Four baritones, two sopranos, a mezzo, a tenor and a counter-tenor are the last singers standing from 1,500 hopefuls who applied from across the US and Canada for the coveted Met auditions.

The final is a ticketed event hosted by Deborah Voigt next Sunday.

Details here.

Pau Casals (1876-1973) restored Bach to cello repertoire, fought Fascism, became symbol of freedom

Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), known as ‘Slava’ for glory, fought Soviet oppression, premiered 100 new works, brought joy to the world.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (b. 1925), survivor of the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra, a living witness for humanity.

The cellist of Sarajevo, Baghdad, Brussels…. someone will always play a cello in all the worst places.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1929-2016), ‘an interpreter who changed our world more than any other over the past 50 years.’ 

Salzburg is flying a black flag over the Festspielhaus today. ORF changed its programming. France Musique is playing only Harnoncourt all day. And tributes are pouring in for a man who changed the musical world.

From the Vienna Symphony Orchestra:

A great loss for the musical world: Nikolaus Harnoncourt died yesterday. He was cellist in our orchestra under Herbert von Karajan and Wolfgang Sawallisch from 1952-69. As a conductor he led us in 91 concerts and performances between 1983 and 2008. We are deeply grateful for sharing these and innumerable magical moments and experiences more with him. He will never be forgotten!

From the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra:

With great sorrow, we received the news of the death of our Honorary Member Nikolaus Harnoncourt while traveling from Bogotá to São Paolo. The Vienna Philharmonic takes a deep bow before one of the greats. After Nikolaus Harnoncourt, nothing is the same as it was before. We will miss his unique perspectives, his out of the box thinking and the manner in which he plumbed the depths of the human soul. Under his baton, we experienced many compositions, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Alban Berg, in a completely new light. His groundbreaking interpretations pushed us to our limits and beyond. They affronted us, they unsettled us – and they convinced us. We extend our deepest sympathy to his family. Without his wife, Alice, the cosmos of Harnoncourt would not have been possible.

photos (c) Marion Kalter/Lebrecht Music&Arts

Gidon Kremer writes: ‘Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with whom I shared many intimate moments in music by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms and – especially – Alban Berg, was always the most generous partner whose presence inspired me to focus on the deepest substance of the scores we performed and recorded together.

Lang Lang writes: ‘I’m in shock today over the news of Maestro Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s passing. He was such a special, genuine, sincere, and talented musician and human being. He taught me so much and opened up musical doors for me – especially with Bach, Beethoven, and of course, Mozart.’

Franz Welser-Möst:  ‘An interpreter who changed our world more than any other over the past 50 years.’

Thomas Hampson: An immense loss for the musical world: Nikolaus Harnoncourt … was more than a conductor, a cellist, an “early music specialist”. Nikolaus Harnoncourt was one of the most enlightened souls I have ever met and had extraordinary influence on generations of musicians. His unbridled curiosity, relentless search for the truth of the matter, his egoless risk of the moment, founded in that staggering renaissance knowledge of music as the language of life’s limitless questioning, have set him apart. Nikolaus Harnoncourt was a pioneer, a rebel and a deeply profound soul. For all of these reasons and so many more, Nikolaus fundamentally shaped my own re-creative process and how I listen and think about music.

Thank you, dear Nikolaus, mentor and colleague, for sharing your light, your passion and your fire with all of us so generously and thank you for a beautiful personal friendship that started more than 30 years ago. We will miss you beyond description, but your legacy will live forever in all those you touched. Mine and Andrea’s deepest condolences and love abide with your precious wife Alice and of course to your entire family.
Nikolaus once said that “the Arts are the umbilical cord to the Divine”. Surely he now rests in everlasting Divine Peace.

From the Salzburg Festival press release (a conflation of equivocations):

Harnoncourt’s career in Salzburg … From 1972 he taught performance practice and historical instruments as a professor at the Mozarteum. His first performance as a conductor in Austria took place thanks to the Mozart Week, where he conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam in 1980. The Mozarteum Foundation was also responsible for his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic. After all, Herbert von Karajan did not want him to appear at the Festival during his lifetime. Karajan and Harnoncourt – those were separate musical worlds. However, they did have one thing in common: they were both after truthfulness in music. Both remained seekers throughout their entire lifetimes, but their searches took radically different paths.

In 1992 the time had finally come, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt first stepped onto the conductor’s podium at the Salzburg Festival.

From the German-based violinist Noé Inui:

photo: Yannis Gutmann

Here is a nice story from yesterday.

I was invited to perform the second violin concerto of Mozart in D Major with the Kosice Philarmonie in the south of Hannover (Bad Münder). The concert was planned for 7:30pm. My one and only rehearsal was at 6pm.

