A Prussian Requiem by John Powell received its premiere at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday night, part of a First World War commemoration concert.

The British composer, who lives and works in Hollywood, notified the Philharmonia Orchestra that he was unable to attend. His wife, photographer Melinda Lerner, was seriously ill.

The performance of the oratorio, conducted by José Serebrier, was moving and impressive. You can hear extracts here.

Next morning, performers were told that Melinda had died not long after the final notes. She was 56.

Our sympathies to John, and to their son.

photo by Melinda Lerner

UPDATE: John has posted the following beautiful words on his public Facebook site:

If you were wondering why I wasn’t at the premiere in London on Sunday, I’m afraid it was because my wife, Melinda, who I’ve loved since the moment I saw her at a gig in the Bull and Gate, London on January 16th 1987, was dying in Los Angeles as I sat beside her. A few hours after the last notes of the music faded on the South Bank, so did she.

For the 29 years, 6 weeks and one day she was mine, she kept me honest…. she never was very impressed with anything I wrote or won, but she was willing to put up with me trying.

Laughed at my jokes when they amused her, let me make up total rubbish to try to trick her into believing stuff… that can really piss some people off… not Melinda….. and she was my muse.

Everything I wrote before I met Melinda was probably just a foreshadowing… my heart hoping to meet someone like her. Everything since is bursting with her; her eyes, her hair, her body, her soul…. By osmosis, I couldn’t help but be a better composer if I were near her.

And thus I stayed close, so we could complete our journey together.
Melinda Lerner 1959-2016

We hear the Montreal Symphony recently held auditions for three vacant viola positions. Very few candidates turned up and some Montreal players fear the orchestra is getting a reputation for not hiring after auditions.

Candidates for to vast trouble and expense to audition and then fly home broke and disillusioned.

Of course there may be other reasons not many turned up for the Montreal auditions – the weather, for instance, or the bilinguality, or some viola thing.

But the incident has led us to a site that reports orchestras which call auditions and fail to hire.

Check it out here.

Houston Grand Opera (HGO) has chosen three new singers and one pianist/coach for the 2016–17 HGO Studio.

They are Yelena Dyachek, soprano (pictured); Zoie Reams, mezzo-soprano; Sol Jin, baritone, and Peter Walsh, pianist/coach.

Well done, them.

The trainees were drawn from an international mailbag of 475 applications. Of these, some 275 were heard in auditions in Houston, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles.

Just four got through.

A success chance of below one percent.

And it came to pass that Carnegie Hall brought forth the names of the children of America who will play in the next cycle of its National Youth Orchestra, known as NYO-USA.

And these are they:

While the media mogul was getting remarried at the weekend, his last wife Wendy Deng was being walked around the Paris fashion shows by a male model who happens to be a classical violinist.

Very chummy. Lots of pictures in the Mail.

We’ve shown him once before, with Miley Cyrus.

Two years after the death of the most revolutionary power in European opera, Camille de Rijck has published a candid, moving interview with Gerard Mortier’s life-partner, the conductor Sylvain Cambreling.

On his deathbed, it is revealed, Gerard gathered around his closest friends to read from Goethe.

The paramount European.

Read here (en francais). We may never see his like again.

The Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev, a far-right member of the ruling party, has let it be known she will be inflicting a punitive cut on Israel Opera for not reflecting her nationalist vision for the country.

She’s also planning a hit on the national theatre, Habimah, for representing a leftist agenda.

Israel Opera receives NIS 18 million ($4.6m) in state subsidy. It will be damaged but not disabled by the cut.

Carlisle Floyd premiered his first opera in 1949 and achieved lasting success six years later with his third, Susannah, which was restaged by New York City Opera and taken to Europe.

This weekend, Carlisle was present at the world premiere at Houston Grand Opera of his 12th opera, Prince of Players, about the cross-dressing 17th century English actor, Edward Kynaston.

First review here from our pals at the Classical Review.

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week on scena.org, MusicalToronto and OpenLettersMonthly:

Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation of Mahler’s first symphony is beautifully played by Munich’s (some say Germany’s) best orchestra and thoughtfully structured by an impressive guest conductor. I think I am safe in saying that it is conceptually different from any of the 120 Mahler Firsts on record, stretching all the way back to Dimitri Mitropolous’s towering Minnesota performance for Columbia in April 1940. And that’s no small distinction in a much-repeated piece.

So where is Yannick going with it? Read on here or here.

This summer’s Montepellier Festival features an infrequent outing for Mascagni’s dubious opera, Iris, in which the heroine has a Freudian dream of getting molested by an octopus and ultimately gets stripped naked on a public balcony by a brothel keeper.

Not a happy ending.

Sonya Yoncheva stars.