Carnegie Hall has installed Mercedes Bass as interim chair and announced a new governance committee to oversee the day-to-day running of the business.

Mrs Bass, a long-term Carnegie trustee, is also Managing Director of the Board of Trustees and Executive Board of the Metroplitan Opera. She is a huge donor to both companies.

Her appointment is both a stop-gap and an illustration that the number of super-rich who support classical music and opera in New York is diminished to a tiny handful. Carnegie is struggling to replace its former billionaire chairman, Ron Perelman, who accused the chief executive Clive Gillinson of exceeding his authority. Press release follows. This saga is not yet laid to rest.

carnegie hall interior

NEW YORK, NY—Carnegie Hall today announced that Mercedes T. Bass has been elected as Acting Chairman of Carnegie Hall’s Board of Trustees. Mrs. Bass has been a dedicated Carnegie Hall trustee for 26 years, having joined the board in 1989 and served as a Vice Chair since 2006. She succeeds Carnegie Hall’s outgoing board chairman, Ronald O. Perelman, and she will hold this post while a search process for a Chairman is completed. Mrs. Bass was elected at the Annual Meeting of Carnegie Hall’s Board of Trustees, held on Thursday afternoon, October 8, chaired by Carnegie Hall President Sanford I. Weill.

At the Annual Meeting, the trustees also elected its slate of officers to include: Kenneth J. Bialkin, Acting Secretary; Edward C. Forst, Treasurer; as well as Vice Chairs Clarissa Alcock Bronfman,Klaus Jacobs, Peter W. May, and Burton P. Resnick. Mr. May will continue to serve in his role as Chair of Carnegie Hall’s Board Development and Nominating Committee.

In addition, the Board approved the creation of a new Governance Committee, charged with overseeing policies and practices related to board stewardship, providing guidance and recommendations to the board at large. The new committee will be chaired by longtime trusteeRobert I. Lipp, who has served on the board since 2000. Mr. Lipp will be be joined by committee members: Carnegie Hall Chairman Emeritus Richard A. Debs; trustee Don M. Randel, board chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation who was newly-elected as a Carnegie Hall trustee at the October 8 meeting.

 

Those of us who travel a lot can never be sure of the welcome that awaits on arrival – or what’s left of us after the airlines and airports have ruined our day.

Every once in a while, there is someone who greets us with a hug and a hot drink.

Musicians the world over regret the passing of Uli Schirmer, manager of the Munich Palace Hotel. Here’s a message from the pianist Igor Levit, and others:

 

uli schirmer

Dear friends, dear colleagues, yesterday a wonderful human being, a magnificent man, a closest friend passed away after a long illness. Uli Schirmer was a real Mensch. It’s an incredible loss. As director of the Munich Palace Hotel he supported artists like a father. As a true music lover he was part of all of our life’s…To mourn a close friend like him is an indescribable loss. A very sad day…I can’t tell how much I will miss him.Some tears may help…
Rest in peace,dearest Uli.

Michael Schade Dee McKee Christiane KargAnselm Cybinski Florian Ganslmeier Stephan J. Schlößer Michael JondralNicolaus Schreyer Alis Schlößer Henriette Kaiser

A man from Thornton Heath was said to have ‘screamed hysterically’ as he beat to death a classical pianist he had met moments before in a bar near Waterloo Station.

Mark Patten, 30, was today sentenced to life at the Old Bailey and ordered to serve a minimum 17 years for the murder of Menelaos Aligizakis on January 3.

Mr Aligizakis, a concert artist and academic from Greece, was in London for the holidays, visiting friends.

menelaos murdered pianist

The Deutsche Sinfonie Orchester (DSO-Berlin), casting around for a music director to succeed Tugan Sokhiev who has moved to the Bolshoi, have named their next chief.

He is Robin Ticciati, 32, music director at Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He will have to give up one of those jobs when he begins in Berlin, two years from now.

robin ticciati

The deal was done by AskonasHolt, city brokers of Simon Rattle bonds.

Never mind that people who are serious about classical music avoid iTunes for its lack of metadata.

Never mind that even the serious ones would struggle to name a successful living Italian composer.

But this man is dominating iTunes this week like no musician that ever lived.

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And it’s not just because he has a new album out. Not to mention the theme music for BBC1s Doctor Foster. Or because he is flatteringly short of hair. It’s just so.

Click here if you haven’t identified him yet.

It may be a 2-for-1 deal in straitened times, but Warner Classics have announed the signing of a pair of piano playing twins from NYC. Christina and Michelle Naughton, 27, are ex-Curtis and ex-Juilliard.

Who were the last twins to sign for a major label? (Who remembers when labels were major?)