The conductor arrives and asks the tempo of the third movement. (I thought that for the KV 211 the 1st mvt’s tempo should be more relevant.) Anyway I decide to sing my tempo and the conductor looks at me with round eyes…..

A rare change for the better. Richard Harwood tells us:

Last night, I was told by a member of cabin crew that the previously unique and crazy BA method of securing cellos is now a thing permanently left in the past. No ropes and none of the recent multiple belt methods. Even more importantly, nobody ever coming on board to tie it in for you! The cabin attendant showed me the document that was released in December 2015 to all cabin staff detailing the new policy which came in to effect on January 1st, 2016.

“With effect from 1st January 2016 a new procedure will be introduced to be used when securing a cello in a seat. This procedure has been developed in conjunction with our ground teams and is based on customer feedback.”

“Cellos (and similar instruments) will be secured by the owning passenger. The passenger will receive securing information as part of the booking process. The procedure requires the use of a single extension seatbelt. The images show correct positioning. The seat utilised must always be a window seat (excluding emergency exit rows) with the passenger occupying the adjacent seat. The seat must be in an upright position with armrests down, ensure seat cushion is stood upright, behind the main body of the cello. The cello head must NOT be resting on the floor. Assistance should be offered if required.”

Success!!

Here are BA’s instructions for all classes of travel.

http://www.britishairways.com/…/sporting-…/onboard-cello.pdf

no more this

It’s not often that a record cover captures intimacy between soloist and conductor, but this one does.

So we asked Gidon Kremer, who’s in Japan, for his impressions of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Here’s what Gidon writes:

It is hard to sum up in a few lines a Master from whom I learned so much.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with whom I shared many intimate moments in music by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms and – especially – Alban Berg, was always the most generous partner whose presence inspired me to focus on the deepest substance of the scores we performed and recorded together.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt was and will no doubt go down in history as one of those rare personalities with a distinct signature.

In a music world full of “events”,”superstars”, imitations, meaningless brilliancy and (often pretentious) “knowledge”, Harnoncourt’s passion and commitment to true values were unique.

An artist with a limitless fantasy, he dared to challenge and encourage,to search and to risk. The deeper meaning behind the performed notes was much more important to him than any perfection so many of us strive for. Communicating with him was a process of permanently learning and “opening up”.

I was one of so many musicians who had the privilege to experience Nikolaus’s generosity and fire. His genius as his genuine friendship will always be a compass to direct me further…

Thank you, dearest Nikolaus for the trace you left in my life.

My deepest condolences go to your “guardian angel” Alice and to the whole Harnoncourt family.

Joel Cohen of the Boston Camerata wrote perceptively about Nikolaus Harnoncourt in 1985, at a time when he was little appreciated in the United States. We reprint his essay with permission:

It took a while for the first tentative plantings of [early-instrument] renewal to bear fruit. Arnold Dolmetsch was playing Baroque violin in the [nineteen] twenties, but the audible results were probably less than completely satisfying in terms of finish and accuracy. In this country, the courageous Sol Babitz experimented with Baroque violin techniques back in the fifties; his ideas seemed outlandish to many at the time, but most of his positions have since been vindicated. Still, it was not until 1960 or thereabouts that the world was to hear a fully professional chamber orchestra that used period instruments and period techniques as a matter of course.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt (b. 1929) began his career as an orchestral cellist; his wife, Alice, trained with the best teachers of modern violin. And they brought to their ensemble, the Vienna-based Concentus Musicus, a strong and sure musical sense to supplement their wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. The Concentus is mainly known nowadays for its work in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music — but in the early years, the group performed and recorded extensively the Medieval and Renaissance repertoire as well. From the very start, the public knew it had discovered something very special. Here was an ensemble that actively sought out the unusual and the untried.

Beyond that, here were musicians capable of playing the works they had turned up with a high degree of polish and panache. A page had been turned: early repertoire on authentic instruments did not have to be performed with inadequate technique.

The core group of Concentus played all kinds of historical stringed instruments: violas da gamba and vielles figured prominently in the ensemble’s early history. The Concentus’s initial success came in 1961, with a recording of Bach’s concertos played on period instruments; from then on Baroque music was the ensemble’s main preoccupation. The instrumental timbres of those Bach recordings from the sixties now seem, a generation later, surprisingly Romantic and “Viennese”; but at the time they appeared radically, violently different.

