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.
Amateur video, filmed in a European capital under state of siege, where the Metro has been shut down for security reasons.
Els Ampe tweeted: Strange atmosphere in #Brussels thesedays … Armoured vehicles with cello sounds in background.
We have been informed of the passing of Richard Cowan, an American bass-baritone who sang leading roles in major US and European houses and in 1998 founded the Lyrique en Mer opera festival in Belle Île, France.
Richard had been struggling for several years with illness; his death was announced by the festival.
As a performer, Richard came first to attention in Berg’s Lulu at the Maggio Musicale, Chicago and San Francisco. In 1990, he played the opening night of the Met as Chaunard in La Bohème.
His signature role was Bluebeard in Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard Castle, which he played at Deutsche Oper Berlin, Geneva, Turin, Melbourne, Liège, and at his own festival.
Our sympathies to his widow, Uliana Kozhevnikova, his daughter, Alexandra Cowan, and loved ones.
A memorial service will be held in Pittsburgh, early next month.
The Chinese pianist has been named the first Ambassador to Château de Versailles.
He reports: ‘I’ve fallen in love with Versailles and I’m excited to help raise awareness about the ongoing need for its preservation and restoration. I’ll give outdoor concerts in the gardens in 2016 and 2017. Merci beaucoup!’
The Bach birthplace museum in Eisenach has announced the purchase of a lifetime portrait of the composer. The painting below, attributed to the Dresden painter Johann Emanuel Göbel (1720-1759), was discovered in private ownership 30 years ago and will now go on permanent display.
No sooner did that new item land than a collector in Dortmund, Wolf-Dietrich Köster, claims to have authenticated by carbon-dating to 1748 a Bach portrait he bought at auction last year.
If both of these pictures are what they are said to be, the number of lifetime likenesses of Bach has just gone up from one to three.
The West African singer-songwriter Sekouba Bambino has emerged as a hero of the Malian hotel siege, feeding the authorities vital information about the attackers from his besieged room.
He identified the murderous jihadists as English speakers with a Nigerian accent.
‘Initially I thought they were petty criminals,’ Bambino told NBC News. Then, ‘it felt like this wasn’t just simple pistols… There were shots from military weapons.’
