A huge gap in the Met orchestra has been filled with quality. Two years ago, both flute players resigned on the same day.

New there are two new signings: Demarre McGill, principal flute of Dallas, and Erik Gratton, principal of Nashville.

Both are on one-year contracts, as is usual for starters.

UPDATE: Message from the players committee:

‘We are delighted to welcome both Erik Gratton and Demarre McGill to the MET Orchestra this upcoming season. Both will fill one year temporary positions. These positions were filled by an invite-only audition, since time was limited, and as is normal for major orchestras in these circumstances. Denis Bouriakov has now resigned from the MET Orchestra, but Stefan Höskuldsson is officially on a one year leave of absence.  In any case, we will follow our normal audition process this upcoming year to fill any vacancies on a permanent basis, which will be advertised in the International Musician four months in advance per our usual contract rules.’
-Jessica Phillips
Chair, The MET Orchestra Committee

The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music at Bloomington has appointed Dana Marsh director of its Historical Performance Institute.

Jonathan Peel, a former opera singer and Slipped Disc contributor,  is appealing for help in the search for his son, Connor.

Connor Peel, 20, was last seen at Rayners Lane tube station a week ago. He was wearing a denim shirt/jacket and black skinny jeans with brown leather boots, has pierced ears and wears a heavy wooden stud in each ear.

His father said: ‘He is an Aspergers sufferer and may well fail to pick up body language and can seem quite rude if challenged. Otherwise he is chatty and approachable. We are using the hashtag #findconnor on Twitter and Facebook.’

Please hep the search by sharing this message with the hashtag #findconnor.

UPDATE: On August 23, Connor made contact and returned home.

Dutch National TV’s Nieuwsuur has followed dancer Ahmad Joudeh, 26, as he searches for safe places to practice and dance in the thick of his country’s horrendous war.

Apart from worrying about getting maimed or killed, he also fears getting drafted into the military.

There is an extraordinary scene where he comforts a bereaved child, and another where he visits his mother’s ruined town of Palmyra.

Take some time and watch this brave, positive young man.

Ali Alexander Rahbari, who resigned from the Tehran Symphony Orchestra over structural inefficiencies, tells us that Daniel Barenboim has asked him to conduct the West-East Divan orchestra next year, with a view to staging a concert in Tehran. The pair met yesterday in Salzburg.

There are, claims Rahbari, eight Iranian players in the orchestra.

James MacMillan in the Spectator:

There is a vile, parochial, kleinstadtisch perspective from some of our cultural commentators which outwardly eschews elitism, but is profoundly motivated by an ideology of resentment and grievance. When portraits were rehung in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish government-supporting journalist Lesley Riddoch threw a tantrum in the pages of the Scotsman. She wanted portraits of Liz Lochhead, James Kelman and Alex Salmond rather than Allan Ramsay and King George III. Old=bad; new=good. English, royalty, bourgeoisie=bad; Scottish, socialist, ‘down-to-earth’=good.

Kevin Williamson is a writer, publisher, far-left activist and vice-convenor of the Scottish Independence Convention. He called for an independent Scotland to conduct a ‘social audit’ of all government officials and public employees to discover their ‘demographic’ and ‘who they speak for’….

Read on here. Riveting stuff.

We regret to share news of the death of Alex Danchev, a brilliant writer who spanned the fields of politics and the arts, writing a landmark biography of Cézanne. The announcement from the University of St Andrews says it all:

Dear Colleagues

It is with deep sadness that I have to inform you of the death of our friend and colleague Alex Danchev, Professor of International Relations.

Alex died suddenly at the weekend. He was 60.

Alex was an extraordinary Professor of International Relations, who took a cross-disciplinary approach encompassing broad-ranging interests including; art, global politics, war, ethics and military history. His chief interest was in works of the imagination, and in putting the imagination to work in the service of historical, political and ethical inquiry. He took as credo and manifesto Seamus Heaney’s inspiring declaration that “the imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.”

As a teacher he was rated extremely highly; having won the Dearing Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and a Political Studies Association Award for Innovation in Teaching.

