The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is a London band without a role. It survives (on £1m of public subsidy) by slipping in between the cracks, going boldly whether no other orchestra can be bothered to go.
So the announcement that the RPO has recorded backing tracks at Abbey Road for a souped-up reissue of Elvis Presley hits draws no more than a yawn. It’s only the RPO. And Elvis is too long dead to object.
This disc comes out late October.
Santa Fe Opera has just announced an opera on the life of Apple founder, Steve Jobs. The composer is Mason Bates, the librettist Mark Campbell.
The opera will premiere some time in 2017.
Jobs was a Glenn Gould groupie. Who should we nominate for the piano role?
We hear that the Spaniard Perez Floristán, 22, has won the Paloma O’Shea piano competition in Santander. The five other finalists were Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Perez is the first Spanish winner in four decades. He takes home 20 grand in Euros.
The Edinburgh Festival’s production of The Marriage of Figaro is in trouble.
Opening a week from now, it has lost both Susanna and Bartolo and has scrambled for replacements.
The soprano Ekaterina Siurina cancelled for no good reason – at least none that has been given.
The bass Robert Lloyd is also out.
The Spanish soprano Sylvia Schwartz (pictured) is flying in, but she’s six months gone and already on baby leave. Good trooper Andrew Shore is trundling up north to replace Bob Lloyd.
Ivan Fischer conducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra.
Subscribers will shortly be seeing the letter below.
Dear Festival supporter,
I have to inform you of changes to the cast for the staged concert performances of The Marriage of Figaro by the Budapest Festival Orchestra on Wednesday 13, Saturday 15 and Sunday 16 August. Ekaterina Siurina is no longer able to perform the role of Susanna. I’m delighted to announce however that Sylvia Schwartz will now perform the role in her place. And as Robert Lloyd is no longer able to perform the role of Bartolo, Andrew Shore will now perform in his place.
Spanish soprano Sylvia Schwartz is one of the most exciting lyric singers of her generation. She has appeared at many of the world’s finest opera houses and festivals including La Scala, Milan, Berlin Staatsoper, The Bolshoi Theatre, and Salzburg and Verbier festivals. She has worked with conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim and Rene Jacobs and performed the role of Susanna with the Vienna State Opera in 2011.
Andrew Shore is acknowledged as one of the finest baritones of today. He has performed with all the major opera houses in the UK, and internationally with The Metropolitan Opera, New York, La Scala, Milan, Paris Opera and San Francisco Opera amongst many others.
Mr Shore has performed the role of Bartolo with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra in New York in 2013, and will also perform the role with the English National Opera in the autumn.
The Edinburgh International Festival is extremely grateful to Ms Schwartz and Mr Shore for agreeing to perform in what promises to be a wonderful event.
Yours sincerely,
The extraordinary ascent of Toronto Symphony Orchestra chief executive Jeff Melanson continues unabated.
While at the Banff Centre, where he wrought havoc among the resident artists, Melanson gave ‘family reasons’ as the cause for his return to Toronto. Soon, he was divorced. Soon after, he was walking out with the glamorous Eleanor McCain, heiress to a frozen potato-chips fortune.
In no time at all, the couple were being pictured in Hello magazine as Toronto’s power pair and he was headlined as ‘Canada’s cultural turnaround man’. In April 2014, Eleanor married Melanson.
Nine months later, she became the astonished victim of his next turnaround.
Here’s what she tells The Star:
Their first Christmas together: lovely. By the middle of January, however — with a bolt and akin to something out of sad-sack chick-lit — her husband, she says, announced he was moving out.
She never saw him after that, she says now. Not once.
“A couple of weeks later,” she goes on, “he sent me an email saying he was leaving the marriage.”
It surprised her?
“It surprised me.”
Entirely surprised her?
“Entirely surprised me.”
No comment from Melanson. Full story here.
UPDATE March 2016: What Jeff did next.
We’ve been hearing murmurs of discontent coming from the office of Peter Bellingham, managing director of Welsh National Opera. Apparently, money’s flooding out faster than it’s coming in and relationships have broken down.
