Leading concertmasters* and close friends have shared reports of the death today of Joseph Silverstein, legendary concertmaster of the Boston Symphony from 1962 to 1984. He was 83.
After stepping down at Boston he became music director of the Utah Symphony, 1983 to 1998, a most uncommon upgrade.
Joey was born in Detroit, studied with his schoolteacher father and went on to Curtis where he worked with Efrem Zimbalist, William Primrose, Josef Gingold and Mischa Mischakoff.
Few concertmasters have ever received such trust and respect from visiting violin soloists.
One of his last performances, last month, was a benefit concert for the new Center for Beethoven Research at Boston University.
*Emanuel Borok, Alex Kerr, David Radzynski and others
Dallas Opera has extended the contracts of General Director & CEO Keith Cerny (pictured left), and Music Director Emmanuel Villaume to June 30, 2022.
Cerny joined Dallas in 2010, Villaume three years later.
We have just saved you from reading a 2,000-word adulatory press release. Be grateful.
The prima donna has been telling Corriere della Sera about male divas…. she’s not a fan.
I didn’t really like Mario Del Monaco. Also, I once gave Giuseppe Di Stefano a slap on stage. During a duet in L’elisir d’amore, instead of singing, he wandered towards the back of the stage to eat an apple. I looked at the conductor asking him, with my glance, what I should do? Continue alone? In the next scene Di Stefano returned to the footlights. My character, Adina, was meant to give him a pinch on the cheek, but instead I gave him a loud slap.
There’s a frank assessment by Peter Dobrin today in the Philadelphia Inquirer of the unchecked decline of a once-indomitable orchestra, a decline that is gathering speed despite the partnership of a world-class conductor and dazzling musicians.
Key Philly facts:
1 Attendance is down from 160,000 in 2014-15 to 153,000. One in four seats is empty on average. That’s unsustainable.
2 Yannick Nezet-Seguin has had to trim his program plans and take a wage far below other US music directors – $519,319 for 10½ weeks in the last accounts*. Philly’s former MD Eschenbach gets over $2m in DC.
3 The musicians have accepted a one-year contract and are murmurous.
4 Many think Michael Kaiser is going to dig them out of the hole.
*UPDATE: We have been furnished with the full pay details for Philadelphia’s music director in the accounting year 2013. They are: The compensation listed on the IRS Form 990, $519,319, is an after-tax number. Yannick is engaged as an independent contractor; hence, the Orchestra pays taxes to the US Internal Revenue Service. These amounted to $227,950. Total compensation also included $12,564 in expense reimbursements, primarily travel-related. Added to the $519,319 this totals $759,833, which was Yannick’s total compensation for 2013.
Kazem Abdullah, 36, has let it be known that he won’t renew after July 2017.
It’s a nice town but no career has taken off from Aachen since Herbert von Karajan’s in 1935.
And conditions were a bit different then.
The owners of Finchcock’s Musical Museum have let it be known they are shutting down and selling up.
Housed in a stately home in Kent, Finchock’s has one of the world’s finest concentrations of historic keyboard instruments.
But its owners, Katrina and Richard Burnett, are in their late 70s and ready to sell up. They will take some of the choice instruments to their new home and sell the rest at auction. The museum will shut on December 31.
The Dutch organist, composer and conductor Jacques van Oortmerssen has died at the age of 65.
Rotterdam born, Jacques succeeded Gustav Leonhardt at Amsterdam Waalse kerk, where he played the great Christian Müller organ of 1734.
Widely esteemed, he performed and taught at major festivals around the world, including the BBC Proms. Like his predecessor, he recorded the organ works of J S Bach, but saw only nine volumes released. He lived to complete a recorded edition of the works of C P E Bach and Johannes Brahms.
May he rest in peace.
Despite a somewhat forbidding demeanour, he could take a joke.
At the post-Hansel and Gretel party at the Vienna State Opera, a rare public appearance by the conductor’s mother, who accompanies him everywhere.
Christian Thielemann, Agnes Buchbinder, Rudolf Buchbinder, Mrs Thielemann. Photo: Wiener Staatsoper/ Christian Pöhn
Südhof, a passionate bassoonist, went on to relate precisely what he had applied from music to his work in science.
Now, the indomitable editors of The Double Reed, have discovered another bassoon player with a Nobel Prize.
William E. Moerner shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Eric Betzig and Stefan W. Hell.
Like Südhof, Moerner teaches at Stanford University. He plays several instruments, including bassoon, and believes that making music is often a prerequisite to breaking down barriers in science. He tells Ryan D. Romine:
A number of my best students (maybe 50%) have strong music skills, something we enjoy during our annual holiday parties. Certainly arts training is a necessary part of a broad education, because we all need to appreciate the arts to see the variety of ways in which our emotions can be expressed.
Moerner goes on to say:
My musical experiences have always tapped into a deep part of my soul in a very personal way. I enjoy the harmonies, the intricacies, and the intellectual challenge, which all probably connect to the rules and structure of science and mathematics, but I also have an emotional connection to music. I met my wife as my partner in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Gondoliers, and her parents were co-founders of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of San Jose! These days, I only have time to rehearse once a week to sing in the Stanford Symphonic Chorus or to do some summer sing-alongs, but this is still very fulfilling.
Read Ryan’s full, fascinating interview about music and chemistry – laboratory and personal – in this month’s edition of The Double Reed.
