Hiroko Nakamura was the first Japanese to finish among the final six at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, placing fourth in 1965 behind Martha Argerich, Arthur Moreira Lima and Marta Sosinska.

Her achievement was hugely celebrated back home and the NHK Symphony Orchestra took her on its first world tour. Married to the distinguished writer Kaoru Shoji, she went on to direct the Hamamatsu piano competition.

Hiroko died on July 26 of colonic cancer.

hiroko nakamura

Taking their security lead from Bayreuth, German music festivals are banning bags and backpacks in the aftermath of recent attacks. The impact is being felt from today at pop festivals. Wacken, a metal festival, is the first to enforce a bag ban. Munich’s Oktoberfest is considering one.

There has been no Government directive, but festival organisers are receiving police advice to this effect.

festival backpack

The conductor Peter J. Re who professionalised the Bangor Symphony Orchestra in Maine in the late 1960s, has died in a local veterans home at a great age.

A New Yorker, he held degrees from Juilliard, Columbia and Yale and was an occasional composer.

 

Peter Re lifts his baton to conduct the Bangor Symphony Orchestra. (Bangor Daily News File Photo)

We have just heard from the violinist Madeleine Mitchell:

So relieved to say I just heard from Krysia (Osostowicz) she has her violin and bows back (the theft having been on her way home after our R3 broadcast pictured above).

How did that happen, Madeleine?

Cash Converters in Streatham! Woman arrested, violin safe!

The violin was stolen outside Brixton tube station yesterday evening while Krysia Osostowicz was unlocking her bike. We are so pleased for her that the agony is over in less than 18 hours.

Thanks to all who helped by spreading the word.

 

krusia

UPDATE: Seller wanted £50 for £200,000 Gofriller

My abiding memory of Einojuhani Rautavaara, who died last night at 87, is of lunch at what was once the tallest restaurant in Helsinki.

It had been the regular haunt of General Mannerheim, who led Finland in two winter wars against the Russians, and the menu was appropriately spartan – reindeer meat, or salmon, with boiled potatoes.

Rautavaara, who had lived through the two wars, chose the venue for its menu and its symbolism. I warmed to his frugality. We talked a lot about Jean Sibelius, who took a keen interest in young Finnish composers and demanded to meet Rautavaara before he left to study in the US. They had a long conversation at Ainola, among other things about Sibelius’s unseen eighth symphony.

Rautavaara got the impression that Sibelius had burned the score during the first Winter War because he feared it was not good enough, and that anything less than his best would weaken Finnish morale and international support. This remains the most credible explanation I have heard for the composer’s act of destruction.

Talking of his own music, Rautavaara said he had explored several styles, from serialism to minimalism, taking what he wanted and never subscribing to any creed. Several of his works achieved international success but I felt he was happiest with an intense opera about a 19th century poet, Aleksis Kivi, who made Finnish a literary language. I saw it at Savonlinna and loved the interplay of text and music, knowing the opera would never travel. Like its composer and his subject, it was quintessentially Finnish.

rautavaara_ari_korkala-760x508
photo: Ari Korkala/FIMIC

The Helsinki record producer Joel Valkila, who worked with Rautavaara this year on what will turn out to be his last CD, tells me that the verses he chose for the album contained several notes of farewell:
And, as the cock crew, those who stood before

The tavern shouted: “Open then the door!”

“You know how little time we have to stay,

and once departed may return no more.

You know how little time we have to stay,

and once departed may return no more.”

 

UPDATE: Another memoir, from Peter Dobrin.

The German soprano has tweeted herself out of Traviata next week at Orange, in a cast that includes Placido Domingo and Francesco Meli.

Unfortunately Diana had to withdraw from the performances of “La Traviata” at Chorégies d’Orange on August 3 & 6 due to illness.

Her likely replacement is Ermonela Jaho.

 

diana damrau violetta
Damrau as Violetta. photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera

Home movies of Adolf Hitler with the Wagner family in the summer of 1936 have been rediscovered at Bayreuth.

The films were shot by the previous Bayreuth director Wolfgang Wagner as a 16 year-old boy and show the Nazi leader in a series of informal settings with the Wagner family.

According to local press reports the Agfa film, which was stored in rusting cans in a Festspielhaus cellar, is presently being digitised and will eventually be made available for ‘authorised research’.

Archivists say the unguarded close-ups are especially revealing, not just of Hitler but of various Bayreuth artists. There is no sound on film.

Wolfgang Wagner with Wieland Wagner and Adolf Hitler
Hitler in posed portrait with Wieland (l.) and Wolfgang (r.) Wagner

 

The doyen Czech conductor Libor Pesek has cancelled a UK tour ‘because of injuries sustained in a car accident’.

Libor, who is 83, was to have conducted the Czech National Symphony Orchestra on the closing night of the Kings Lynn Festival this weekend, followed by a concert at Harrogate.

But he told organisers that a fractured breastbone sustained in a recent road accident will prevent him from conducting for several weeks.

libor pesek

Libor, always a law unto himself, was music director in Liverpool from 1987 to 1998 and remains hugely popular with British audiences. We wish him a speedy recovery.

Finnish media report the death during the night of Einojuhani Rautavaara, at the age of 87.

The most widely performed Finnish symphonist after Sibelius, Rautavaara led the trend away from serialism with naturalistic, environmental works such as his Cantus Arcticus concerto for taped birdsong and orchestra (1972) and his flute concerto, Dances with Winds (1975).

His eight symphonies were recorded several times over and are frequently performed.

In a Slipped Disc poll of which composers would be performed half a century from now, he ranked among the top five.

The son of Eino Rautavaara, a founding bass at Finnish Opera, he was sent to finish his studies at Juilliard and Tanglewood, where he was impressed by Aaron Copland. He taught for most of his life at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Of his eight operas, Vincent – on the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh – gained international exposure.

A reserved, phlegmatic man, Rautavaara composed as he pleased, joining no cliques or fads.

First obituary here.

rautavaara ashkenazy

Here’s a telling comparison:

There are 14 world premieres this year at the BBC Proms, which runs for 8 weeks, July 15-September 10.

There are 14 world premieres at the Lucerne Festival which runs for 4 weeks, August 13-September 11.

Six of those premieres are short works, performed in the same concert.

But it does seem that the Proms are slipping on the new-music front.

lucernefestival02

UPDATE: The BBC would like it to be known that there are 31 premieres in total, 16 of which are BBC commissions (including co-commissions). Of these,

14 are world premieres

10 UK premieres

7 London premieres

UPDATE2: The year’s major premiere by a British composer takes place tonight at the Salzburg Festival. Thomas Ades’s Exterminating Angel will be seen at Covent Garden next April.