A year ago, the Bayreuth Festival had first call on three most sought-after conductors in Europe: Kirill Petrenko, Andris Nelsons and Christian Thielemann.

Now, they have one.

Ever since Thielemann was named music director by the festival’s chief, Katharina Wagner, relations with his two colleagues have been unsettled. Petrenko ruled out further cooperation with Bayreuth, blaming the festival for an overload of summer work. Andris Nelsons quit yesterday.

It is clear from all the leaks we are receiving that Nelsons’s walkout was provoked by Thielemann’s uncalled-for interference in his Parsifal preparations. Nelsons is generally an easygoing man. Thielemann is not.

Thielemann, however, has refused to take over Parsifal himself. Bayreuth is now ringing around for a credible replacement.

There is no sign that Petrenko or Nelsons will return any time soon.

 

 

The family home at 211 Central Park West is up for sale after a lawsuit that followed the death of Vera Stern, the violinist’s divorced wife and mother of his three children. It’s the place Vera downsized into after the divorce, still in the same building as the original home. Isaac maintained a studio at the same address.

The original asking price of $9 million has been slashed to $7.65 million.

It’s a 3-bed co-op.

 

isaac stern house

More pics here.

 

I spent a happy hour or three last summer having drinks in London with the finest American music critic of my time, the infinitely engaging Tim Page. Tim is, of course, so much more than a music critic. He’s the leading authority on the novelist Dawn Powell, a movie polymath, a professor at USC and a brilliantly astute observer of the human condition. We had a whale of a time.

A few weeks after our conversation, Tim was found lying senseless on a Connecticut railway platform.

He was rushed to hospital, underwent brain surgery and has battled valiantly ever since to recover his physical and mental equilibrium. Friends could only watch in admiration as he put his life and mind back together again.

Now Tim has written an essay on his year of recovery. It is essential reading.

tim page

 

Sample:

Music still astounds and renews me, although it demands more solitary concentration than ever before and I can no longer “swim” in it as I did from earliest childhood.   But I’ve found a new therapy: part of each day is spent listening to complicated pieces that I know fairly well but not too well – large amounts of Bach, Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations and late quartets, symphonies by Mahler and Bruckner, “Die Meistersinger” — and I concentrate deeply, often with my eyes shut.  Well-known, technically “simple” works bring pleasure but don’t seem to be furrowing the same neural paths that I sense from more extended challenges.  Such exploration takes me back to my childhood, and the wonder I used to feel when wandering the woods around the University of Connecticut, pushing aside the branches of budding trees, finding out what paths led to what streets and, eventually, which one of those streets would lead me home.       

Read on here.