They’ve just announced next season, built around what appears to be the Chicago stage premiere of Berlioz’s Les Troyens.
Larry Johnson has full details here on Chicago Classical Review.
Unforgettable.
RIP.
Ryan Taylor has been named president and general director of Minnesota Opera, starting in May. He comes from Opera Arizona.
It’s the bow-tie that clinched it.
Press release here.
photo (c) Marion Kalter/Lebrecht Music&Arts
The memorial service for Pierre Boulez in Paris was attended this afternoon by the French prime minister Manuel Valls, the culture minister Fleur Pellerin and others from across the political spectrum.
The musician Daniel Barenboim spoke of Boulez’s legacy as a man of the future interested in many things beyond music.
photo: Suzanne Giroud
Laurent Bayle, president of the Philharmonie de Paris, recalled Boulez’ creative achievements including Boulez’s lifelong disdain for “les invalides de la nostalgie”. The most moving and evocative homage was delivered ex tempore by the architect Renzo Piano, recalling Boulez’s lifelong search for beauty: “Beauty will save the world.”
The Royal Liverpool Phil has appointed five new players:
Joint Assistant Leaders Andrew Harvey (b.1985) and Mihkel Kerem (b.1981, Estonia);
first violin section player, Nuno Carapina (b.1981, Portugal),
principal clarinet Benjamin Mellefont (b. 1993 Australia),
and principal piccolo Sameeta Gahir (b. 1989).
The moment in Truly, Madly Deeply when Alan Rickman, whose death was announced today, comes back from the beyond. Juliet Stevenson is his ‘widow’. No-one has ever watched this scene with dry eyes.
One of eight participants in a Channel 5 documentary on alcoholism, Rachael Lander talked about furtive drinking on stage, in orchestra dressing rooms, everywhere ‘to take the edge off’.
You can watch the programme here.
Rachael tweets that she is ‘overwhelmed by lovely messages from people watching’.
‘I was playing in professional orchestras drunk. Drunkety drunk,’ she admits.
Cello, she now says, ‘is the best addiction’.
The auto manufacturer has filmed its new campaign around the inner contemplations of conductor Marie Rosenmir as she drives to work.
Marie, 42, won the Swedish conductor’s prize in 2006. She works in the Inversion collective of six women conductors and composer. She is about to get more media exposure than any woman conductor alive. This is a b-i-g motor industry campaign.
Photo: Jan-Olav Wedin
The ovations were so long and loud last night at the end of the second act of Rigoletto that Leo Nucci and Nadine Serra repeated the cabaletta, in front of the curtain.
This was the first Verdi encore sung at Scala since Riccardo Muti repeated Va, pensiero in Nabucco in 1988 (source: La Scala archives). The prohibition on repeats in Verdi was instituted by Arturo Toscanini, back in the mists of time.
From a Paris correspondent:
“David Bowie est un fantôme.” These were the words that opened the solemn voiceover of a FranceTV documentary last Wednesday, days before the rock star’s death. The programme, titled Bowie, l’Homme Cent Visages ou Le Fantome d’Hérouville (The Man with 100 Faces or The Ghost of d’Hérouville), explores a curious idyll in his prolific career, two stints in an historic, sprawling manor in the French village of Hérouville, 45km outside of Paris.
The composer Michel Magne bought Château d’Hérouville in 1962, and transformed it into Strawberry Studios.
The rooms where Frederic Chopin and George Sand once made love were rocked by the sounds of Pink Floyd, Iggy Pop, Grateful Dead and Jethro Tull. Elton John named his 1972 album Honky Château after the place where it was recorded.
Bowie recorded his Pin Ups cover album in the Château d’Hérouville in 1973, sampling Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.3 (at 4:00) and (briefly) Strauss Also Sprach Zarathustra in the song ‘See Emily Play’.
Bowie at Honky Chateau, 1973
He returned in 1976, a recovering cocaine addict, for Low – the first in a Berlin trilogy, actually recorded in France – a masterpiece and his most advanced album up until that point.
In the TV documentary, Dominique Blanc-Francard, a sound engineer working on the 1973 sessions, said: ‘When he looked you in the eyes it was like he was piercing you with lasers, it felt as though someone was rummaging around in your thoughts…Out of all the clients we had at the chateau, he was the coolest. For that time, he had such a bizarre look, really like an alien. One couldn’t imagine him being human.’
Bowie complained about the diet of rabbit and potatoes. More troubling, according to his collaborators on Low Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, were visitations by a ghost, and a bedroom Bowie refused to sleep in, believing it was haunted. By Chopin, perhaps?
Strawberry Studios shut down in 1985, a year after Michel Magne’s suicide. The chateau remained derelict and was finally put up for sale in 2013 with an asking price of €1.29m (£1.12m). A group of sound engineers has taken up the challenge of restoring the honky chateau to its former glory, and are seeking investors. (See below for contested claim).
They hope to reopen Honky Chateau this year. The piano used by Elton John on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is still there, rotting away in the attic.
A deadline is reached at midnight in the standoff between the musicians and management of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut. If the players refuse to accept further cuts, the orchestra will be shut down.
Hartford is a nice place in a fairly wealthy region. But it seems the locals have lost the will to sustain a concert life.
pictured: music director Carolyn Kuan
The players, who are employed on a per-session basis, have issued this statement:
The musicians of the HSO are salaried professionals. We are here to work. We have offered to forgo wage increases in order to keep the product competitive. We have done our part. It’s now time for management to stop misrepresenting a situation that it has created.
It is management’s job to manage, not dismantle, our organization. It is management’s job to promote and sell its product, which is live orchestral music performed by the musicians of the HSO. Cutting the product is not an option. In order to fulfill its mission, the HSO needs to grow its product. Creating a scarcity not only diminishes the product itself, but deprives the community of that which it values. An orchestra must work together on a regular basis to achieve and maintain the level of excellence that the public expects and deserves.
Here is the HSO’s stated mission:
“We believe passionately in the performance of live symphonic music and its value in the community. To that end, the mission of the HSO is to perform live orchestral music of the highest quality forever expanding audiences, and to increase through its educational programs the understanding and enjoyment of that music by residents in Connecticut.”
Clearly the HSO has forgotten this mission. Look at its unprecedented pullback of performances and educational programs. Last year saw the cancellation of both a chamber orchestra series and the well established Jazz and Strings series. More importantly, the HSO’s in-school educational programming has diminished to the point of near nonexistence. Core musicians once went into the schools over 25 times per year. This season, under the new HSO management, most of the musicians have yet to perform in a single school. These programs are a key component of the HSO’s stated mission. They are also key to justifying its status as a not for profit entity.
The Hagen Quartet have cancelled their Berlin Philharmonie concert due to illness. Viola player Veronika Hagen is undergoing surgery for a shoulder injury, according to a Berlin press release. We wish her well.
The concert is rescheduled for May.
The Artemis Quartet have also cancelled their Berlin date this month while they reach a decision on a new viola player to replace the late Friedemann Weigle.