Try this: almost one-fifth of the music performed is by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.
Or this: Less than two percent of the music, 1.8% to be precise, is written by women.
All those women are presently alive. Dead women composers do not exist.
That rules out Bacewicz, Kapralova, Ustvolskaya (all three fascinating)…
… Any Beach, Ruth Seeger, Lizzie Lutyens, Ethel Smyth, Maconchy, Fanny Mendelssohn, Hildegard of Bingen, Clara Schumann, Rebecca Clarke, Vivian Fine and the putative Mrs Bach.
Not that the playing situation is much better anywhere else, as far as we can tell.
Dead women composers are always deader than men.
It has been a hair-raising weekend at the Seattle Symph.
Soprano Jane Archibald fell sick and there was no-one within reach to take over Messiaen’s Poème pour Mi, which had to be scrapped.
A chorus member volunteered to step up for the other part of the program, which was Fauré’s Requiem.
But what to do about the Messiaen-shaped hole?
Conductor Ludovic Morlot called for Ravel La Valse.
Without rehearsal.
Or a permanent concertmaster.
The apprehension in the orch was, we hear, ‘pretty intense’.
But Emma McGrath in the #1 seat took the change in her stride and the substitute work proved highly effective.
Do not try this at home.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic assistant conductor, Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla, 29, is on a learning curve. Her repertoire grows from one concert to the next. And she’s being auditioned for music director in San Diego. She’s getting known pretty well around southern California:
Her gender and her youth would not seem to be much of an issue during her rehearsal with the L.A. Phil. The sheer physicality of her presence on the podium is immediately remarkable. Her motions are big but crisp and incisive. She plants her feet, bends her knees, and drives a phrase like a tennis player swinging through a forehand. She makes a fist and growls, asking for more vigor.
She treats the orchestra as equals, as partners. She says “please” and “thank you.” Her verbal directions are brief and to the point. She seems to want to let the orchestra play through Rodion Shchedrin’s “Carmen Suite” – trusting their abilities to learn it, a sure way to win over musicians – more than to hear herself talk. At any rate, her baton is plenty expressive.
The 20 year-old Italian national Alexander Gadjiev took both the judges’ vote and the audience prize at the elite Japanese piano competition. He also walked off with the Mayor’s award, a clean sweep.
The sixth finalist was left on his own with fourth prize.
What kind of indecisive judging is that? And how was #6 left feeling?
The Times reports on a ‘cultural literacy’ scheme that is designed to help teenagers pass their Oxford and Cambridge admission interviews with flying colours.
Students attend art auctions at Christie’s, performances at the Royal Opera House and lectures at institutes to help them to hold their own. Children are also taught how to speak clearly and intelligently, to help them to succeed at university interviews .
The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art is running workshops at the Harris Federation, an academy chain, for pupils from the age of 13….
The British and French governments regard the refugee camps at Calais as an unsanitary nuisance at best, even as a potential hazard. Some London musicians look to them as an opportunity for expanding their experience of the great variety of world music. The initiative is the brainchild of Vanessa Lucas-Smith, cellist of the Allegri Quartet.
Vanessa says: ‘I’ve been lucky enough to play in The Wigmore Hall and record in Abbey Road Studios both of which I thought were beyond my dreams as a kid. The Jungle refugee camp and the makeshift studio we set up (complete with deafening generator) definitely wasn’t on my bucket list, but how it has changed me. Honoured and bettered to have shared the stage with the talented musicians there.’
Watch. Buy. Give.
We are an eclectic group of musicians from London who found extraordinary musicians to jam with, write, rehearse, perform and record, over two days in The Jungle refugee camp in Calais, France. Together we are called The Jungle Collective. We have three tracks and with your help we can complete the album and let more voices from The Jungle be heard.
https://thejunglecollective.bandcamp.com/
Jean Batigne, founder of the Percussions de Strasbourg, has died in the Languedoc at the age of 82.
An award-winning percusssionist, primcipal of the Philarmonique de Strasbourg, Batigne’s focus turned to contemporary music after a seminal conversation with Pierre Boulez in 1959. Two years later, he founded the Percussions de Strasbourg, primarily to advance the performance of modern music.
He retired to the south of France in 1992.
Hello?
It’s Shalom from the kosher aisle.
Eight days of parody from comedian Ari Blau.
You really needed that, right?
Ok, let’s stick to tradition.
From the website home page of the Georgian pianist, Khatia Buniatishvili.
Khatia’s great career has come quite naturally, without a struggle. The sun has no need to move mountains to exist for it rises and shines for all. And these are the words that spring to mind when one sees her bursting onto the stage or in life: her hair flowing, her fine figure quite the Parisian, her lips smiling, her light sylph-like steps and her feline body. But the rose will show its thorns if it feels what it holds dear to be threatened. She won’t be made to give up a humanitarian project. She won’t be prevented from helping the country in which she was born and raised. She won’t be forced to play in a land that pours scorn on her values. She won’t have playing partners forced upon her who do not inspire human respect and great artistic admiration in equal measure. For that matter, nothing can be imposed on this young lady of the air whose wing-beats pollinate works and who sprinkles a musical cloud of golden powder to the four winds.
