‘Pray for me,’ messages Terrence Wilson, a concert pianist and former Verbier assistant, after fire gutted his Montclair, New Jersey, apartment block.
Terrence has lost his piano and most of his possessions, including a Grammy nomination certificate.
Offers of help are trickling in. If you know Terrence, send some solidarity to his facebook page.
The region’s murky politics are often inseparable from culture.
The I, Culture Orchestra – which brings together 94 musicians aged 18-28 from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Armenia – will play Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in Kiev’s Maidan Square on August 24.
That’s bound to please the Russians.
I, Culture is based in Warsaw.
The conductor is Kirill Karabits, a Ukrainian.
We are very sorry to learn that the outstanding German baritone Johannes Martin Kränzle has cancelled his 2015 season after being diagnosed with bone marrow disease. He is awaiting a stem-cell transplant.
Johannes, 52, a member of the of the Frankfurt Opera since 1998, has sung major roles at La Scala, Munich, Berlin, Glyndebourne and San Francisco.
We publish his announcement below and urge all readers to register as possible bone marrow donors.
Dear friends,
I have been diagnosed with a bone marrow disease: MDS (Myelodysplasia).
The only chance of cure is a stem cell transplantation. This procedure will be demanding all my strength and patience, and I will have to give time to overcoming this disease.
Therefore I will take a rest for the season 2015/16.
I would like to encourage you to register as a donor at the National Bone Marrow Donor Program. To be a potential donor means only to give a saliva sample, and in case of a match, usually to donate blood.
www.bmdw.org
Liebe Freunde,
ganz überraschend ist bei mir MDS , eine akute Knochenmarkerkrankung, diagnostiziert worden. (Myelodysplasisches Syndrom)
( www.mds-patienten-ig.org/myelodysplastische-syndrome )
Die einzige Heilungschance ist eine Stammzelltransplantation. Dieser Eingriff wird meine ganze Kraft und Geduld fordern, und ich werde der Überwindung dieser Krankheit Zeit und Raum geben.
Die Spielzeit 2015/16 werde ich deswegen pausieren müssen.
Sehr ermutigen möchte ich alle, sich als Spender bei der Knochenmarkspenderdatei registieren zu lassen. Spender sein bedeutet, erst eine Speichelprobe abzugeben und im Fall, dann ein Leben retten zu können, meist eine intensive Blutspende.
www.dkms.de
The knock-on effects of Oliver Knussen’s visa denial are becoming ever more dramatic.
Act One: Ollie, booked five months ago to conduct a Gunther Schuller tribute, gets snarled in the US visa system and has to cancel at two days notice.
Act Two: Modernist concert is split up between two resident young Brits, Jonathan Berman and Stefan Asbury. Stefan got landed with Elliott Carter’s extremely difficult A Sunbeam’s Architecture.
Act Three: On the night, Stefan pulls out of both the pre-concert talk and the concert itself. Turns out his wife his having a baby (a boy, congrats all round). So Jonathan steps up and conducts the whole show, never having rehearsed the Carter.
Act Four; He’s been asked to replace Stefan again today (Sunday).
“Jonathan Berman conducted all five of the large works, a heroic feat. The evening lacked two of its scheduled conductors. Oliver Knussen, who co-curated the FCM with John Harbison and Michael Gandolfi, will apparently not be making it to the Festival at all because of “visa problems.” He had been engaged to conduct both Schuller pieces and the Maderna. Stefan Asbury was also unavailable; at the preconcert talk it was disclosed the reason was the impending birth of his child, and by the opening of the concert we learned they had a boy. He was to conduct A Sunbeam’s Architecture. Jonathan Berman, a young English conductor with a sizable contemporary-music résumé, was scheduled to conduct only Megalith, but somehow managed to step in for all five works and did a spectacular job, his performances confident and shapely and alive. There may have been some tentative ensemble moments in the Carter, but the achievement was impressive. Berman was assisted by the astonishing level of accomplishment from the TMC Fellows, whose ability to play difficult scores together is one of the abiding wonders of the FMC.”
From a drinking pal in Finland (where else?)
Jack Kohl, a New York based music director, has written his first novel, That Iron String(Pauktaug Press). It’s about a couple of pianists in New York, trying against all odds to make a go of it.
