We hear that Lucas Macias Navarro has been named assistant conductor of the Orchestre de Paris, part of Daniel Harding’s new team. The appointment has yet to be officially announced.
Lucas used to be principal oboe for Claudio Abbado in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, before joining the Concertgebouw orchestra in Amsterdam.
With the Arena suspended in bankruptcy, the fight has begun over its future. Our correspondent writes:
The political battle in Verona has just started and will soon turn national. The local PD (Democratic Party) is calling for an extraordinary city council session, accusing Mayor Flavio Tosi of killing the Arena.
Other political parties are calling for minister Dario Franceschini to appoint a new intendant, independent of the Mayor. Some political forces have a hidden agenda of transforming Arena di Verona into a venue for pop events.
All this takes place during an electoral campaign with a referendum in two Sundays and municipal elections in several large cities in June.
Svetlana Savenko and Elena Sorokina have received notices of dismissal. Both are renowned historians of Russian music. No reason has been given.
h/t: classicalmusicnews.ru
Tiberiu-Ionuț Soare, named interim director general of Bucharest Opera this week, has been removed from the post.
He had plunged the ballet in turmoil by sacking its renowned Danish director Johan Kobborg.
The conductor Vlad Conta was named by the Culture Minister as the new interim director general of ONB, with Tiberiu Soare serving as his deputy.
There has been no response to Kobborg. This political intervention appears to solve nothing.
Kobborg’s wife Anlina Cojocaru is due to dance Macmillan’s Manon on Sunday. She had threatened to boycott the company unless her husband was reinstated.
For the past quarter of a century, Michael Haas has been trying to persuade the Austrian authorities to accept responsibility for the musical lives their country destroyed during and after the Hitler era.
Michael, producer of Decca’s breakthrough Entartete Musik series, has finally won hs case. Here’s what he tells us:
In 2006, Prof. Gerold Gruber of Vienna’s University for Music and Performing Arts (MDW) founded exil.alrte, a society which I co-chair, and is dedicated to the restitution of Europe’s lost musical legacy from the Hitler years.
After some ten years of successful projects, awards and commendations, the in-coming MDW chancellor, Ms Ulrike Sych has allowed us to proceed with plans to establish Europe’s most comprehensive Exile Music, and Performing Arts Centre to be based in the premises of the former Music Academy (the predecessor of the present MDW, most of which is located on a campus some 3 blocks behind the Music Academy Building).
The Centre will called ‘exilarte’ and will offer, among other things, archives and housing for composer estates. We shall be digitising and uploading material, both print and audio, and making it available within the restrictions and wishes of the executors. We intend our centre to be a partner for scholarship and not merely a repository of documentation. The MDW was recently ranked second in the list of performing arts colleges and universities, and with some 4,000 students, we have every motivation of making works available to Europe’s future generation of musicians. We also intend for the Centre to be international and not focussed solely on Austria-Hungary.
The musical legacies of these composers is very much a European artistic legacy and we see exilarte as engaged in an act of cultural restitution. We hope exilarte will facilitate the return of these musical estates and bridge the gap that was left by Hitler’s 12 years of power. The MDW will pay for transport, insurance and incumbent costs in restoration, digitisation and archiving.
The Centre has been given generous space – some 700 sq. metres including climate and humidity controlled storage facilities: reading room; lecture facilities; performance venues etc. It will be located on the ‘beletage’, or principal floor of the historic Music Academy, located in the ‘Academy Wing’ of Vienna’s Konzerthaus. The photo shows the wing adjacent to the Konzerthaus.
This centre should finally takes Austria’s head out of the musical sand (It must be recalled that I could find no partners in Austria for Decca’s “Entartete Musik” series, despite the predominance of Austrian composers covered) and will hopefully place Vienna in the forefront of restoring Europe’s lost musical legacy.
Our Chicago psychoanalyst Dr Gerald Stein has been thinking deeply about what psychoanalysts think about.
Rachmaninov, of course.
My earliest recollection of any connection between sex and music was the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch, with Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe. The former imagined seducing the latter when a combination of circumstances fueled his fantasy: a stale, seven-year-old marriage; his wife’s temporary absence; and the availability of Ms. Monroe, his smoldering new neighbor. Ewell’s plan was to use Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2 to win her ardor. The scene above depicts his strategy.
Read on here.
