The Washington Bach Consort has announced the sudden death of its founder and leader, J. Reilly Lewis.

Reilly, who was also music director of the Cathedral Choral Society, stood at the heart of baroque and religious music in the capital. He was 72 and extremely vibrant. Musicians across DC are in shock.

Here’s the WBC statement:

reilly lewis

 

It is with profound sadness that we inform you that Dr. J. Reilly Lewis passed away of a sudden heart attack last night. According to his wife Beth, he enjoyed a wonderful day yesterday, rehearsing music and driving with the top down on his Jaguar.

Reilly was our founder, conductor, Artistic Director, and much more… he was our leader, our center. Reilly was our friend. We’re shocked and saddened by this tragedy. We’re working with Beth and will announce funeral arrangements as they become available.

Reilly was such a wonderful, special person, but only his love of each of you surpassed his love of Bach and great music. I can’t begin to say how saddened we are and how much we’ll miss Reilly. Our deepest sympathies to Beth and all who mourn.

From the ISM:

New figures published by the Department for Education (DfE) (Friday 3 June) show a drop in entries for GCSE and A level music.

The overall entry for GCSEs in England increased from 4,916,000 in 2015 to 4,929,000 in 2016.

In the same period, GCSE music saw a decline of 3% and A-level music saw a drop of 8%.

Deborah Annetts, Chief Executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), the professional body for musicians and music educators said:

‘These figures are deeply concerning and show that the new EBacc proposals are already undermining the take up of music in our schools.

More here.

piano lesson

The airline has finally explained why it required Cecilia Bernardini, leader of the Dunedin Consort, to remove her violin from its case and hold in on her lap last weekend for the duration of an Amsterdam-London flight.

It said: ‘We are sorry that our customer was unable to make use of our extra hand baggage allowance for instruments on this occasion, as there were an unusually high number of musicians booked on to the flight.’

Oh, fff’s sake…

cecilia bernardini violin2

Allegro Media Group, based in Portland, Oregon, has sacked dozens of staff and is refusing to return calls or to send stock back to the labels.

Labels affected include Arte Nova, Avie, Challenge Classical, Stone Records, Music & Vision, Priory, Resonus Classics, Winter & Winter and more.

Hard times ahead.

hannigan de leeuw

UPDATE: A UK client tells us that Allegro is now in the hands of liquidators. The chance of anyone seeing money or CDs any time soon is slight.

 

 

Sir Peter Jonas shared his views today with Die Zeit:

Can nations commit collective suicide? It is possible and the prospect of Brexit shows us, not for the first time in history, that humans can behave like lemmings charging headlong to a fatal cliff top in mass hysteria. Brexit: no thank you! Do Brits really wish for Boris, simply a more likeable and brainier version of Donald Trump, as leader? Are they nostalgic for a Britain of the 1950’s and early 60’s? Do they really want a return to a disunited Europe with the malignant instability that cursed it with uncertainty and conflict over centuries?

Do they really hanker after that “Little Britain” mentality encouraging insularity and enabling bulldog jingoism a la Farage to have its day? No – the best of Britain could and should be the best of Europe: freedom, understanding, European cultural values, tolerance and diversity. A united Europe is no longer a dream but can be a reality, warts and all. The Brexiteers (usually older, white and male) blow the trumpet of their own version of fantasy economics and chauvinism. I pray that my fellow Brits will not throw the European dream away in a fit of “wogs start at Calais” pique!

Sir Peter Jonas

 

peter jonas

After 45 years leading the orchestra at the Vienna State Opera (also playing as the Vienna Philharmonic), Rainer Küchl stepped up last night on stage to receive his farewell bouquet.

 

rainer kuchl farewell

 

photos © Wiener Staatsoper / Ashley Taylor

rainer kuchl farewell2

From Lebrecht Listens, my album of the week on MusicalToronto:

Before we go any further, let me declare once and for all that I am done with three stars. Everywhere else, critics award three stars as a kind of neutral, no-harm-done mark for something they neither love nor hate. Myself, I’ve stopped reviewing that sort of thing. If it doesn’t make you want to laugh or cry (for better or worse), why steal a nanosecond of your readers’ attention by discussing it?

