The scintillating American musicians has been named Guest Director of the Brighton Festival in its 50th year.

laurie anderson

press release:

Brighton Festival is delighted to announce that the Guest Director for 2016 is the pioneering artist and musician Laurie Anderson. Anderson takes the helm in a milestone year for Brighton Festival as in 2016 it marks its 50th year, celebrates its unique, energetic and creative city and reflects on the nature of home.

Renowned for her inventive use of technology – from her 1981 hit O Superman to her appointment as NASA’s first artist-in-residence –Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most daring creative pioneers. Her eclectic, multidisciplinary career has spanned the worlds of art, theatre and experimental music and has seen her create works as a writer, director, visual artist and vocalist. Most recently Anderson has garnered acclaim for her first feature film in almost 30 years – Heart of a Dog – which reflects on the deaths of her husband Lou Reed, her mother, her beloved dog, and such diverse subjects as family memories, surveillance and Buddhist teachings.

A long-time supporter of Brighton Festival, Anderson is well-known and well-loved by the city following successful appearances such asDelusion (BF2011) and All the Animals (BF2015). An inspiration to audiences and artists alike, she has been described by Brighton Festival 2015 Guest Director Ali Smith as: “the performance artist, singer, musician, artist of our lifetime I think – a great, great figure of liberty and liberation of the arts”.

Derek Gleeson has sent us these fine shot from inside the glittering new Harbin opera house in China, where he is conducting the Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra.

harbin opera3harbin2

After the resignation of Myung Whun Chung as music director, under a hate campaign from a sacked CEO, more key personnel are leaving the orchestra before things turn really nasty.

A concertmaster, whom we have been asked not to name, has left the country without signing his contract.

And the orchestra’s artistic advisor, Michael Fine, has submitted his resignation. Michael, a former head of Deutsche Grammophon, secured the Philharmonic a 10-album contract and world tours with Maestro Chung. He was passionately committed to its success and held its musicians in great affection and respect.

All history now. The SPO is losing credit and people day by day.

michael fine chung

It was 49 years ago today that the BBC Symphony Ochestra landed in Warsaw for an East European tour, only to hear from the Russians that one of their two conductors was unacceptable.

Apparently, Gosconcert had assumed that Pierre Boulez was the assistant conductor to Sir John Barbirolli until some sharp-eyed ideologue spotted that he was a dangerous modern composer. The BBC were ordered to replace him.

By this time, they were on a flight to Moscow. On arrival there was a frosty champagne breakfast meeting with Gosconcert in which the BBC executive William Glock and the tour organiser Lilian Hochhauser were told once more to send Boulez home. Glock, Lilian tells me, stood up and said ‘if he goes, so does the orchestra.’

The Soviets backed down. Next, they objected to a Webern piece on the programme. Boulez agreed to replace it with an earlier Webern work, opus 6, which the commissars foolishly assumed would be less offensive.

In Leningrad, Boulez conducted his own piece, Eclats. The audience had never heard anything like it before and demanded an instant encore. ‘It was packed,’ says Lilian, ‘they were hanging off the balconies’.

Various Russian musicians have told me down the years that this was the moment their world changed. Suddenly, they realised there was more to music than the regime would let them believe.

At night in Moscow, Edison Denisov led a small group of composers up the back stairs to Boulez’s room in the Hotel Ukraine. Denisov began teaching his music secretly to select students. He kept in touch with Boulez and, on a return visit to Russia in 1990 (pictured), introduced him to the next generation of composers: Smirnov, Firsova and and more.

It is one of Boulez’s least-known achievements, but he helped to bring down the Soviet Union.

denisov boulez

(c) Dmitri Smirnov

joyce didonato falls

Florence Foster Jenkins is known as “the worst singer of all times”. Yet she sold out Carnegie Hall in 1944 and had a large camp following. It’s too good a story to stay off the big screen.

The Florence Foster Jenkins Story goes into production this month … with Joyce DiDonato (pictured) in the title role. Joyce says:  ‘In all my experience, I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered a singer who has lived more radically for the sheer act of singing, and the uninhibited sharing of that singing, than the legendary Florence Foster Jenkins. Portraying her on film, my intention will not be to create any kind of a caricature, but instead to enter fully into her zany, passionate world where singing was paramount and the audacity of her desire to sing ‘like a bird’ ruled all.’

The film, to be released in November 2016, is produced by the Berlin based 3B-Produktion and distributed by Edition Salzgeber. Additional partners: Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, DFFF (Deutscher Filmförderfonds), ZDF/Arte, SRF, ORF, NRK, SVT, Galerie Kornfeld Berlin and (!) Donna Leon.

The Donna Leon?

A Slipped Disc reader explains how this picture came into being:

I was student at Manhattan School of Music. Boulez came to our school in April 2005 for a week of workshops and concerts. He was working one evening with the orchestra while at the same time our school’s Beach Boy Cover Band was performing in the cafeteria. He came through the lobby while I was talking to my friends who handed out the leis and they offered him one, which he took with a smile, and I asked to take a picture. All told it was 20 seconds, but very memorable.

boula-boulez

Boula-Boulez (c) Joseph Charles

It’s by Tim Page, in the Washington Post:

In later years, Mr. Boulez was by all accounts a gracious, soft-spoken and self-effacing gentleman, much beloved by the musicians he worked with. In his composition and his conducting — which he managed with the brisk efficiency of a bank teller giving change — he was the antithesis of the romanticized stereotype of egoistic, heaven-storming musician.

