Out of the blue, at the end of a stressful day, this popped up on social media.

Klaus Tennstedt’s first opera at the Met.

Have you ever heard a Met audience erupt like that for an overture?

As the cellist James Kreger recalls: From the outset of the very first rehearsal, one could sense his total, life and death, commitment to the score. That made the orchestra even more eager to reciprocate in kind. Those incredible moments on January 7, 1984 made me feel privileged to be part of this great orchestra, and will remain with me forever as one of the high points of my career.

Just listen.

We will never hear his like again.

The Cleveland Orchestra has recruited Opus 3 artists manager Ilya Gidalevich as its Artistic Administrator. Ilya presently looks after such artists as Conrad Tao, Eugene Tzigane, Miguel Harth-Bedoya and Les Violons du Roy, as well as a range of singers.

Before joining Opus 3, Ilya worked for Goldman Sachs. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Yale with majors in Music and Political Science. He was born in Odessa, Ukraine and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He joins Cleveland next month.

Message from Knoxville Opera, following the ‘old and ugly’ furore:

Knoxville Opera is deeply apologetic and sincerely regrets the hurt caused by our recent audition notice. When we posted the ad for engaging three singers for our education/outreach production of LA BOHEME we used language to communicate in “short-hand” the specific descriptions of the characters of Mimi and Musetta by Henri Murger, the original author, as they appear in the printed Puccini scores in the prefaces to Acts 1 and 2.

When considering all artists, our first priority has always been and always will be a person’s vocal ability to sing the role. We are a company committed to a culture of inclusion and will continue to hold ourselves ethically accountable for hiring diverse artists. If one were to take a comprehensive look at the entirety of the artists in our company over the past decade, one would find that our casting has been both diverse and inclusive. Please allow us to once again express our sincere and respectful apology.

So it was all Puccini’s fault, then?

Stefan Arzberger, who has been on bail in America for eight months since he was charged with attempted murder after an incident in a Manhattan hotel, has resigned from the Leipzig String Quartet.

A statement by the quartet said he had taken the decision because he was unsure he could return to Germany by the spring of 2016 and this was affecting the group’s touring plans and stability.

Official statement, released December 7, 2015:

Stefan Arzberger Resigns as Member of the Leipzig String Quartet

The prosecution of the case filed against Stefan Arzberger, first violinist of the Leipzig Quartet, continues to progress slowly. A timeline for a resolution of the process that began in the Manhattan Superior Court in April of 2015 is impossible to predict. His return to Germany by the Spring of 2016 is therefore very uncertain. For this reason, Stefan Arzberger withdraws as a member and stakeholder of the Leipzig String Quartet, enabling his colleagues to plan ahead and secure their futures and careers. Stefan Arzberger regrets that he is forced to make this difficult decision and looks forward to a speedy conclusion of the trial in New York so that he can both clear his name and continue his personal creative development. The Leipzig String Quartet will assume all of its future engagements and tasks with a modified line-up and remains committed to maintaining the high quality of the ensemble. We would like to thank all of our partners, event organizers and hosts, as well as our friends for their help and support during these difficult times and look forward with hope to a positive resolution to Stefan’s ongoing and uncertain case in the United States.

Stefan Arzberger

Leipzig String Quartett

New York Leipzig, December 4, 2015

Jimmy Lopez, composer of Bel Canto which has its world premiere next week in Chicago, has been talking about possible controversy to our friend, Elijah Ho. The plot of Bel Canto centres on a hostage siege in Peru.

Speaking shortly after the Paris terror attacks, Jimmy was asked by Elijah whether the Bel Canto siege fell into the same trap of moral ambivalence as John Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer.

He said: ‘In the US, I don’t think it will elicit the kind of reaction Klinghoffer did. If it were to be staged in Lima, it would be a different story….I think neither Nilo nor I try to take sides…You cannot cast moral judgment on your characters while writing…What we have to do is get into the head of the terrorist and find out what he thinks, what’s driving him…It is dark, definitely, but it’s also a great opportunity, musically…’

‘Even though it’s about an event that happened in 1996, somehow history keeps repeating itself…Bel Canto is not there to open wounds. It will remind us of what keeps happening, but it will help us to heal, that there is a humanity that unites all of us, even the most monstrous of people, that there still has to be some humanity left.’

Read the full interview here.

Janelle Gelfand in Cincinnati has written one of the best inside accounts we’ve seen of the medieval torture that has been reinvented as the audition for new orchestral players.

“From a statistical chance, it’s probably easier to get into the NBA,” said Christian Colberg, principal viola of the Cincinnati Symphony. “It’s a very tough process, a process that sends people to therapists, and that truly changes your life. It’s almost barbaric, but it is absolutely fair.”

Read the full feature here.

Ray Dolby, inventor of the Dolby noise-reduction system for audio tapes and movies, was so grateful to Pembroke College, where he got his doctorate and met his wife, that he left it a fortune in his will.

The university calls it ‘the largest gift to a Cambridge college in modern times,’ an English euphemism meaning since forever. Cambridge University was founded in 1209, which falls within the category of Early Modern History.

Ray Dolby, who died in 2013, earned his PhD at Cambridge in 1961 and stayed on as a graduate student and research fellow at Pembroke. He met his wife, Dagmar Dolby, at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory of Physics.

Dagmar said: ‘At Cambridge, he gained the formative education and insights that contributed greatly to his lifelong ground-breaking creativity, and we also began a wonderful lifetime together there.’

