At the opening of the Los Angeles Philharmonic residency at London’s Barbican Centre tonight, Gustavo Dudamel turned to the audience and said:
‘The universal language of music sends a message of beauty, love and peace.’
The music director of English National Opera has been threatening to resign all season, sometimes on a weekly basis. It is not easy being in charge at a company that is being progressively shrunk by Arts Council diktat, operating without an artistic director who might sensibly mitigate or redirect the cuts.
Those close to Mark urged him consistently not to resign. He had damaged his career once before by walking out of La Monnaie in Brussels.
What’s more, ENO seemed to be resolving its problems with chorus and orchestra and setting out its future with some gusto. Only last week, the chorus declared itself content with the new deal.
The problem, though, was that in a diminished future there is less for a music director to do, at music director level. The productions that were offered to Mark were uninteresting revivals. One was a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. He was unhappy with the prospects and he did not care who knew. There may have been additional causes, but he’s not saying.
So he jumped.
With bad timing.
On a day when all news is overshadowed by the Brussels atrocity.
He had been in the job for less than a year.
UPDATE: What next at ENO?
ENO’s statement:
We regret to confirm the announcement that Mark Wigglesworth feels unable to continue as Music Director despite the best efforts of the Board and Senior Management to persuade him to remain. We are disappointed that he will not stay to lead the artistic forces through this particularly challenging period. Mark has agreed that he will continue as Music Director until the end of the season and will then return as a Visiting Conductor in the 2016/17 season. Mark is a world class conductor and we look forward to welcoming him back as guest conductor in future years.
Mark’s PR:
Mark Wigglesworth has today resigned as Music Director of English National Opera, effective from the end of the current season. He will continue to honour his contractual commitments as a conductor and looks forward to continuing to work with the wonderful musicians of ENO.
Ends
Mark Wigglesworth is not commenting further at this time.
Demain, mercredi 23 mars, la Monnaie sera fermée. Toutes les activités sont annulées et les employés sont priés de rester chez eux.
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Morgen, woensdag 23 maart is de Munt gesloten. Alle activiteiten zijn afgelast en de werknemers worden verzocht thuis te blijven.
The pianist George Li, silver medallist in last summer’s Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, has been named among five winners of the annual Avery Fisher career grants in New York.
The others are violinists Alexi Kenney, Tessa Lark and Sean Lee and the cellist Jay Campbell.
Each receives $25,000.
The awards, due to be announced later today, are leaking all over social media.
The influential QS university rankings are out and, in the performing arts category, Juilliard comes top again.
Second is Vienna, third the Royal College of Music in London.
QS is UK based and, some would argue, UK biased.
To rank the elite Curtis Institute alongside London’s Royal Holloway is, well, counter-intuitive.
As for placing the Tchaikovsky Institute and the Franz Liszt Academy in the low 20s, that’s simply perverse.
Like the deluded election pollsters, QS needs to rethink its sampling model.
Full list here.
Chief exec Cressida Pollock has marked her first year in the job with an article on ENO’s unique selling points:
Many of the people who make up our audience today are not “opera buffs”, and nor should they be. Our audience members have so many choices in what to do with an evening – to watch a series on Netflix, to meet friends for dinner, to go to a late night at a museum, or to one of the hundreds of live performances on each night in this city. We should not take their time, or money, for granted. It is our task to persuade them of three things – that opera is the most exciting art form of all, that seeing it live is an incomparable experience and that ENO is where they should see it.
And we need to persuade them of this in the midst of a cacophony of competing information. Opera is not expensive. Opera is not posh. Opera can speak to people in a way no other art form can. Challenging these prejudices is what makes our future at ENO so exciting. We have the opportunity to have an open conversation about how we can persuade audiences of the necessity of experiencing opera – its excitement, its relevance and its affordability.
Read on here.
The worst about this morning’s bombs in Brussels is the absence of shock.
A suicide bomber shouting a verse from the Quran blew himself up at the airport, killing many innocent people, at least a dozen, perhaps more.
Others planted bombs in the Metro during rush hour, causing further deaths.
And we are not shocked.
We go about our business, checking devices for updates.
After Paris, we tell ourselves, there were bound to be more coordinated attacks. Only a matter of time and place.
We pray for no-news.
We barely spare breath to condemn.
This is the new normal.
How we adjust to it is the test of our humanity.
The Dresden Staatskapelle and its chief conductor have renewed for three more years, taking them to 2020 and beating off exploratory overtures by the Berlin Philharmonic.
Dresden have been in residence since 2012, when the Berlin Phil quit for Baden-Baden.
The Beethovenhaus in Bonn has bought a letter that the composer wrote in 1813.
It’s addressed to Maria Eleonora Fuchs, a countess, and it mentions a severe personal crisis. This is unusually strong language for Beethoven. He is broke, has lost his patron and is suffering from ‘a torn heart’.
He is 43 years old and without prospects or means of sustenance.
It is not clear if the letter was ever delivered.
Police in Benbrook, Texas, last night brought charges of capital murder against Sofya Tsygankova, a Russian pianist, in connection with the deaths of her two children, Nika and Michela.
The children, aged five and one, were found dead by their father, Vadym Kholodenko, winner of the 2013 Cliburn Competition gold medal, when he came to visit last Thursday. The cause of death has not been disclosed, but there was no physical injury. Sofya was in the house, covered in stab wounds.
She is presently in hospital in Forth Worth. ‘We have probable cause, reason to believe, that she committed the homicides,’ said Benbrook police commander David Babcock.
The couple were going through a contested divorce.
The pianist Peter Takács, a professor at Oberlin, will undergo hand surgery in Cleveland today for an injury suffered while he was playing at Carnegie Hall. The audience was unaware. Here’s what Peter tells Slipped Disc:
I played a 3-concert series at Weill Hall entitled “The Beethoven Experience “.
After the second one, on November 13, the day of the Paris attacks, I tripped and fell on both my hands. It was clear that something was wrong with my right hand.
I proceeded to practice for my third concert, which took place on January 14, 2016, in spite of pain and inflammation on the radial side.
Later, a CT scan showed a fracture of the “hook of Hamate”. So, indeed, I played in Carnegie Hall with a broken bone in my right hand!
When athletes do this, we call them heroes.