It was obvious from the beginning that these musicians had some strong ideas about how to proceed. The Baroque strings and winds had their characteristic sounds; equally controversial was Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s approach to rhythmic articulation. The skilled performer of Romantic music learns to make a smooth line and to avoid strong, systematic acccents. Harnoncourt pointed out that the older way of doing things made an important aural distinction among the beats in a measure. In a cycle of four beats, “one” was the most important, “three” was next in intensity, “two” was a weak beat, and “four” was the weakest of all. These are rules that children learn as beginning music students, and that they spend years trying to unlearn at conservatory. But for some parts at least of the Baroque repertoire, they were important precepts. In the seventeenth-century music of Jean-Baptiste Lully, for example, you are supposed to hear the beginning of each measure; careful descriptions from the period leave little doubt on that score. At Versailles all the “vingt-quatre violons” played with the same accented bowstroke as each new measure came around, and Lully himself beat time on the floor with a stick. The poor man eventually punctured his foot in an excess of directorial enthusiasm; he died of the ensuing infection. None of our “authentic” Baroque ensembles has yet tried to replicate this particular detail of French performance practice.

But several of them have done their best to recreate the rhythmic feeling (or feelings) of that period — and here was Concentus, heretically proposing its solution. Thump! went the downbeats, as regular and inevitable as the judge’s gavel in small claims court. Perhaps Harnoncourt, in his commendable desire to unglue one beat from the next, went a little too far. Some of the Concentus performances seemed too dogmatic, too systematized, to make entire musical sense.

Some, but not all. For Harnoncourt, his wife, and his associates are extraordinary and sensitive players. On a good day, they make the music leap and spin. Bass lines are superbly clean and full of life (cellist Harnoncourt is an excellent continuist); inner voices are finely delineated; and the melodic parts are chiseled and shaped in a way that blends careful historical research with a healthy measure of Central European cantabile.

By showing what first-rate orchestral players could do on early instruments, Concentus helped destroy the myth that one performed older music because of some underlying personal handicap or weakness. (The core group of Concentus had been recruited from musicians of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra; for years, you could glimpse Harnoncourt in that cello section during the traditional New Year’s Day telecast of Strauss waltzes.) The playing of violinist Alice Harnoncourt, oboist Jiirg Schaeftlein, and flautist Leopold Stasny is exemplary in polish and fluency. When bassoonist Milan Turkovic unleashes the solo part of a Vivaldi concerto, the concert space overflows with bass-clef burbles, like the water-filled cellar in the famous Disney cartoon of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. To be sure, critics complained at the beginning that Concentus couldn’t play the instruments. The critics were talking through their hats; this is a very high-powered group.

Harnoncourt and Concentus began an extensive recording program of major works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Monteverdi operas, Bach’s major instrumental and choral works (including a still-incomplete series of all the cantatas). Much of this large-scale repertoire centered around the human voice, and here Harnoncourt’s instincts were less sure than when he was dealing with instruments. Some of the soloists he engaged for his operatic productions were too attached to their plummy wobbles to blend well with the orchestral sonorities. Nonetheless, some of the finest moments in Concentus’s discography involve the collaboration of singers and players. The wonderful taste and control of Max von Egmond, the magnificent text declamation of Kurt Equiluz, add immeasurably to Concentus’s performances of Bach passions and Bach cantatas.

Isolation from peers is a problem in the early music world. Some specialist performers even take pride in the distance they put between themselves and every other kind of musical activity. Harnoncourt has gone far in the other direction. His desire to touch many people is evident in the “standard” repertoire he frequently directs. That same urge has perhaps inspired his ambitious, large-scale modern productions of Baroque opera. Stage director Jean-Pierre Ponelle is no historian of theater, and the Monteverdi operas he undertook with Harnoncourt at Zurich in the seventies contained many frankly contemporary elements. The film they made of Monteverdi’s Orfeo has both weaknesses and strengths: the cliché-ridden crowd movements and the sometimes unstylish singing are offset by an unforgettable, chilling decor for the underworld scenes, and the vital, incisive playing from the orchestra pit (which contained both Concentus regulars and members of the Zurich opera orchestra).

Missionary-like, Harnoncourt has tried to bring his insights into early music performance to the modern orchestral milieu. Some of the musicians in the Zurich productions of Monteverdi were modern-instrument players retrained for the occasion. And recently, Harnoncourt has been guest-conducting some large modern orchestras (such as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw) in performances of Mozart. Unlike Frans Brüggen, whose Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century is made up of early music specialists, Harnoncourt has decided to expend considerable time and effort with “modern” players. And he has in fact managed to obtain some extraordinary results. The Mozart performances of Harnoncourt’s “modern orchestra” period have been among the most convincing of his entire career. The perfumed aesthete we often seem to perceive in conventional Mozart playing has been replaced by someone else! Harnoncourt’s Mozart is dynamic, vigorous, a man full of tempestuous energy, a creature of the theater from first to last. We have caught a glimpse of Mozart the Romantic, thanks, ironically, to someone who came from much earlier music. It took the unhackneyed perspective of an early music “outsider” to make us hear the strength and modernity of music sometimes perceived to be frilly, decorative, and ancien régime.

