Michael Bracegirdle wasted his youth restructuring businesses in the City of London. ‘I really did enjoy my job,’ he tells City A.M., ‘but was having some issues in my personal life and seeing life fly by me.’

‘In 2003 I helped out a school friend with a choral concert, then I applied for a post-grad at the Royal Northern College of Music. I left my finance career and never looked back.

‘It was the fear of taking the step that was much harder than the transition itself… Life in the finance world wasn’t doing my health any good, but now I feel 10 years younger!’

He’s appearing for the next two weeks in a Soho production of Carmen.

Mike Bracegirdle left finance

 

‘This injection of Mozart into the impeccably all-American, hyper-masculine world of first-person-shooter games upends Hollywood convention so completely that the film’s writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie, has to be thumbing his nose at it…’

Read full review here.

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You should also read the principal flute of the LSO on fakery in the orch, here.

Rim Rakhimov, 27, was left for dead at the end of May by drunken louts who stabbed him as he went to the aid of a girl they were molesting in a public park. A soloist in the Bashkir State Opera and Ballet Theatre, he was rushed to hospital and placed in a medically induced coma. There were fears for his survival and his career.

Happily, Rim has made a full recovery and is back in rehearsal, we hear, for The Merry Widow.

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In a report on a new piece being written around political catch-phrases, the BBC’s Today programme discovered a concert grand that had been given to Neville Chamberlain after he returned from Munich on September 30, 1938, waving the piece of paper that sold the Czechs to Hitler.

 

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The gift came from the manufacturer Julius Blüthner ‘on behalf of the German people’, in gratitude for the British PM’s efforts to avert war.

The gift appears to have been made public at the time since there are (we see) a number of letters in the Chamberlain correspondence files at the University of Birmingham that question his propriety in accepting it. But the rules were more relaxed in those days and the piano remains, according to the BBC, in the possession of Chamberlain’s granddaughter.

There was nothing corrupt about the gift, which appears to have been personal and heartfelt. Blüthner’s busiess had receced under Hitler while his arch-rival Carl Bechstein, a a Nazi supporter from the early 1920s, prospered. Blüthner’s hope for peace may have contained a forlorn wish that the Munich Agreement had been a setback for Hitler.