English National Ballet has announced that Caroline Thomson will step down next year as executive director after three highly successful years in the job.

Caroline, a former deputy D-G of the BBC should have succeeded Mark Thompson in 2012 at the national broadcaster, but they’d never had a woman D-G and they weren’t about to appoint one. So they staggered on with George Entwistle, Tim Davie and now Tony Hall in an ever-increasing state of vulnerability.

If Hall can’t hold it together (and he’s not doing well), Caroline will be available soon.

Could be the best solution.

 

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Yo Yo Ma is 60 today (warm brotherly greetings from Lang Lang).

Vladimir Putin is 63 (warm greetings from V. Gergiev).

Yundi Li is 34 (no tweets from Lang Lang).

yundi birthday

Yundi is presently judging the Chopin Competition in Warsaw.

Those present on November 29, 1962 were, in addition to President and Mrs. Kennedy, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Leonard Bernstein, Marian Anderson, Van Cliburn, Robert Frost, Fredric March, Benny Goodman and Bob Newhart.

yo yo ma, aged 7

He’s 63 today.

This is the image being circulated by musicians – and widely liked – on social media.

 

vladimir putin birthday

Just when everything seemed to be going so well, the Philadelphia Orchestra has hired Michael Kaiser as a consultant to help out with income policy and future strategy.

Kaiser’s record is mixed. He helped London’s Royal Opera House out of a deep pit of despond, leaving before the job was done, but the latter half of his decade in charge of Washington’s Kennedy Center was marred by inertia, jobs for pals and general retreat. The Center has thrived again since his departure.

Philadelphia musicians might like to be reminded that Kaiser in Washington hired his friend Christoph Eschenbach, a conductor they overwhelmingly rejected, at the highest music director salary in the US.

That Philadelphia should now need Kaiser’s non-FDA tested brand of snake-oil is cause for despair.

 

kaiser

The quote is from the admirably grounded Karl Jenkins in his new autobiography, Still with the Music (p. 223).

This morning Karl, 71, became the first Welsh-born composer ever to receive a knighthood.

Arise, Sir Karl.

Sir-Karl-Jenkins

Angela Gheorghiu has announced she will be facing two different men from the ones she expected at the Met:

Roberto Aronica is the new Mario for Angela’s Toscas at the Metropolitan Opera on October 29 and November 2, replacing Massimo Giordano.

Also Zeljko Lucic will be Scarpia for both performances, replacing George Gagnidze, initially scheduled to sing on October 29.

The Met’s website is way behind her.

angela gheorghiu2

The 9th Unesco Indian summer festival opens this weekend in Slovakia. Details here.

levoca festival

A study by two researchers at the University of Notre Dame has come up with some seriously bad findings.

A sampling of 2,250 Americans were asked to rank 15 genres of music as liked, disliked, or ‘mixed feelings’.

The replies were then compared to a similar survey from 1993.

The key finding is this: Today’s highly educated young – ‘high-status newcomers”, in the jargon – tend to dislike Classical music and Rock more than those of 1993.

In the first survey only 8 percent marked ‘dislike’ against classical music. Today (the survey is dated 2012) than number rises to 15 percent.

In general, dislike of classical music across all ages has slightly declined, but among the most desirable target group for music planners young people really hate what they consider to be their parents’ music and choose rap as an alternative.

keep-calm-and-hate-music-8

Full report here (paywall). Summary here.

From an interview with the Chicago Maroon, a student newspaper:

Riccardo Muti: ‘In the last [several] years, we have become a visual society. So instead of listening to the music, we want to see conductors exercising on the podium, pianists that communicate with God while playing, violinists that try to impress the public with sexy attitudes…All this didn’t exist 30 years ago, 40 years ago. Today, with television and other things, people are interested in what they see. Nobody speaks about the spiritual integrity of these [artists]; what they are conveying to the public.

‘So something dramatic is happening. And instead of helping the public to become more concentrated on the substance of what art is, we are following them—giving them candies instead of vitamins. The next time you go to a concert and see a conductor who moves more than is necessary, and opens his mouth like a shark, you have to boo.’

muti students

photo (c) Todd Rosenberg

More here.

It was a big Bruckner night in Linz on Sunday, but an hour and a half before the concert Dennis Russell Davies collapsed in pain and was rushed to hospital, where he underwent surgery that night.

Davies, 70, had made an awkward turn in the podium and torn the patellar tendon behind his knee. He’s making a good recovery, we’re told.

Kapellmeister Ingo Ingesand, called in from the Landestheater, conducted Bruckner’s fourth without rehearsal. He has been engaged for the forthcoming concert while the music director recovers.

dennis russell davies
Dennis Russell Davies with old friend Philip Glass

It’s all happening too fast for Alexander Shelley, newly installed  music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) in Ottawa, and principal associate of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) in London. So he’s told his other orch, the Nuremburg Symphony, that he plans to leave in 2017.

Shelley turns 36 tomorrow and is on a rising curve with mainstream orchestras.

alexander shelley