We understand that the crusading interim manager, Tiberiu Soare, has left Bucharest National Opera with immediate effect.
Johan Kobborg is back as director of ballet and George Călin as head of opera.
There has been no official confirmation yet. A statement is expected later today.
UPDATE: Călin’s restoration is temporary, until the end of the season. Soare is not going quietly. His supporters are demonstrating at the rear of the opera house and threatening to call a strike.
Kobborg says: ‘Thank you to all that supported in this difficult time. This quickly became so much more than just about me being there or not, and that is the reason why I didn’t leave straight away, as I and ‘we’ could not allow for this institution to go back to how it used to function, for the sake of the artists and for the sake of the future of Romanian culture life.
‘Rightness has prevailed, and not only that, much more then that! It is the beginning of reform, and ONB might soon be the benchmark for the better of other Romanian institutions as well.
‘I came to ONB because of good people, and would only ever leave ONB in the hands of other good people. So until that day comes, I am very much here and very much BACK! Damage has been done, but will rebuild and continue what we started with even more passion. Now I will leave the politics behind, and go back to what I live for. Art.’
The New England Conservatory is the new owner of the the 1714 Stradivarius violin, bought by Johannes Brahms’s friend Joseph Joachim in 1849, when he was just 18 and played as his principal instrument throughout his life.
The Strad was left to the NEC by the estate of the violinist and teacher Si-Hon Ma, who died in 2009, aged 84. Professor Ma, an NEC graduate and sometime player in Georg Szell’s Cleveland Orchestra, was professor of music at Kent State University in Ohio, from 1971 to 1994.
He bought the instrument from the Rembert Wurlitzer company in New York in 1967. It was previously owned by an American collector, Hugh Long.
A new Generalmusikdirektor has been announced in Wuppertal.
It’s Julia Jones, 54, sometime principal conductor at Basle Opera and Lisbon.
She’s a prophet without honour in her own country, having conducted only once at Covent Garden.
From a US Government release:
Washington, DC – Less than a month after the historic visit by President Barack Obama, a U.S. government cultural mission to Cuba will take place from April 18-21, 2016. The President described his trip as extending the hand of friendship to the Cuban people, and this delegation, including some of America’s most distinguished writers, artists, musicians, as well as arts and cultural leaders, will continue this historic collaboration with the Cuban people.
The delegation includes: the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) co-chairs George Stevens, Jr. and Margo Lion; National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu; National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William Adams; and Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton. U.S. artists joining the delegation include: Joshua Bell, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, Martha Clarke, John Guare, DJ IZ, Lourdes Lopez, Larisa Martinez, Dave Matthews, Kal Penn, Smokey Robinson, Usher, Alfre Woodard, and John Lloyd Young.
In Cuba, the mission will build on President Obama’s recent visit and the progress made toward the normalization of relations with Cuba, in particular to advance deeper cooperation around the common bonds of our heritages – arts and culture – and identify greater opportunities for people-to-people artistic and cultural collaborations. The visit itinerary will include both lively scholarly and artistic event and exchanges, as well as meetings with Cuban government officials and directors of cultural institutions. […] Support for the delegation’s visit to Cuba has been generously provided by Airbnb, American Airlines, The Betsy-South Beach, Ford Foundation, Inktel Holdings Corp., and Libra Capital. U.S. American Airlines is the airline partner of the 2016 U.S. Cultural Mission to Cuba. The Center for Democracy in the Americas worked with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities to organize the itinerary.
An activist group claims to have taken over the stage at a concert by the Mariinsky Orchestra and Valery Gergiev at Cadogan Hall on Monday. Their targets included Putin’s anti-LGBT policies and his Government’s alleged links to the oil company BP. There has been no independent report of the demonstration, nor any published review of the concert.
The activists issued the following release and picture:
photo: Hugh Warwick
‘Actorvists’ invade stage with same-sex ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at BP-sponsored concert
• Cadogan Hall concert targeted due to oil sponsor and Russian conductor’s links with Putin • Unsanctioned ‘balcony scene’ entertains audience • Concert-goers include high-level officials from BP, and British and Russian governments
Three performers from theatrical campaign group BP or not BP? took to the stage – and a balcony – at Cadogan Hall this evening to challenge BP’s sponsorship, just before Russia’s Mariinsky Orchestra was due to begin a performance of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Invitees included VIPs from BP, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and the Russian Embassy, who gathered for a BP-hosted reception beforehand.
The actorvists, all of whom are LGBT, performed their own four-minute version of the Shakespeare play, titled ‘Ramira and Juliet’, in which the lovers are gay musicians who fall out over Ramira accepting sponsorship from BP. Adapting many famous passages from the play, they ultimately sort out their differences, drop the oily sponsor, and marry – which would be illegal in Russia under its draconian anti-gay laws. [1] The full script can be found below. Concert-goers laughed and applauded as the performers recreated the famous balcony scene with an anti-BP, pro-gay rights twist, culminating in the actorvists ripping the BP logo from their programmes. A lone heckler was shushed by the audience, and boos could be heard whenever BP’s name was mentioned. Security allowed the performance to conclude and the disobedient thespians left the building of their own accord.