Interviewed by our colleague Michael Johnson, Jack has this to say about the concert business:
Aren’t we witnessing a lemming-like stampede? Aren’t Asian conservatories training thousands of talented youngsters, most of them aiming for careers in the U.S. and Europe?
Yes, the throngs of pianists keep coming, and throngs of really good ones. I do not believe the next generation will be the last in classical music. The music will survive because of its greatness. But the medium of the large concert put in place with, say, Mendelssohn and Liszt — and the re-creative artist as window on the imagined intentions of the composers — perhaps must, perhaps should, play itself out.
Look ahead 30 or 40 years. What might replace current classical music performance traditions?
I think the re-creative artist will eventually have to remerge as a creative artist. We cannot forever be textual slaves and hope to remain relevant in a glutted market. I don’t know where the new music will come from. But I know it will emerge and join a place with the canon — and it will be something that will be loved.
Are young artists already starting to rebel?
Indeed. What young, thinking mind can long honor the mantras and standards that are put forth by the conservatory and university if the ideal of the re-creative artist is principally, if we are really honest, simply playing as cleanly as possible from a page of score written by someone centuries ago? Everyone attempts to cite all sorts of flaws to the present system – but this simple and monstrous flaw stares everyone in the face and no one speaks of it. It’s repetitive music-making.
Click here for more.
Two German media sites, Bild and Speigel, reported that the Chancellor fainted at a coffee bar in Bayreuth.
They later printed a government statement saying it was nothing of the sort. Her chair was faulty and collapsed. The Chancellor went on to watch Tristan und Isolde, which she said she enjoyed.
Our correspondent saw her at the opera and says she looked ‘totally fit’. A colleague who saw her during the coffee incident says the media blew it out of all proportion.
Nothing much else to report from the opening weekend.
No cellist sells more classical albums in America than Zuill Bailey.
Week after week on the Nielsen charts, he outsells cellists of far greater pedigree and Carnegie residency.
So how does he do it?
‘For those who don’t know about classical music, it’s my job to take it to them,’ Zuill tells Zsolt Bognar on Living the Classical Life.
Watch here.
It’s summer and the flying’s getting harder. This just in from Andres Cardenes, former concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony and a busy teacher and performer:
Just when I start thinking the airlines understand the law regarding violins as carry-on, the B35 gate agent in Pittsburgh tells me I can’t carry it on, nor would it fit. I immediately argued, whereupon she began laughing at me. Fortunately, I carry a copy of the law in my case and showed her. She then proceeded to ignore me as I tried to enter my FF#. Power trip, ignorance, disrespect and rudeness. Nice job description, USAir/American Airlines.
No apologies or even acknowledged me after I argued it was the law. Another gate agent took care of me while the original one ignored me.
Something slightly weird is bugging our chers copains at resmusica.
Tomorrowland is a hard-core electro-pop music festival in Antwerp.
This weekend they’ve invited the Belgian National Orchestra to show how it’s done unplugged.
Go figure.
The retired bass-baritone explains in a radio interview how he came to be conducting Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the Verbier Festival tonight – his maestro debut.
Tommy, 55, says the idea came from Verbier chief Martin Engstroem not long after he gave up singing for health reasons. He thought about it long and hard, discussed it with his wife and friends, listened to dozens of recordings and finally took up the challenge.
‘We’re going to have a lot of pleasure together,’ he says, ‘but don’t start thinking I’m the next Karajan.’
Listen to his interview in German, here.
In another interview he says, ‘what do you call it when you conduct without arms?’ referring to his physical disability.
Go for it, Tommy.
You can hear the concert on medici.tv.
He’s in Australia, talking to Andrew Ford on the ABC:
On politicians who question public funding for the arts: ‘The fact that I think they are idiots doesn’t mean it surprises me. I grew up with a generation of politicians who had a hinterland, who’d been through wartime and realised the value of anything that helps the human spirit. Those were different times…We lose arts and culture at our peril.’
On relative values: ‘In Germany there has always been the feeling that the arts are absolutely central to everything. England isn’t a particularly rich country but London is one of the wealth centres of the known universe….We all have to fight our corner. With 85 billionaires there, don’t there have to be two or three who have an interest in the arts?’
Listen here.