The news is that Peter has quit. He’s to be replaced by Leonora Thomson, director of audiences and development at London’s Barbican Centre and former head of press.
Peter is thought to be in line for the chief executive vacancy at Glyndebourne.
What goes round…
A survey by the Journal of Advanced Nursing says surgeons should not be allowed the choose the music in theatre. There should be a decision by the whole team whether to play music or not, and which to play.
The survey found that in some instances team members could not hear what the surgeons were calling for during an operation, and that having to repeat instructions led to delays and possible danger.
The survey flies in the face of established wisdom, which is that music can assist calm and concentration in theatre.
Read the Journal article here.
Apparently, the first use of music in an operating theatre dates back to 1914. Anyone known where, who played, and what music?
Louise Plowright, star of West End musicals Mamma Mia and Wicked, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three years ago. After life-saving surgery, Louise’s cancer went into remission.
At the beginning of 2015, the cancer returned. There was nothing more the doctors in the UK could do; they advised that her only option was palliative chemotherapy.
Louise contacted Dr Woo-Chul Moon in South Korea, who has developed a treatment that creates an individual vaccine from the patient’s own blood cells to attack the cancer. Dr Moon has treated more than 50 patients with stage 4 inoperable cancer, 90% of whom have lived for over 2 years. In order for Louise to receive this treatment, she will have to travel to the Seoul National University Cancer Hospital. Initially she will have to stay for five weeks and will need to return to Seoul to receive additional treatment in the following year.
Louise needs to find £140,000 and has today started a 30-day Crowdfunding campaign that will allow her to get this treatment to save her life. See https://crowdfunding.justgiving.com/louiseplowright
Louise’s sister, the well-known mezzo-soprano Rosalind Plowright writes: ‘I am Louise’s eldest sister and we are a very close family. I am an opera singer (theatre plays a major role in the Plowright family). We lost our mother to cancer and our sister Marion is a cancer survivor. As a family we must beat Cancer.’
Peter Gelb has told the Hyperallergic website:
‘We recently came to the conclusion that it would make sense, that this production should not employ any makeup. I realize it’s a sensitive issue. We feel that it’s the appropriate direction for this production and we’re happy with that decision. Quite frankly, [director Bartlett Sher] and I have talked about this for some time, how [Otello] should look in this production, so it’s a decision that has evolved over time.’
2015 production photo of Latvian tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko
Gelb added: ‘The [poster] look that was achieved was mostly through shadowy lighting. It was meant to be very moody and atmospheric. It wasn’t meant to launch a controversy or represent the actual production.’
UPDATE: Chicago got there first, as usual:
Norway’s main museum for musical instruments, the Ringve Museum near Trondheim, has been seriously damaged by fire.
Many of the exhibits were damaged beyond repair. A Guarnerius violin has been reduced to ashes. There is hope that a piano once played by Chopin might be salvaged.
Report here.
A new-tech listening model launches this morning in Salzburg.
Named Idagio, it offers unlimited access to a curated classical database, where the choice of what plays is yours, not some anonymous producer’s.
Better still, it gets to know what you like and anticipates what to play in case you’re too worn out to choose. As of noon today, the app is available for download.
Idagio’s USP is the most advanced set of metadata ever applied to classical music. Unlike Itunes and Spotify, which pay peanuts to musicians, it offers fair trade streaming to participating artists. Thomas Hampson, Franz Welser-Möst and the Vienna Phil are among the first to sign up. Check out the app here.
As far as Slipped Disc can see, this is very much a sign of where classical listening is heading. At the moment, we have two broadcast models – music you’ve heard 100 times before and never need to hear again(Classic FM) – and music chosen for you by people who know oh-so-much-better than you do what you should be hearing (BBC/NPR).
These narrowcasters become redundant once Idagio – or the next-gen metadata operator – returns choice to the listener.
Go, Idagio.
The Moscow conductor Anatoly Kremer has died at 82.
A former People’s Artist of the USSR, he composed successful film scores, notably Eksperiment (1980), and light operas.