BP is a major operator in Russia, holding a 19.75% stake in massive state oil company Rosneft, making it the largest shareholder after the Russian government. Rosneft is probably Russia’s worst polluter, [2] responsible for multiple spills and leaks, including once causing oil to flow out of domestic taps. [3] BP has been actively sponsoring and promoting Russian culture and achievements in the UK, [4] and has previously lobbied against sanctions linked to the conflict in Ukraine, which have put plans to drill in the Arctic with Rosneft on ice. [5]
BP recently sponsored the Science Museum’s Cosmonauts exhibition, which celebrated Russian space exploration and saw the museum’s director receive the Pushkin medal from Vladimir Putin. [6] The BP-sponsored Mariinsky Orchestra’s world-famous conductor, Valery Gergiev, is a vocal supporter of Putin and has been targeted by gay rights protests in the past. [7] The performance also comes two days before the anniversary of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico which has cost the company more than $50 billion and the impacts of which are still affecting residents and ecosystems today. [8]
The Paris-based label has latched onto contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Release follows.
One of today’s leading contraltos, Marie-Nicole Lemieux is in demand on the opera stage, as soloist with the world’s finest orchestras, in recital and in the recording studio. The French-Canadian singer is as renowned for the richness and agility of her voice as for her warmth and exuberance, on stage and off.
It is these rare qualities that have led Erato to sign Lemieux as an exclusive recording artist. Her label debut, due for release early 2017, will be devoted to Rossini, whose music she describes as “a revelation” and for whom the singer has a particular affinity. The recording sessions took place in December 2015 around Lemieux’s Rossini recitals with the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon and conductor Enrique Mazzola. “Strangely, with Rossini, you sing twice as much, but you’re half as tired at the end of the performance,” she told Opéra Online. “Rossini, it’s organic, it’s beautifully written, and he understands perfectly the voice.”
They got used to English chorus directors in Berlin when Simon Halsey was head of the Rundfunkchor, working closely with Simon Rattle and the Philharmonic.
Now the RIAS Kammerchor has chosen another Brit to succeed Hans-Christoph Rademann.
Step up Justin Doyle, chorus conductor at Manchester University and a regular with the BBC Singers.
Family and friends are reporting the death of Brian Asawa, a dazzling countertenor who in 2014 set up a management agency for opera singers. Brian was 49, or possibly 50.
The report says he passed away today at 12:42 pm surrounded by his loving family.
Three years after a 1991 debut in San Francisco, Brian became the first countertenor to win Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition. He went on to sing at the Met, Covent Garden, Paris, Brussels, Munich and other major houses.
A friend said of him tonight: ‘Wonderful, wonderful talent. The most dedication you can imagine. Generous to a fault.’
Here’s what we hear indirectly from the stage manager in charge of Saturday’s Tosca at Vienna State Opera:
He says the audience wouldn’t stop clapping last Saturday after Kaufmann’s first “E lucevan le stelle” for around seven minutes.
Once Angela realized he would repeat the aria, she went back to her dressing room. Picked up by the stage manager before the aria ended and heading back to the stage, she was surprised when the conductor refused to stop for a second ovation (as the conductor of the April 9 performance had done).
Strange, though, that the usually outspoken Angie has stayed so shtum.
press release:
SAN FRANCISCO, 18 April 2016 – The San Francisco Symphony (SFS), led by guest conductor Pablo Heras-Casado, will be the first major symphony orchestra to use Facebook’s live video streaming feature “Facebook Live” to webcast a world premiere to audiences around the globe, for free. Commissioned by the SFS, composer Mason Bates’s latest work Auditorium, with Bates performing on electronica, will be streamed from Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on Wednesday 27 April at approximately 8:15 pm local time/PST (Thursday, 28 April at approx. 4:15 am in the UK) on the Symphony’s Facebook page www.facebook.com/sfsymphony. The world premiere webcast will also be archived and available for on-demand streaming following the performance. To experience Auditorium, viewers should be followers of the SFS Facebook page, and will receive an automatic notification when the stream begins.
Henry Threadgill for In for a Penny, In for a Pound.
It’s an album.
In for a Penny, In for a Pound is the latest installment in saxophonist/ flutist/composer Henry Threadgillsongoing exploration of his singular system for integrating composition with group improvisation. The music for his band Zooid his main music-making vehicle for the past fourteen years and the longest running band of his illustrious forty plus-year career is no less than his attempt to completely deconstruct standard jazz form, steering the improvisatory language towards an entirely new system based on preconceived series of intervals. His compositions create a polyphonic platform that encourages each musician to improvise with an ear for counterpoint and, in the process, creating striking new harmonies.
