Jed Gaylin music director of Bay Atlantic Symphony, has a fresh take on many aspects of the issue, including the pre-concert talk:

George Szell was fond of telling a joke about how everyone, when they die, ascends a staircase with a sign “to heaven,” except Americans. We all go up a stairway with a sign “to a lecture on heaven.”

But why must the lecture be so removed from the joys and explorations of the concert experience? Why can’t the conversation on heaven (the concert) contain some of the heavenly aroma? Why should there be separate staircases? Stravinsky has an apt line about how we have all been taught to appreciate music too much, and to love it too little.

And this:

To me, relevance is a quality, like innocence. Some works have it, some performances have it. As a performer, I cannot make music relevant any more than a defense lawyer can make the client innocent. I can work to uncover what is so singular, “in-relief” about a work, for me, at that moment. If my artistic sensibilities and capabilities are hot and firing smoothly, it will be relevant. I can commission works from composers whose music I believe is vital, and who aware of our current musical milieu. But it is for a composer to write something that is relevant—and perhaps even timeless.

More here.

Your thoughts?

In the thick of the biggest European migration since the 1940s, with nuclear powers playing Russian roulette in Syrian skies, a Labour leader who wants to drop our defences and a Europe that is rebuilding its borders, the act of writing about music can seem futile, if not positively escapist. What benefit is there in contemplating the work of composers, the merits of interpreters and the putative meaning of black notes that fly in and above five stave lines like crows at the dawn of Armageddon?

In times of crisis we are enjoined to keep calm and carry on. But carrying on is the hardest thing to do when there is no correlation between the overriding abnormality and our concentrated preoccupation with very small things. What, in a word, is the point?

Read my current Standpoint essay here.

The Israel boycott lobby have turned again on the Jerusalem Quartet, trying to black their next performance at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.

The BDS, whose supporters have previously disrupted their London recitals, state – absurdly – that the quartet are cultural ambassadors of Israel.

They are nothing of the sort, just four outstanding musicians trying to play Beethoven and Schubert.

Those who try to stop them are philistines.

Operagoers are outraged at the removal of a number of partitions at the old Paris Opéra in order to cram in more seats in the central balcony.

A petition has gone up to stop the vandalism, ordered by Opéra director Stéphane Lissner, apparently without Ministry authorisation. The Palais Garnier ought to be untouchable. It belongs to us all.

Sign here.

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The Oude Kerk of Amsterdam, also known at St Nicholas Church, has announced a new organist, Matthias Havinga.

Matthias, 32, succeeds Jakob Lekkerkerker, who has been in the seat for only eight years.

No reason has been given. Jakob remains on staff. Story here.

Jason Haaheim, principal timpanist of the Metropolitan Opera, has posted a notice of the death of his distinguished predecessor, Richard Horowitz.

Dick, who served for 66 years, retired in 2012, aged 88.

He was the third longest-serving orchestral player on record.

It is no secret that Wolfie had a dirty mind and a filthy tongue.

The evidence is there for all to read in his family letters, which are full of body parts and what he’d like to do to them.

But no-one* has ever put on record the music that Mozart wrote to some of his smutty ditties.

Leck mich im Arsch, for instance. Loosely translated it means ‘lick my ass’, but the German is somehow more personal, prescriptive and – in the naughty music that Mozart composed to it – anatomically descriptive.

So no-one’s ever recorded it?

Well, Sabine Devieilhe has, on a new Warner album called ‘Mozart: The Weber Sisters’.

Slipped Disc has been sneaked an early listen of the offensive track, made all the more offensive by following on from a serene and beautiful account of Et Incarnatus Est from the Mass in C Minor, as sacred as it gets.

Sabine waves away the incense, then pitches into Lick My Ass, and with such commitment and gusto that she almost corpses at one point when she realises exactly what she’s singing. The record is out next week and you’d better find the track yourselves because I doubt many classical radio stations are going to be exhorting their listeners to get low down and dirty with one of the – hush – Great Composers. It’s about as low as classical music can go.

We’ll be offering a Slipped Disc prize to the first radio station that plays the track and translates it, fein schmeck and all.

And to the first reviewer that calls it a bummer.

*UPDATE: There is one prior recording. It’s by a straight-faced male choir and, by comparison to what we’ve just heard, totally po-faced.

As foreseen, the Salem Chamber Orchestra has been unable to cover a $100,000 shortfall and will go out of business today after 31 years.

The composer John Corigiliano was due to visit this month.

It’s a sad day for Oregon.

Bombed out at the end of the War, the house reopened in November 1955.

The following month Christa Ludwig made her role debut as Octavian in Der Rosekavalier.

‘I remember it so well,’ she told a Vienna audience this morning. ‘I went down a couple of steps in my white-pink dress and everything was white and bright. In that moment, I thought: “Hold it right there. You are so beautiful.’

‘Ich kann mich noch sehr gut erinnern. Ich ging mit meinem weiß-rosa Kleid die paar Stufen hinunter und alles war weiß und hell erleuchtet. Da dachte ich in dem Augenblick nur: *Verweile doch, du bist so schön!‘’.

l-r: Ludwig, concertmaster Walter Barylli, repetiteur Hubert Deutsch

Not an obvious choice.

Gustav Kuhn’s 24-hour version of Wagner’s Ring in Shanghai, borrowed from the Tyrol Festival, won a 40-minute ovation from a huge audience that managed to stay awake. Kuhn, 70, has also conducted Parsifal and Meistersinger in China in the past couple of years.

Yu Long, director of the Beijing Music Festival, said on presenting the award: ‘Kuhn’s name, here in China, will always be spoken in the same breath as Richard Wagner’s.’

Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, who at 92 is the oldest conductor still working, will be named today ‘Ehrendirigent’ (honorary conductor) of the German Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern.

Stan has been conducting them since 1978.

press release:

UPDATE: And here’s some video:

Theophilis ‘Mike’ Burroughs, a sometime music teacher at Stuyvesant High School, has been sentenced to 15 years after being caught selling a stash of weapons to people he thought were from Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group. They turned out to be cops.

At the trial Burroughs, 54, proclaimed himself a Hamas supporter.