Veteran foreign correspondent Michael Johnson has been talking to a rare entrant in an all-male occupation. Barbara Renner looks after the pianos at Tanglewood. ‘The wives don’t like it,’ she says.
Tanglewood chief piano technician Barbara Renner once won a $50 bet by proving to a male tuner that she could manipulate the nine-foot Steinway Model D as well as any man. And she has gone on to thrive in this man’s world of piano tuning, never looking back. Equipped with a refined and well-trained ear, she is now in great demand, tuning pianos all over the East Coast of the U.S. with great classical and jazz pianists.
It wasn’t the first time her physical fitness for the male-dominated job had been challenged. While in training,her instructor asked each student to remove the action from an old reproducer (player) Steinway grand that had very long keys and carry it across the room and back. “He wanted to make sure we were physically capable of the task.” She passed the test and was on her way.
Women in the tuning world, still a small minority, have been forced to face down the men. And the odds are long.
The cellist Miranda Wilson, a student of our much-missed friend Alexander Ivashkin, has written a candid and effective reflection on where the fear comes from, and how to disable it.
In my career as a cellist and a professor of cello, I’ve noticed something happening again and again. A performance–my own or someone else’s–is going reasonably well, and then an unexpected mistake changes everything. It might be a wrong note, a badly missed shift, a momentary memory lapse.
In the split second after the mistake, things can go two ways. There’s a possibility that you recover, and the rest of the concert goes without incident. But the greater possibility, especially with inexperienced players, is that you withdraw into yourself. Your stance hunches or stiffens as you berate yourself over and over for your mistake. The concert goes on in the present, but you’re stuck in the past, obsessing about what went wrong.
One of Europe’s best string quartets played at London’s Wigmore Hall this week.
Three of the players are EU citizens, the fourth is from a former Soviet republic.
The unlucky man (we have been asked to protect identities) must apply for a working visa every time the quartet performs in Britain. The visa costs him £450.
That’s about his entire fee.
The celebrated quartet will play the Wigmore Hall again next month. Our friend will pay another £450. (Apparently he requires a Certification of Sponsorship each time from every booking venue.)
The process he has to undergo through the UK Border Agency is complicated and time consuming.
But that’s how we treat non-EU citizens who want to take part in our musical life. They are not part of the club. Our gatekeepers can exploit, harass and humiliate them, and no-one cares. That’s life.
Now fast-forward to June 2016.
Imagine Britain voted to leave the EU. Before very long, other EU countries would subject our musicians to similar regulations. We’d be the ones who paid £450 for an EU visa. Our government would doubtless reciprocate. Musical life would wither for want of the free flow of talent. We’d be living in the Land without Music.
Brexit, anyone?
UPDATE: Here’s what Brexit will mean for music colleges and universities.
Vadym Kholodenko discovered the deaths of his two small daughters last month at their home in Benbrook, Texas. His estranged wife, Sofya Tsygankova, was arrested and charged with murder.
Vadym has decided to return to the concert hall next week to play the second Saint-Saëns concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya.
He has issued the following statement:
‘In this time of extreme loss and sorrow, I must look to music which has been so important in my life, and through which I can express myself. I ask those who will attend my concerts to also focus on the music. I continue to be grateful for those who are sending support from all over the world.’
If you can’t reach anyone at Copenhagen’s Royal Opera this afternoon, it’s because they are reeling from the news, or have been rushed to hospital in shock.
In the biggest gift in Danish opera history, the AP Møller Foundation has pledged ‘a three-digit million’ amount over the next four years to help the Royal Opera recover from DK35 million in Government cuts and the high maintenance costs of a new building.
The gift is in Danish crowns, which are six to the dollar or nine to the UK pounds, but that’s still huge money.
A hundred million DK changes at US$16 million or UK£11m, and this donation is way over one hundred million. It’s an epic icebreaker in Europe, where private giving does not come near to matching US generosity to the arts.
There are two conditions attached. The donor wants tickets to be cheaper for young people and expects to see new productions of the ten most popular operas.
Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.
The veteran Korean violinist has signed with Warner Classics for a Bach album, recorded in Bristol, to be followed by other projects.
It’s Kyung Wha Chung’s first release in 15 years. In 2005 she stopped performing after suffering an injury, resuming in 2013.
She says: ‘I am so happy to be returning to the recording studio after many years for a series of exciting artistic projects. The first of these is the solo Sonatas & Partitas of J.S. Bach: a monumental task. This is the unending quest of my musical journey. To have the opportunity to work again with Stephen Johns (who was my long-term producer at EMI) is wonderful, as is being made to feel such a welcome part of my Warner family. I will soon share more news about this wonderful new adventure with all of you.’
Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke. r-l: Alain Lanceron, President Warner Classics & Erato; Kyung Wha Chung; Jean-Philippe Rolland, EVP Artists & Repertoire Warner Classics & Erato. (Looks like it was shot in a police cell)
At the wedding of Catharine Rogers and Ben Woodward last Saturday, there was bound to be music. Catharine’s a soprano and Ben’s conductor of Fulham Opera.
So they warmed up with the fugue from Verdi’s Falstaff. No mistaking the groom in the video. Looks like the best man is playing viola in the orchestra in a grey top hat and the bride, singing Alice, emerges gloriously at the end from the chorus..
Sheer joy.
We wish these lovely guys a lifetime of encores.
The Metropolitan Opera’s 11th Annual Beverly Sills Artist Award, worth 50 grand, has been given to soprano Ailyn Perez, who sings her first Bohème Musettas there this month.
Previous winners include Joyce DiDonato, Bryan Hymel and Michael Fabiano.
Ailyn, 36, is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She said: ‘For me and so many others, Beverly Sills’s legacy is an inspiration. She presented the operatic voice as something we could be fascinated and awed by, and with her great sense of humor, she was ‘Bubbles,’ the diva we could all relate to. I also feel a great responsibility to be an active part of continuing that tradition, and to find innovative ways to engage new audiences through social media and working in our schools. Opera will survive and thrive if we embrace it as an important part of our collective culture.’
Loud applause for the singers was followed by boos for Katie Mitchell and her production team after the opening of Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden last night.
One spectator told Slipped Disc that the boos were not above and beyond the normal for a challenging production.
The quickest reviews, just in, may indicate a split down gender political lines.
Mitchell makes Lucia a curiously modern figure, more Ruth Ellis than the fey Romantic heroine depicted in the music. Donizetti and his librettist quite carefully and plausibly chart her descent into madness – but Mitchell has chosen to ignore this, inventing a gratuitous plot line in which Lucia is desperately trying to abort Edgardo’s baby, enlisting the help of her maid Alisa and some kinky sex games in disposing of her wretched blameless husband.
Some might find this intriguing; I found it merely perverse – and heavy-handed too.
George Hall in the Stage:
There was a good deal of booing for the production team at their curtain call. Much of this is surely down to Mitchell’s split screen approach, whereby the audience sees not only the characters meant to be singing at any given moment, but what is happening simultaneously offstage. The effect is hugely distracting.
As the wedding guests (presented, curiously, as all male) celebrate Lucia’s nuptials with Arturo to one side of the stage, to the other we witness Lucia and Alisa kill him in what is clearly a premeditated attack. His death throes are so protracted as to generate laughter – no mean feat is this unrelievedly sombre piece.
Though undeniably powerful in places – the last 40 minutes are unforgettable – this is ultimately a version of the opera rather than an interpretation, and the stagecraft can be over-complicated. Vicki Mortimer’s designs split each scene in two, allowing Mitchell both to confront us with parallel narratives throughout, and to bring on stage material that Donizetti leaves off it. But the result is as much distracting as illuminating, above all in the juxtaposition of the murder and the formidable performance of the Wolf’s Crag duet.
Lucia di Lammermoor is an opera in which men spend an awful lot of time talking about women, and very little actually talking to them. (Which, if nothing else, ensures a rather more dramatic denouement than a frank conversation about everyone’s hopes and dreams would produce.) Enter director Katie Mitchell and her “strong feminist agenda”, determined to give Donizetti’s women back their voices, and with them the agency every plot twist in the opera conspires to deny. If the result is by no means a classic production, neither is it the all-out assault on tradition and decency the Royal Opera’s recent warnings of sex and violence led us to believe….
Mitchell’s Lucia deserves much more than the knee-jerk booing it got on opening night. Thoughtful, if strident in its agenda, it has plenty to say, and finds an emotional violence and anger that’s as rare as it is authentic
A funeral service will be held on Saturday, April 9, 2016 at 3:00 p.m. at Brown Funeral Home, 5430 W. Gulf to Lake Hwy, Lecanto, FL 34461. The family will receive guests one hour prior to the service.
A memorial will be held in June. Please follow www.facebook.com/TerryPlumeriMusic for more details.
Please send me anything you wish to be read at the service via email. sutragreen@hotmail.com
The police are asking anyone with information on Terry’s death to call 911. Anonymous tpsters who wish to claim a $3,000 reward can call Citrus County Crime Stoppers at 888-269-8477 or visit crimestopperscitrus.com.
‘Please call immediately so that we can get this resolved, and have this be brought to justice,’ says Kelly.
Further details have emerged of Terry’s classical career before he became a film composer.
After taking lessons with Robert Brennand of the New York Philharmonic, Terry played double-bass for some years in the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington. While there, he studied composition and conducting with its music director Antal Doráti. He went on to tour as music director with the singer Roberta Flack.
