From the You-Couldn’t Make-It-Up Department:
MARIETTA, Georgia—John Brandt, music director of St. Joseph Church in Marietta, didn’t have to look far for a kidney donor. Ann Burkly, a member of his choir, readily volunteered.
Read more here.
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The actor Sasha Baron Cohen and his wife Isla Fisher are giving $500,000 to Save the Children to pay for measles vaccinations for children in northern Syria. A further half-million will go to the International Rescue Committee to help refugees in Syria and elsewhere, particularly women and children, with health care, shelter and sanitation.
Sascha is renowned for his Ali G and Borat characters.
Agency report here.
Under the orchestra’s new freedom of information policy, we popped the question.
Guess what? We got a straight answer: 7 are scheduled to perform, out of 13.
Click here for more.
He was the most trusted of Mahler’s conductor assistants, closer to the composer at first than the young Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Alexander Zemlinsky.
What attracted Mahler to Oscar Fried was, aside from his personal devotion, his aspiration to be a great composer.
Fried went on to pursue a successful career as a conductor, making the first recording of Mahler’s second symphony in 1924 and conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the second performance of Mahler’s ninth.
The first western conductor to work in Soviet Russia, he sought asylum there after Hitler came to power and died in Moscow, of uncertain causes, in 1941.
Fried’s greatest success as a composer came in 1903 with Das trunkene Lied (The Drunken Song) for chorus and orchestra, based on texts by Friedrich Nietzsche with which Mahler was closely familiar. After 1914, the work sank into oblivion.
It was revived earlier this year by a German youth orchestra and will be broadcast by Deutschland Radio on Wednesday at 8 pm. Details here.
Fried (standing left, in 1928) with Ravel at the piano
Prince Mohammed University, one of the largest private colleges in Saudi Arabia, has suspended a foreign teacher after he played the violin in front of a class of young women. The matter came to light when a student posted a video of the performance on Youtube.
Dr Eisa Al Ansari, the rector, said the action was contrary to tradition and Ministry of Education regulations.
Saudi Arabia is an elightened member of the United Nations council for human rights.
It has been a year of steady growth on the world’s most visited classical site. There have been no earth-shattering events and few spectacular exclusives.
We are heading for 14 million visitors through the course of the calendar year. And we’re examining the most-read stories of the year, a piece of analysis that throws up more than a few surprises.
Who do you think got the most hits in 2015?
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Work finished last weekend on the new opera house in Harbin, in the northeast of China.
It’s an automatic icon.
Breathtaking in conception and, unlike Sydney, unimpaired by political meddling.
Want to see more? Move your clicking finger here.
Photography by Adam Mørk and Hufton + Crow.
Hilde Zadek is the last survivor of Vienna’s Golden Age post-War cast. A Hitler refugee who fled as a child to Palestine and returned to a hotbed of unreformed Nazis who disparaged her voice, her looks and her lifestyle choices, Hilde at 98 is totally free of rancour.
Asked for her advice to singers today, Hilde says:
‘Ich denke, dass jeder Mensch – es sei denn, er ist krank – zu einer positiven Lebenseinstellung gelangen kann. Ich musste mich in meiner Jugend einer schwierigen Realität stellen. Aber das gab mir letzten Endes auch Kraft.
I think everyone, unless they’re sick, can find a positive otlook. As a very young person I had to deal with a tough reality. But that, in the end, gave me strength.’
Long may she last.
with Christa Ludwig, 2014