There’s a lot of movement in Philly, most of it for the good.

We reported exclusively this week a shakeout in the woodwinds.

Now, there’s action on the board front. Press release below.

Board of Trustees Elects Mark E. Rubenstein Next Chair of the Curtis Institute of Music

A member of the Board of Trustees since 2009, Mr. Rubenstein brings a deep knowledge of the school and extensive national connections, succeeding Nina Baroness von Maltzahn on June 1, 2016

Chiona Schwarz and William R. Stensrud join the Board of Trustees, reflecting Curtis’s continued commitment to broadening the reach and expertise of its volunteer leadership

PHILADELPHIA, PA— December 4, 2015 —The Curtis Institute of Music Board of Trustees announces the election of Mark E. Rubenstein as its new chairman, effective June 1, 2016. He succeeds Nina Baroness von Maltzahn, who will remain on the board of trustees upon completing a two-year tenure marked by an expansion of worldwide touring and international exposure for the school.

This is the Royal Mail’s new Christmas stamp.

Mary appears to be playing a portable keyboard. Joseph is warming up for karaoke.

The reviews for the Chinese pianist’s performances with the Philharmonia Orchestra this week have been uniformly… epic.

John Allison in the Telegraph:

So can he play Mozart? Not really, but he does manage some exquisite Mozartian effects. Lang Lang’s problem seems to be a flighty attention span, which leaves him bored the moment anything is going well. Too immature to channel his huge talent, he took the biggest liberties in his staccato exaggerations that found him pecking at the notes aggressively — the antithesis of what the Philharmonia was doing under Esa-Pekka Salonen. The slow movement supplied some balm, but he romped noisily though the finale. Nothing added up.

And can he play Chopin? Not on the evidence of his encore, the Waltz in E flat, Op. 18. Touting a cheap imitation, Lang Lang played with a vulgarity seldom, if ever, heard on the London concert platform. For crimes against its national composer, Poland really ought to lock him up and toss the key into the Vistula.

Geoff Brown in The Times:

In Mozart’s Concerto No 24, out came his old trick of raising an idle hand high in the air, throbbing with excess feeling, while other hand works the keys. This clearly impressed some in the packed house, but it did nothing for the sense of continuity in the wonderful music he was playing.

What I heard mirrored what I saw: a string of effects, chiselled notes here, abrupt dynamic shifts there, each phrase leading a separate life from its colleagues ahead and behind.

Richard Fairman in the Financial Times:

Lang Lang is not a performer who can be upstaged easily and his wildly exaggerated playing in Grieg’s Piano Concerto was nothing if not meant to be noticed. The melodies were milked for every last drop of emotion. The faster music was hammered out at top speed regardless of sense or clarity (and not with the precision there should have been). Everything was reduced to showing off in a way that cheapened the music.

Michael Church in the Independent:

There never was any problem with his technique, and there isn’t now, but the implicit message of his playing in the first movement was ‘look at me’. The lovely Rondo which followed was efficient, but neither soloist nor orchestra seemed alive to its beauty; the concluding variations were brilliantly executed, but cold.

Then it was encore time: Chopin’s Grande valse brillante, distorted with relish, and turned into a vehicle for Lang Lang’s superabundant vanity. While Salonen looked impotently on, he accepted his plaudits with practised finesse, and a look in his eyes which seemed to say ‘No, really, you are too, too kind!’

Tim Ashley in the Guardian:

You can’t fault his often formidable dexterity, but this [Grieg] was a wayward interpretation that proceeded by fits and starts. The best of it was perversely exciting, but lurching tempo changes threatened to pull the first movement out of shape, and dynamics were extreme to the point of exaggeration in the adagio. There were plenty of characteristic grand gestures and ecstatic glances towards the audience in moments of rapt contemplation. Playing a passage for the right hand alone, at one point, he placed his left hand over his heart and gazed heavenwards. Salonen just about kept things under control.

Andrew Clements in the Guardian (CD review):

The four Chopin Scherzos are often monstrously aggressive, with their hammered chords and machine-gun figuration – what should be filigree seems more like shrapnel – and little space is given to the moments of repose that allow these wonderful pieces to breathe.

The Austrian soprano Martina Serafin severely injured her leg in the climactic jump of Wednesday night’s Tosca at the Vienna State Opera.

It appears she fell awkwardly onto the mattress and twisted the leg. She was so badly hurt that she could not take curtain calls. We hear that Martina has been put in a plaster cast for eight weeks and has cancelled her performances over that period.

Maria José Siri will take over as Tosca in Vienna.

We wish Martina a speedy recovery.

Serafin with Roberto Alagna in the Vienna production (c) Wiener Staatsoper / Michael Poehn

The tabloids are full of Myleene Klass this morning, which is just how she likes it. The paparazzi pictures, which we wouldn’t dream of showing on a grown-up site like Slipped Disc, display Classic FM weekend presenter Myleene arriving at a Cosmopolitan event with nothing but a lacy see-through covering her bottom.

In case anyone missed the spectacle, Myleene helpfully tweeted: ‘Essentially, I’ve gone out tonight in my pyjamas’.

Classic FM’s audience, many of them mature people who are presumed by advertisers to be interested in dentures and stairlifts, will be mystified perhaps by the fuss.

Myleene, who has a wry sense of self mockery and marketing, will not be in the least discomfited. Here’s her wholesome picture from Classic FM.