Rafael Payare, conductor of the Ulster Orchestra and a rising podium star, was refused entry to the US today even though his visa is current, according to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

Payare was due to give concerts with the orchestra this weekend together with his wife, the US cellist Alisa Weilerstein.

He is said to be ‘shocked‘ by his exclusion.

Cincy have replaced him with Dallas assistant conductor Karina Cannelakis.

The results are in:

I prize €25 000                   Christel Lee, USA

II prize €18 000                  Emmanuel Tjeknavorian, Austria

III prize €12 000                Friederike Starkloff, Germany

Three other finalists, Mayumi Kanagawa (USA), Minami Yoshida (Japan) and Nancy Zhou (USA) received a prize of €2000 each.

The finalists placed second and third started the last round as joint favourites.

Christel Lee, 25, studied with Kyung Wha Chung at Julliard, graduating four years ago. Of South Korean origin, she was born in the US and raised in Canada.

picture: Dorothee Falke

Other prizes:
The Foundation of Helsinki Conservatory of Music awarded a special prize of  €3000 to Emmanuel Tjeknavorian for the best interpretation of Sibelius Violin Concerto
City of Järvenpää awarded a special prize of €2000 to Friederike Starkloff for the best interpretation of commissioned piece in second round.  The commissioned piece was one of the award-winning pieces from Jean Sibelius Composition Competition 2015.
The best Finnish contestant Pekko Pulakka got the special prize from the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yleisradio; invitation to make a recording for Yle.

When Morris Robinson lets rips, the stage shakes.

Morris has just let rip in the direction of Knoxville Opera which only seeks to cast ‘age appropriate, attractive artists’, no-one older or less pretty.

Says Morris:

With regards to Knoxville Opera, and the Executive Director who blew me off and didn’t return my call …

I’ve called (executive director and conductor Brian) Salesky’s office … he hasn’t returned my call. I figured he wouldn’t. This business is full of folks who sit behind shields and throw darts … yet are too afraid to stand behind their own words.

The pop star has sent the orch $50,000 in gratitude for its recording of John Luther Adams’ haunting piece, Become Ocean.

In her letter to music director Ludovic Morlot (which has not been published), Swift is said to have praised the beauty of the work and the musicianship of the orchestra. She also recalled going to hear her local symphony with her grandmother and how important that was to her.

Two years ago, we reported that she gave $100,000 to her home town Nashville Symphony.

Because she likes the things we do.

Morlot has gone on Youtube to say thanks.

Taylor’s style.

The Adams session.

Family members are reporting the death of John Eaton, who composed an opera on Shakespeare’s The Tempest with a libretto by the late New Yorker critic Andrew Porter. It was premiered at San Diego in 1985.

Eaton, who was 80, taught at the universities of Indiana and Chicago. In early days he worked with Robert Moog on synthesisers. Later, he developed a genre of Pocket Opera and wrote in microtones.

In a sure sign that peace has broken out since the horrendous 16-month lockout, musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra have donated the rest of their lockout fund to the organisation’s community outreach initiative.

The orchestra itself announced a small surplus.

Read here.

After 40 years on the CSO Members Committee, bass player Roger Cline will not run for re-election.

His daughter Jenny Mondie, plays viola in the National Symphony Orchestra and chairs its committee. Jenny writes a vivid reminiscence in the CSO players’ journal, Backstage with Chicago Symphony Musicians (not available online). Here’s a sample:

I was not quite a year old when Dad won the CSO bass audition in 1973. There are stories about him putting me in my infant seat on the dining room table and practicing excerpts at me before that audition. Mom, Dad, and I moved to the north suburbs of Chicago that September and straight into a four-week lockout. While it was an immense honor and very exciting for Dad to have this new prestigious position (he was previously in the West Point band playing sousaphone), the lockout must have been quite a strain for a young family. My Dad is very logical and likes finding creative solutions to problems, so it was probably inevitable that he would be drawn to serving on the Members’ Committee, but the experience of joining an orchestra during a labor stoppage probably sealed his fate.

