The Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is to be artistic director of ACO Collective, an offshoot of the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Agent’s press release below.
Finnish violinist, Pekka Kuusisto, has been appointed as Artistic Director of ACO Collective (formerly known as ACO2). The appointment starts in 2016 and runs for three years, and a main-stage tour in February 2016 will form his first project.
Kuusisto will work closely with the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s Artistic Director, Richard Tognetti, who said the following about the announcement: “Pekka has a calling to turn things on their head. A musical insight that is as disturbing as it is compelling. He’s a musician for the new world and, therefore, his appointment to the newly branded ACO Collective couldn’t be bettered. I look forward to working with Pekka and eagerly anticipate how he will evolve new forms from ancient traditions. This is a big appointment for the ACO, and for the future of music in Australia, and we confidently entrust Pekka with these responsibilities.”
ACO Collective combines musicians of the Australian Chamber Orchestra with Australia’s most talented young professional musicians at the outset of their careers, selected from the ACO’s Emerging Artists’ Program, to create a combined ensemble with a fresh, energetic performance style. Kuusisto already has a long history with the organisation – his debut tour with the ACO was in 2001 and he has performed regularly with both the ACO and the former ACO2 ever since.
The immensely popular and outspoken Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor has posted a breakdown of receipts from her German tour. She got paid 500 Euros for three shows. The agents took 12,000.
Here’s the receipt. Below is Sinead’s rant. Couldn’t happen in classical, could it?
Sinead: Observe below… What I got paid for three shows in Germany, FIVE HUNDRED EURO as compared to what everyone else got paid. The last two figures on this list amount to what the agent Rita Zappador and Modus In Rebus got, €11,700.00.
The €47,700.00 is the total of what my four and a half hours’ work generated. Pls note the document is page 9 of 7! This is the type of dodgy documents we are being provided with. This is the sodding insurance document !!!
In the end the agent didn’t even pay me the five hundred. SHE DOCKED ME FOUR THOUSAND! So my work generated almost €48k but cost me €4k. Pls note bands do not arrange these things themselves. One’s business managers and agents do. One trusts one is not being lied to when one is seduced to go on tour by being assured of earnings. Our job is to shake our asses and sing nice. Management’s job is to fight off every cunt that wants to rip us off. MASSIVE negligence cases to be brought by me against every member of my now ex management team.
Not only for the below but for several even more appalling and wreckless negligences, which have cost me hundreds of thousands of euro which I was illegally told was my obligation to pay, and it was NOT my legal obligation. In short I have been ass raped by Rita Zappador and Modus in Rebus with the full (written, and totally behind my back, without my knowledge) support of Simon Napier Bell, Bjorn De Water and my now ex accountant. ALL of whom need to lawyer up, and get ready for the fraud squad.
The Lahti Symphony Orchestra has named Dima Slobodeniouk as principal conductor and director of its Sibelius festival. He succeeds Okko Kamu in September 2016.
Lahti has had a good run of Finnish chiefs in Vänskä, Saraste and Kamu.
Slobodeniouk came to Finland to study conducting with Leif Segerstam, Jorma Panula and Atso Almila, as well as the visiting Ilya Musin.
He will continue to serve as music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia.
photo: Marco Borggreve
From the bottomless archive of Bruce Duffie’s interviews, we offer as an August curio the memories of Franz Mohr, chief concert technician for Steinway, and personal tuner to Vladimir Horowitz. Apparently, he only ever attended one Horowitz recital. His nerves would not have survived many more.
Read the interview here.
From my Album of the Week on sinfinimusic.com:
If, as the prophet so aptly put it, the Ethiopian can change his skin and the leopard his spots, there is no reason to imagine that Anne-Sophie Mutter can’t do a club night. The Ice Queen of the violin, Germany’s first international virtuoso of modern times, has been awoken to club culture by her 20-something children and would like to have a slice of the action. Promo videos for this release show her chatting up a young audience in a Berlin den and generally acting in a manner altogether out of character from her aloof and self-absorbed concert-hall persona.
So how did she perform? Read here.
The culture minister Vladimir Medinsky wants the composer to be reburied in a new memorial complex which is being constructed on the Rachmaninov family’s estate. ‘Nobody needs Rachmaninov in America,’ he declared.
Rachmaninov, who died in exile in 1943, is buried at Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, Westchester County, New York.
The pianist Denis Matsuev, a presidential advisor on music, is said to be less keen on the transfer. Russia is presently in the process of buying the composer’s estate at Senar, Switzerland.
Opera Australia principal artist Kanen Breen was singing the national anthem at the FIBA Oceania Championships in Melbourne, wearing a rainbow-like tie when an audience member shouted ‘faggot!’
His partner and fellow-singer Jacqui Dark writes:
I was in the middle of a show at the Opera House and myself and all of his colleagues were incredibly proud of him and were running offstage when we could to try to catch a glimpse of him televised live on Channel 9. I had friends poised to tape it in case I missed it, and his family were set to travel from the country to watch him perform.
He nailed the anthem. He looked fantastic. He also wore a snazzy rainbow tie to show his support for marriage equality, an issue on which the government of this country is embarrassingly backward. He finished and stepped back to rousing applause. The applause died down and a solitary, angry male voice in the crowd yelled ‘Faggot!’.
I am beyond stunned by this. Beyond hurt and beyond angry. He took it in his stride, texting me that it had happened and adding ‘My work here is done.’. I found myself unable to accept it with such grace, and then found myself wondering why this was so. The sad conclusion I have reached is that he can accept it because it happens to him every day. Every. Day. Stop to consider that – imagine that every time you leave the house, you’re resigned to the fact that you’ll cop abuse from complete strangers. That you could be standing in a silence in front of 15 000 people – the most vulnerable a performer will ever be – and be shot down by a pathetic, cowardly word. I sometimes see it: When we’re walking down the street and a stranger sneers “Nice pants”, or when he’s riding on the train with our son and an ignorant bigot yells out “Oh, look – the poofter’s got a baby!” I’m outraged every time and can’t believe that this is 2015 Australia. He shrugs it off and occasionally tells me if there’s a really bad event. I find this sadder than the abuse itself. That people are walking around every day expecting to be abused. Resigned to it. USED to it. This appalls me beyond words.
A Norwegian film festival has refused entry to a film about disabled children because it is Israeli, not Palestinian.
A Spanish music festival has cancelled the American rapper Matisyahu because he refused to sign a Palestine solidarity statement.
Orwell was right. The world can only conceive of politics in binary simplicities. Palestine good, Israel bad.
Three years ago, Peter Tregear was brought in to calm down the Australian National University’s (ANU) School of Music in Canberra from which the teaching talent was flying out as fast as and wherever it could after a round of budget cuts. Peter succeeded. Canberra reverted to a modicum of quiet efficiency.
Three months ago, Peter saw his job advertised. Today, he quit.
ANU has lost all credibility. It may also be missing a final consonant.
