 Los Angeles Philharmonic: $1,447,049 (1.54 percent increase)
7 Saint Louis Symphony: $1,012,158 (5.51 percent increase)
8 Minnesota Orchestra: $944,098 (20.24 percent decrease)
9 Baltimore Symphony: $930,914 (5.45 percent increase)
10 Cleveland Orchestra: $907,829 (23.15 percent decrease)
NB: Boston and Philadelphia were vacant that year
Now read Drew.
In a desperate attempt to drum up business – or an act of ironic self-deprecation, according to your point of view – the Hyperion label has posted a list of the albums that have not sold a single copy for the longest time.
Several have received accolades from reviewers. One is by the Dallas Symphony with star pianist, Stephen Hough.
Won’t anyone buy these records? Go on, make them an offer.
Two responses in German media to the election of Kirill Petrenko as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic have been decidedly hostile, verging on racist.
Sabine Lange on NDR Kultur drew an unfavourable comparison between the rejected candidate Christian Thielemann, ‘a world acclaimed expert in the German sound’, and the Russian-born Petrenko, ‘ the tiny gnome, the Jewish caricature of Alberich’ who threatens to seize power.
If that’s not bad enough, Manuel Brug in Die Welt points out that three leading conductors in Berlin are now Jews – Barenboim and Ivan Fischer are the others. Unhelpful and unnecessary, the more so since the three are so different in almost every aspect of character.
Both are castigated by the magisterial Eleanora Brüning in the Faz for disseminating racist clickbait, but the damage has been done. Lange on NDR has appended a semi-apology to her post, saying she was using Wagnerian rather than racist imagery when comparing Petrenko to Alberich. She misses the point entirely.
Two German publications find fault with Kirill Pentreko being a Jew, one of them likening him to an offensive character. This is, as Ms Büning rightly says, unacceptable conduct. Lange and Brug should be ashamed.
UPDATE: In a page 3 feature for the JC today, I noted that Petrenko’s origins counted for nothing these days in an enlightened, multicultural Berlin. Specifically: Among the precedents that tumbled when Kirill Petrenko was elected chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra this week, the Jewish element was the least remarked upon.
It now seems that outside Berlin the enlightenment has been slow to dawn.
Read the JC article here.
Tan Sri Francis Yeoh, a Malaysian plutocrat, has given a million Euros to Rome’s floundering opera house. Yeoh, 60, just loves opera.
The venerable Maria João Pires has cancelled Sunday’s recital at the prestigious Klavier-Festival Ruhr.
She is replaced at two days’ notice by the Canadian, Janina Fialkowska.
The brilliant and prolific composer, who died last weekend, reflects in this moving recent film by Mark Trunk on the loss of his wife, Marjorie, who died in 1992. A beautiful man.
Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory have been pursuing the same goals – and student pool – for half a century. Now they want to create a ‘powerhouse’.
It’s getting tenured music teachers worried right across the USA. And beyond. One widely respected administrator calls it ‘enlightened’.
Read here.
Sascha Goetzel has terminated ‘with immediate effect’ his job as principal guest conductor of the Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne, a post he has held for three years.
He blames the orchestra’s administrateur général, Marc Feldman, over changes in future programming and the removal of Goetzel’s name from the orchestra’s website.
A summer spat, in other words.
COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE
Sascha Goetzel, directeur artistique et chef principal du Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra, ainsi que premier chef invité du Kanagawa Philharmonic Orchestra au Japon, a démissionné avec effet immédiat du poste de premier chef invité de l’Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne qu’il occupait depuis 2012. Dans une lettre au Président de l’orchestre, il justifie la décision qu’il se voit contraint et forcé de prendre cette action en raison des décisions de l’administrateur général de l’orchestre, Marc Feldman, concernant la future programmation, ainsi que face à sa décision unilatérale et sans précédent d’avoir retiré le nom de Sascha Goetzel sur le site Internet de l’orchestre. Il écrit : «C’est un honneur et un plaisir pour moi d’avoir travaillé avec les musiciens de l’Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne. Ils m’ont témoigné leur appui et leur sympathie à de multiples occasions, et un rapport honnête et amical a toujours présidé à cette collaboration.»
Un musicien de l’orchestre a commenté: «J’avais lu dans la plaquette de la saison que nous venons de recevoir, que Sascha Goetzel n’était plus premier chef invité, mais je pensais que la Direction de l’orchestre l’en avait informé. Vous me voyez désolée que cela se passe ainsi. Je regrette profondément cette façon de faire de notre administrateur général.»
Sascha Goetzel a fait ses débuts avec l’Orchestre National de France la semaine dernière à Paris avec deux programmes. Parmi ses nombreux engagements internationaux de la saison 2015-2016, il dirigera l’Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, l’Orchestre National de Lorraine et l’Orchestre National de Bordeaux. À Vienne, sa ville natale, il dirigera plusieurs représentations de Don Giovanni à l’Opéra de Vienne.
25 juin 2015
He missed out on the Berlin Phil – and that hurts.
But Bayreuth may have compensated Thielemann with a new title.
Here’s what has gone up in the parking lot.
‘Reserviert für Musikdirektor C. Thielemann’
Until now, apparently, the parking spots were just marked with ‘Dirigenten’ and ‘Festspielleitung’. Now, it has been personalised and dignified with a title.
We are saddened to learn of the death of Avis Herseth, widow – after a 69-year marriage – of the inextinguisbale Chicago Symphony principal trumpet, Bud Herseth. Avis, an academic librarian, was 95.
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests gifts to either the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, or Merit Music Chicago, in support of Merit’s celebrated trumpet ensemble, which Avis supported.
Perfect peace.