Christina and Michelle Naughton

 

Alexander Ullman (pictured) survived the first trial by a jury of past winners at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Here are the ones who got through to the second round:

List of the participants of the second round:
Ms Soo Jung Ann (South Korea)
Ms Miyako Arishima (Japan)
Mr Łukasz Piotr Byrdy (Poland)
Ms Michelle Candotti (Italy)
Mr Luigi Carroccia (Italy)
Ms Galina Chistiakova (Russia)
Mr Seong-Jin Cho (South Korea)
Ms Ivett Gyӧngyӧsi (Hungary)
Mr Chi Ho Han (South Korea)
Mr Olof Hansen (France)
Mr Zhi Chao Julian Jia (China)
Mr Aljoša Jurinić (Croatia)
Ms Su Yeon Kim (South Korea)
Ms Dinara Klinton (Ukraine)
Ms Aimi Kobayashi (Japan)
Mr Qi Kong (China)
Mr Marek Kozák (Czech Republic)
Mr Łukasz Krupiński (Poland)
Mr Krzysztof Książek (Poland)
Ms Rachel Naomi Kudo (United States)
Ms Kate Liu (United States)
Mr Eric Lu (United States)
Mr Łukasz Mikołajczyk (Poland)
Ms Alexia Mouza (Greece)
Ms Mayaka Nakagawa (Japan)
Mr Szymon Nehring (Poland)
Mr Piotr Nowak (Poland)
Ms Arisa Onoda (Japan)
Mr Georgijs Osokins (Latvia)
Mr Jinhyung Park (South Korea)
Mr Charles Richard-Hamelin (Canada)
Mr Dmitry Shishkin (Russia)
Ms Rina Sudo (Japan)
Mr Michał Szymanowski (Poland)
Mr Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev (Russia)
Mr Alexei Tartakovsky (United States)
Mr Alexander Ullman (United Kingdom)
Mr Chao Wang (China)
Mr Andrzej Wierciński (Poland)
Mr Zi Xu (China)
Mr Yike (Tony) Yang (Canada)
Mr Cheng Zhang (China)
Ms Annie Zhou (Canada)

 alexander ullman

Mr Byrdy, the Pole, drew the short straw to kick off round 2.

 

It starts in 2017, marking the 50th anniversary of the Easter Festival her husband founded in Salzburg, and it’s being endowed ‘in the spirit’ of his achievements. It’s worth 50 grand in Euros to the winner.

Anyone we’d care to nominate?

herbert-von-karajan-in-salzburg-austria

This looks like a really worthwhile idea. An awful lot of dewy-eyed stuff gets written about the benefits of paying in a youth orchestra. There is not much serious study of how, exactly, playing in an orchestra affects children from under-privileged and other backgrounds.

So the LA Phil has set up a pilot study at Stanford University to test the proposition under neutral conditions and academic criteria.

Details below.

yola

Los Angeles – (October 6, 2015) – The Los Angeles Philharmonic announced today a research collaboration with Stanford SPARQ: Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions to measure the effects of YOLA’s rigorous, group classical music education on student and community development. This announcement was made during the 2015 Take A Stand symposium, an annual convening in Los Angeles of El Sistema practitioners from the U.S. and throughout the world.
Los Angeles Philharmonic Association President and CEO Deborah Borda said, “We are eager to embark upon research that will consider our YOLA students the way we do: as young leaders who are acquiring social and musical skills that will last a lifetime. So much research into arts learning has focused on how the arts can be used to improve in-school performance today. This research is about how the arts prepare young people to be successful adultstomorrow.”
The study will examine the effects of YOLA’s ensemble-focused music training on students, parents, and instructors. By examining YOLA, researchers will provide new insights and data about the social impact of El Sistema-inspired music education on children, families and community.
The results of the Stanford SPARQ study will be presented in 2017, coinciding with YOLA’s 10th anniversary, and the culmination of The National Take a Stand Festival, an unprecedented initiative to create a unified national platform for El Sistema-inspired programs throughout the United States. Findings will be distributed widely to provoke field-wide learning. The USC Brain and Creativity Institute will also present results of their five-year longitudinal research project, Effects of Early Childhood Musical Training on Brain and Cognitive Development, a research collaboration launched in 2012 with the LA Phil and YOLA to investigate the cognitive effects of musical training on childhood brain development.

Fascinating revelations in a trawl of Martha’s friends by Jessica Duchen for the current issue of Pianst magazine.

abbado argerich2

 

According to the pianist Gabriele Baldocci, Martha and Claudio met as fellow-pianists in Friedrich Gulda’s class. Martha went on to win the Chopin competition. Deutsche Grammophon asked her to record one of the concertos.

Who would she like to conduct? Claudio, she said.

It was his record debut.

 

argerich pianist mag

 

But is the story true? Would DG in those authoritarian days have allowed a young pianist to choose her own conductor? Can anyone corroborate?

 

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.

 

Caroline-Thomson-photograph-682x1024-700x455

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.