It’s not all smiles and candles as the pianist of our epoch reaches a life milestone today.

Martha Argerich has been told that her Lugano Festival must close after a scandal-ridden bank withdrew its sponsorship. This month’s festival is her last.

But there will be more joys ahead.

For the first time since he stored out in 2005 with the house in open insurrection, Riccardo Muti will return to La Scala tonight for an exhibition of his life and work and a meeting with its turbulent audience.

Tickets (free) and details here.

Her birthday was June 4.

You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to.

Musicians in the Kansas City Symphony have accepted a 19.7 percent pay rise over four years, plus health care and insurance upgrades. The new contract was amicably negotiated, no lawyers either side.

‘Something special is happening here,’ said Frank Byrne, executive director. ‘In my 15  1/2 years with the Kansas City Symphony, I have seen a transformation in the culture of the organization, and that is not by accident. I and my staff have worked very systematically to build trust and relationships with our musicians, and it has paid off wonderfully.’

‘We are on the lower end of salary compared to other orchestras,’ said Brian Rood, a trumpet player who chaired the negotiating committee. ‘We were losing too many talented musicians to other orchestras, and while we will not be able to keep them from going to Chicago and Boston and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, maybe we could do more with salary and working conditions to keep them from going to Utah, Oregon, Nashville or even Cincinnati.

The 2016 base salary in KC is $51,537.

Read full report here.

KC musicians get out of jail

Fiona Maddocks went to hear a recital last week by Steven Osborne, playing the same music that (unknown to her) had just blown us away in the Lebrecht Album of the Week.

Fiona saw the full five stars. She writes today in her Observer column:

Psychologists, with a name for everything, call it sedatephobia. Fear of silence. The compulsion to talk when the room falls quiet, to switch on the radio in an empty room, to rush from country quiet back to the reassuring roar of town. In part, this is about noise pollution. In part, it’s about hearing rather than listening, passivity rather than action. By calling his solo recital at the Barbican’s Milton Court The Music of Silence, the pianist Steven Osborne confronted the matter head on, with music by Morton Feldman (1926-87) and George Crumb (b1929). Although the works of these American avant garde composers had outbursts of noisy eruption, the primary issue was stillness. Even the tiny clicks of expanding and contracting overhead lights sounded fortissimo against the quietness of Osborne’s playing. No one clapped between pieces. There was barely a fidget or a cough. Nothing disturbed the concentration. The whole experience was a kind of enchantment.

And more here.

So why does this matter?

Because Steven Osborne had to use all of his persuasive powers to convince even an enterprising independent label like Hyperion to let him record contemporary esoteric music that he believed in with every fibre of his being. He got his way, just.

The result is a phenomenal recording, life-altering, ineradicable.

The artist was right. The artist usually is.

Let’s start believing it.

The 13 year-old singer won Romania’s Got Talent this weekend.

She is also a contender in America’s Got Talent.

Experienced opera singers are alarmed.

Carnegie Hall voice teacher Claudia Friedlander has written the following assessment in the Summer Issue of Classical Singer Magazine:

This is why Bretan’s performance raises such deep concerns for experienced opera singers and voice teachers. She possesses both a promising voice and strong musical instincts, but most of the sounds she is producing are the result of effortful, unsustainable manipulations of a body that is not yet mature enough either to create these sounds in a free, organic way or to withstand such pressure without significant risk of injury. The hazardous technical problems I note include the following:

Her vibrato is tremulous and irregular and is accompanied by shaking in her tongue and jaw. An organic vibrato depends in part on well-modulated registration, and it may be that she is not yet able to fully engage the muscles governing heavier registration. This may also explain why the cut of “Nessun dorma” she chose to perform omits the low D at the very beginning – she may simply not be capable of producing a focused sound in her primo passaggio yet. 

She performs these syllabic phrases with virtually no legato, pumping breath into individual notes and syllables rather than streaming her air continuously throughout each phrase. This is an extremely fatiguing process, and while it can produce a sequence of richly produced tones it cannot deliver the long, beautifully shaped lines required for Puccini; it would also be hard to sustain for a period longer than the one minute and twenty seconds of this excerpt. …

Read on here.

UPDATE: What happened next.

UPDATE2: Still worried?

A Viennese website has raised the ghost of Andreas Dippel (1866-1932), a member of Mahler’s cast, who is reckoned to have sung 162 tenor roles in Italian, German and French. The repertoire, in those days, was larger, more adventurous and still growing. The numbers are contested. Some authorities credit him with *just* 158 roles.

Domingo has performed 147 roles as a tenor and baritone.

Dippel went on to be joint manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1908 to 1910 with Gatti-Casazza, who deputed him to tell Mahler that Toscanini was taking over his Tristan production. Mahler DUly quit.

Dippel died in Hollywood in his mid-6os.

This Thursday, Rainer Küchl will take the front seat for the last time in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 45 years after he was first appointed.

Thursday’s performance at the Vienna Opera will be his last.

We share Vienna’s thanksgiving for his phenomenal contribution.

He will be succeeded next season by 30 year-old José Maria Blumenschein.

Armenia’s National Academic Opera and Ballet in Yerevan has appointed Constantine Orbelian as artistic director.

Orbelian, 59, was born in San Francisco and made his name as a concert pianist, recording extensively for Delos. His late uncle, for whom he is named (and sometimes confused), was a successful Armenian-Russian film composer.

In 1991 he became chief conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra and in 2014 of the Kaunas Symphony Orchestra in Lithuania.

We have received the following clarification of the weekend’s Beijing embarrassment from The Classical Buskers, which we are happy to share:

The facts are that Ian had a quick costume change backstage and in his hurry he did not manage to cover himself properly. He was actually wearing pants, they were just very small. He had other pants that were bigger, which he normally wears with that outfit, but those are the ones he forgot. It was the first show of the tour, so jetlag didn’t help.

 He did not realise that he wasn’t fully covered until the show was over and is deeply embarrassed about this mistake. Steps have been taken to make sure that this will never happen again, as he has a much longer costume now and the rest of the tour is continuing. Ian is seriously mortified about this and it was just a horrible mistake. He has personally apologised to the few parents that were seated on the front row and complained at the time.

Sarah Bruce
General Manager, The Classical Buskers