The sheer vastness of Harnoncourt’s life project, the size of Concentus’s discography, the continuing evolution of these musicians — all these things make it hard to summarize their contribution in a few lines of text. One can, of course, quibble with some of their decisions and stylistic options. One can always oppose another sensibility, another way of doing things, to theirs — even within the framework of the historicist, early instrument approach. What lies by now beyond challenge is the permanent change these people have brought about in our musical life. The early music world has always had to defend itself against accusations of amateurism. Frequently, there was some truth in the charges: many performers at the movement’s inception had nimbler intellects than they did fingers.

Concentus set new standards for professional performance on old instruments. They stood, and stand, as a living rebuke to those who proclaimed it impossible to play early instruments really well. They gave us living actualizations of many masterpieces — works whose true content had been partially obscured by misunderstanding and lazy habit.

And they gave a still younger generation a model to emulate, a standard to surpass if possible. Harnoncourt was and is a risk-taker. When some current specialist magazines accuse him of “overinter-pretation,” they are throwing pebbles at a giant. In this decade, one current of early music fashion encourages presenting a seamless, nearly decisionless surface of sound to the listening public. Harnoncourt’s way has been the more daring and, I think, the more profoundly “authentic.” His performances have a center, a strong point of view. We will be arguing for years over their specifics, but not about their underlying spirit.

(c) Joel Cohen

#Harnoncourt#ConcentusmusicusWien #earlymusic#baroquemusic #baroquecello #bach #styriarte

Two years ago, the Chinese pianist went to the source for Mozart.

Team Lang Lang tweeted today: I’m in shock today over Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s passing. He was such a special, genuine, sincere, and talented musician & human being.

The Austrian period performer and ensemble leader, who died on March 5, aged 86, was one of the gentlest souls ever to achieve success in the combative art of classical music.

A descendant of French Huguenots on one side and of Austrian emperors on the other, he experienced the Hitler hysteria in his hometown, Graz, and decided early on to beware of the dangers of charisma.

Defying family expectations of a career in Church or the law, he studied music and played cello in the 1950s in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, conducted at the time by Herbert von Karajan but also by such old-world types as Bruno Walter, Josef Krips and Otto Klemperer.

A concern for art and heritage led him to rescue ancient instruments from Viennese junk-stores. He discovered they had to be played differently from the ones he used in the orchestra. His wife Alice shared his enthusiasm. Their friendship with the Gustav Leonhardts in Holland led to the formation of the Concentus Musicus Wien. Together, they recorded the complete Bach cantatas.

The rest is music history.

Harnoncourt was, in my acquaintance with him, a family-oriented, religious, tolerant, mildly spiritual man who struggled to understand why men – and musicians – could be so mean.

He spent half an hour with me agonising over Karajan’s decision to shut him out of Salzburg for 20 years. ‘But we got on well in the orchestra,’ he sighed. Harnoncourt genuinely could not understand how a peacock conductor might take offence at his former cellist getting better Bach reviews than he did.

Alice was always present. She protected him from much of the world’s nastiness and fought his corner with the music industry. At home, they made music with children and grandchildren.

Some disputed his historical interpretations on record, others his stylistic decisions. But Harnoncourt’s informed approach to the Beethoven symphonies opened the ears and hearts of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw orchestras and his influence was felt everywhere in Europe. In the United States he had less impact, and was not much bothered by it, though he was touchingly proud of his cousin Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I have seldom met a more benign musician. When we first met he pointed out a small anecdotal error in my book The Maestro Myth (which he devoured) completely without rancour. He responded to his own triumphs with humility and to indifference with a shrug. He laughed at the title ‘maestro’. In rehearsal, he was deadly serious, totally focussed, refusing to let go of a phrase until he was satisfied.

He was a wonderfully decent human being. I never heard him utter a malicious word. He seemed to exist in a state of grace.

photo (c) Lebrecht Music&Arts

The Harnoncourt family has announced the death of the great conductor, cellist and period instruments pioneer at the age of 86.

He retired from performing in December after a period of illness.

‘An exemplary human being’: First appreciation here.

Harnoncourt’s place in music history here.

Harnoncourt and Lang Lang here.

A well-liked Montreal guitarist has been arrested on suspicion of holding up 10 big banks with guns.

His lawyer says Mark Vandendool is suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder.

Right now, he’s getting more attention than he can handle. Watch here.

James W Crownover has been announced as the next board chair of Houston Grand Opera.

Singers will be expected to bring flowcharts to reheasal.

Jim’s a former joint head of management consultancy McKinseys. He has been a Grand Opera goer since 1987.