“Perhaps I can explain it best by an old Chinese story,” he said to his biographer, the late Joan Peyser. “A painter drew a landscape so beautifully that he entered the picture and disappeared. For me, that is the definition of a great work — a landscape painted so well that the artist disappears in it.”

Read full obit here.

boulezisback

About Stravinsky:

About Mahler:

About the fear of new music:

About his own music:
boulez in the kitchen

Dr Mark Berry, a devout Boulezian, has published a swift tribute to the greatest influence on his musical and intellectual life, the French composer Pierre, Boulez, who died today.

Mark writes:

He was, quite simply, the conscience of what some of us are stubbornly old-fashioned enough still to call New Music. That does not mean that he was always right, although he was far more right than wrong, but he knew and he incessantly urged a fearsomely moral, fearsomely humane doctrine – in the very best, Catholic sense – that nothing could be further from the truth than the ‘anything goes’ post-modern morass. Yes, it did matter, as performer, as composer, as listener, as human being, what one did; no, it was not good enough to pander, to ‘make allowances’, and so on. Above all, it mattered to educate; in that sense, he stood in the greatest Western tradition.

Read the full tribute here.

boulez freeman

Boulez by Betty Freeman (c) Lebrecht Music&Arts

In 1945 he declared ‘Stravinsky is dead’. Six years later he pronounced ‘Schoenberg is dead’.

Pierre Boulez, who died yesterday, was a post-war musical revolutionary, determined to slam the door on the past. And that included the radical and modernist composers who were his greatest influences.

He told me in the late 1980s: ‘The history of music proceeds from Bach, through Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, and then via Schoenberg and Webern to Stockhausen and me. All else is irrelevant.’ His certainty was unshakeable, his arrogance almost humble.

He dismissed Mozart as ‘trivial’, Shostakovich as ‘reactionary’.

When he finally became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971-75) and the New York Philharmonic (1971-77) it was, he told me, an act of political entryism: ‘You cannot always stand outside, barking like a dog.’

His revolutionary zeal, however, was tempered with immense personal charm, great humour and an insatiable love of musical gossip. Rehearsal breaks with orchestras would turn into veritable gab-fests. Even the composers whose career he blighted – men like Dutilleux and Ohana – were susceptible to his warmth and grace.

Pierre Boulez was born on March 26, 1925 at Montbrison in the Loire and returned there often for refreshment. He moved to Baden-Baden in the 1960s with a lifelong partner, whom he sometimes referred to as his valet, and it was there that he died. In the 1950s, he led the revolution with Stockhausen from a summer base in Darmstadt.

A serial composer, he became aware of the possibilities of electronic and digital manipulation in the 1970s and founded a Paris research institute for composers, IRCAM. But he came too late to the party to benefit from advanced technology. The last third of his life was – like that of Sibelius (whom he abhorred) – creatively barren.

The major works by which he will be remembered are mostly orchestral: Le Marteau sans maitre, Pli selon Pli, Rituel (pour Maderna) and Répons. Many of his works exists in several, obsessively revised versions.

He had long relationships with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Lucerne Festival and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Pierre was the Prince of Modernism, the last of his kind. A world dies with him.

He was, among other things, such fun.

boula-boulez

In 1945 he declared ‘Stravinsky is dead’. Six years later he pronounced ‘Schoenberg is dead’.

Pierre Boulez, who died yesterday, was a post-war musical revolutionary, determined to slam the door on the past. And that included the radical and modernist composers who were his greatest influences.

He told me in the late 1980s: ‘The history of music proceeds from Bach, through Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, and then via Schoenberg and Webern to Stockhausen and me. All else is irrelevant.’ His certainty was unshakeable, his arrogance almost humble.

He dismissed Mozart as ‘trivial’, Shostakovich as ‘reactionary’.

When he finally became chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971-75) and the New York Philharmonic (1971-77) it was, he told me, an act of political entryism: ‘You cannot always stand outside, barking like a dog.’

His revolutionary zeal, however, was tempered with immense personal charm, great humour and an insatiable love of musical gossip. Rehearsal breaks with orchestras would turn into veritable gab-fests. Even the composers whose career he blighted – men like Dutilleux and Ohana – were susceptible to his warmth and grace.

Pierre Boulez was born on March 26, 1925 at Montbrison in the Loire and returned there often for refreshment. He moved to Baden-Baden in the 1960s with a lifelong partner, whom he sometimes referred to as his valet, and it was there that he died. In the 1950s, he led the revolution with Stockhausen from a summer base in Darmstadt.

A serial composer, he became aware of the possibilities of electronic and digital manipulation in the 1970s and founded a Paris research institute for composers, IRCAM. But he came too late to the party to benefit from advanced technology. The last third of his life was – like that of Sibelius (whom he abhorred) – creatively barren.

The major works by which he will be remembered are mostly orchestral: Le Marteau sans maitre, Pli selon Pli, Rituel (pour Maderna) and Répons. Many of his works exists in several, obsessively revised versions.

He had long relationships with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Lucerne Festival and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Pierre was the Prince of Modernism, the last of his kind. A world dies with him.

He was, among other things, such fun.

boula-boulez

The death has been announced of Pierre Boulez, the most influential French musician of his time and also the most divisive.

He was 90 and has been bedridden for almost two years.

More follows. First assessment here.

pierre-boulez-540x304

‘The conscience of new music’ here.

Boulez talks here.

An exemplary obituary here.