So no more three stars on this site.

They’d be wasted, anyway, on Cameron Carpenter. The flamboyant American organist, more used to playing in a singlet than a surplice, either makes you feel young and with-it or old and totally out of it. Much of what I’ve heard him play has the first effect on me.

Read on here… and here on OpenLettersMonthly.

Cameron_Carpenter_Sony_Signing

The vox populi coming out of the Coliseum last night was not ecstatic. The new Tristan and Isolde, directed by the company’s callow artistic director Daniel Kramer (pictured), had failed to overwhelm.

First reviews now trickling in tend to confirm that impression.

daniel kramer

Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph: Daniel Kramer’s staging … feels like something struggling against the massive simplicity of the plot and its philosophical hinterland. The most peculiar aspect is the presentation of the servants Brangäne and Kurwenal as a commedia dell’arte double act, cringing and servile caricatures who end up as syphilitic Beckettian hobos…. Such quirks suggest to me an ambitious and imaginative director without confidence, trying adolescently hard to make an original statement.

Andrew Clements in the Guardian: What won’t be resolved so easily are the problems with the staging, which is confused and illogical, and offers no obvious insights into Wagner’s drama. Certainly Anish Kapoor’s designs don’t help matters. In the first act, the space is divided into three segments with no heed paid to the audience’s sight lines, while much of the action is confined to the front edge of the stage in the other two, though the moon-like object that opens to reveal a beautifully lit grotto for the lovers in the second act is certainly striking.

But the glosses that Kramer adds seem gratuitous. Craig Colclough’s Kurwenal is a Jacobean fop in the first act and some hybrid between Benny Hill and a Beckett clown in the last…

David Nice, on TheArtsdesk: Daniel Kramer … has a few “bad Star Trek episodes” and many good ideas that don’t always join up or else outstay their welcome. Unevennness abounds: hideous costumes and makeup clash with Anish Kapoor’s eventually brilliant designs, singing and conducting are only patchily inspired.

On the other hand, Barry Millington in the London Evening Standard: For English National Opera and its incoming artistic director Daniel Kramer, whose production this is, much has depended on this new Tristan and Isolde, with designs by renowned sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor. It’s a brave and bold show, sometimes idiosyncratic, but at its best (the final act) full of resonant imagery and theatrically enthralling. In short, just what ENO needs. 

More to come.

 

 

The Salzburg Festival has named the rising but not-terribly-experienced Clémentine Margaine to replace Joyce DiDonato in this summer’s production of Nicolai’s Il Templario.

Margaine, 31, was a cast member of Deutsche Oper Belin in 2011-12, then spent a season at Dallas.

She’s becoming something of a new-gen go-to Carmen.

Clémentine Margaine

Joyce DiDonato has pulled out of this summer’s run of Otto Nicola’s esoteric Il Templario. She was to have sung Rebecca opposite Juan Diego Florez in the hard-to-sell three-acter.

We hear that after months of study with her New York vocal coach, Joyce has decided the part just doesn’t suit her voice.

UPDATE: Salzburg statement here.

UPDATE2: Just in: Salzburg plucks French mezzo for absent Joyce

joyce and jessye

It used to be Sir Malcolm Sargent’s mansion in the Bucks-Fizz stockbroker belt.

The conductor sold it for £40,000 to the pop singer Cilla Black.

Her estate now has it on the market for £4.3 million.

Enjoy a guided tour here.

malcolm sargent's house

In today’s other casting news, Paavo Järvi has shared a Twitter request:

Dear Mr. Paavo Jarvi,

Greetings, my name is Jared with a Japanese production company. I wanted to contact you because we are looking for a Vladimir Putin look-alike to appear in a TV commercial here in Japan. (No acting required)

Had they seen the cover of Paavo’s latest release?

paavo putin