Jenny writes of her experiences at the NSO:

Once after a meeting, I was criticized by one of my Committee colleagues as being too dour towards our management. Distraught, I called Dad. His response was “If there isn’t someone scowling on your side of the table, how will they know you’re really paying attention?”

Read the full article here.

Andrew Green reports on the Classical Music site that Radio 3 is to halve the amount it pays to musicians for concert relays. The amount is usually 20-30 percent of the artist’s performing fee.

Radio 3 controller Alan Davey and his sidekick Edward Blakeman made the announcement to a gathering of artists’ agents.

The amount saved is tiny as a proportion of BBC overheads – possibly less than Alan Yentob’s salary.

UPDATE: Statement to Slipped Disc by the BBC: ‘We’re  presently in a series of ongoing and confidential discussions with the industry on this matter.’

We broke exclusive news yesterday of the admission of two women, Karin Bonelli and Patricia Koll, as full members of the Vienna Philharmonic, a red lipstick day in the orchestra’s dark history of male dominance.

We also broke news that Ekaterina Frolova had been admitted on trial to the first violin section, the start of a compatibility process that usually takes three years.

Today, our mole in the orchestra informs us of a fourth woman who has been quietly admitted.

Adela Frasineanu passed her trial last week for the second violin section and will play in the New Year’s Day concert on television.

Well done, Adela.

Vienna has just begun to move into the second half of the 20th century. This week might prove to be historic.

The BBC’s creative director has stepped down, following concerns about his handling of the Kids Company charity.

Few will regret the departure of a man who wielded too much power, often unwisely, and clung on long past his sell-by.

Alan Yentob is 68. We wish him a happy semi-retirement.

He will, it has emerged, continue to produce and present the arts-puff series, Imagine.

As chairman of Kids Company, Yentob warned of social mayhem if the celeb-fronted charity was allowed to collapse. He also sought to influence BBC news programmes in their coverage of the fiasco. Stern resistance by Newsnight exposed his machinations. Many expected him to be fired, but D-G Tony Hall showed signs of having an emotional dependency on Yentob and was unable to pull the trigger.

Yentob’s resignation has relieved him of that unpleasant duty but leaves Lord Hall further weakened. Hall called Yentob today ‘a towering figure in television, the arts, and a creative force for good for Britain.’

That’s not a view widely shared within the BBC, let alone beyond.

UPDATE: Last week, Tim Davie, head of BBC Worldwide, was cross-examined by a House of Commons select committee over the share of revenues that Yentob might be taking from international sales of the Imagine series.

Future of Music Coalition has conducted an earnings survey among US composers and musicians and followed it up with detailed financial case studies.

They arrived at the conclusion that there are 42 ways that musicians are augmenting their income, including ringtone revenue (big for Boccherini), ‘neighboring rights royalties’ (is that the people next door paying you to let them sleep?) and ‘composing original works for broadcast’ (not much money there).

That’s 42 ways to feed the family.

Then they found three more. Read the full 45 here.

Knoxville Opera’s ageist, lookist casting policy has drawn first blood. Dr Claudia Friedlander, who runs a voice studio, has published an open letter to the opera company that can’t apparently get much right.

Claudia writes:

The objectification of singers based on age and appearance is ill-conceived and highly detrimental to opera as an art form. Opera companies prioritize these attributes over vocal excellence at their peril. The vocal and artistic maturity required for superb performances of these roles has nothing to do with the age of the singers, and the shape of their bodies ought to reflect the physical demands of singing rather than some preconceived aesthetic. Because opera is such a buyer’s market these days and there are more gifted singers than the profession can possibly employ, it might appear possible to cull singers over a certain age or weight from your applicant pool and still end up with a viable cast, but if opera is to not only survive but thrive we must be showcasing not merely viable singers but transcendent ones. 

There won’t be much transcendence at Knoxville any time soon.

Read Claudia’s full letter here.