He was also a committed researcher, who loved discovering a line of enquiry and then following it no matter where it led. He wrote extensively on art and politics and good and evil in the modern world, published a prize-winning new translation of The Letters of Paul Cézanne, and authored of a number of internationally acclaimed biographies. His was an academic life brimming with lives – his 2012 biography of  Cezanne was widely praised; his biography of the philosopher-statesman Oliver Franks was on the Observer’s ‘Books of the Year’; his biography of the military writer Basil Liddell Hart was listed for both the Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction; and his unexpurgated edition of the Alanbrooke Diaries was listed for the W.H. Smith Prize for Biography. In 2009 he published On Art and War and Terror, a collection of essays on the most difficult issues of our age and, in particular, the nature of humanity in times of conflict; followed by his most recent book, On Good and Evil and the Gray Zone – a sequel published last year.

Alex was born in Bolton, the son of a mining engineer, and brought up in Alloa and Huddersfield.  He was educated at University College, Oxford; Trinity Hall, Cambridge; and King’s College London before his academic career began as an officer in the Royal Army Education Corps in 1979. His journey continued at Keele University where he became a Professor in his mid-thirties. He then took up a Professorship at the University of Nottingham, where he held a chair, before being appointed to the School of International Relations at St Andrews in 2014.

Alex enjoyed working in St Andrews, where he found an openness to cross-disciplinary enquiry and continued his life’s work of exploring what it means to live well as a human being. He set us a great example. Colleagues in the school remember a man of great personal warmth, hugely committed to his students; and who was passionate, and deeply articulate, about the wide range of topics that interested him. Both in the school and across the wider university, we will recall his profound commitment to an interdisciplinary exploration of the power of the artistic imagination to illuminate the human and social worlds.

I know you will all wish to join me in extending our heartfelt sympathies to his wife Dee, two step-children, and grandchildren.

The funeral will be held in Oxford, and there will be a memorial service in St Andrews at a later date. Details will be available in due course from the School and the Chaplaincy.

I leave you with a quote from Manifesto 90 by Lebbeus Woods (100 Artists’ Manifestos), which Alex cited as his personal favourite:

“I declare war on all finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears.  I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength then ‘melt into air’.”

Professor Garry Taylor

Acting Principal and Master

We have long suspected that the number of fans claimed by many stars are, somehow, not truly reflective of the real state of their popular base.

Now, there is a device that shows which artists are buying likes by bulk, and where these phantom fans come from.

Here are a few examples, taken at random, discovered by entering the artist’s ID into likescheck.com.

The violinist Julian Rachlin boasts 47,533 ‘likes’ on his Facebook page.

Using the checker device, we can ascertain that his largest group of fans – 12.7% – are in Bangladesh, his second largest – 11.9% – in Afghanistan and the third largest in Libya.

In other words, most of Julian’s page fans are phoney. He may be unaware of this deceit; it may have been an innocent mistake on his part or his agent’s. But the stats are incontrovertible.

Take the relatively unstarry German pianist Valentina Babor. Her page has 63,243 likes. The highest proportion – 57% – come from Iraq.

The young Austrian pianist Ingolf Wunder, 22,000 likes, has his largest group of fans in the Philippines, his second largest in Mexico. *See update below

And so on …. and on.

What is happening here is a double-blind – the public are being deceived and the musicians are being ripped off.

Anybody who comes along offering a miracle boost to your social media profile, just press delete. Don’t pay.

*UPDATE From Ingolf Wunder:

Neither myself, nor my management has ever bought any “likes”, followers or anything else of that kind. Being mentioned in connection to such a topic is insulting and damages my reputation. I insist that the responsible person has enough dignity to make a corrective statement immediately. I established my FB Page in 2009, before virtually everybody jumped with full force on that train and long before the older generation was probably even aware of it. My wife is doing my social media in close connection with myself and I’m personally behind all of my posts. All the posts get a lot of organically generated traffic, which is not the case if one buys “pages likes”. The organic reach (not boosted or promoted posts) of each post is approx. 5.000 – 762.000(!).
We have never used any artificial methods (buying likes, bots etc.) to enhance the “page like counter” artificially, which does not serve any purpose.

Here’s a tale of woe from the Australian oboist Rachel Bullen, who plays in the Esbjerg Enemble and augments her income with other musical activities. Apparently, that’s not on in the state of Denmark. Here’s Rachel’s story:

So about 6 months ago, I was fined 50,000DKK (10,000AUD/7,000€) for playing concerts with groups other than Esbjerg Ensemble and teaching oboe.

Nowhere in the information I received about my permit to work in Denmark does it state that I am not allowed to do that. Nor on the New to Denmark website. Nor even in the Danish law. If you try to ask STAR about it, they probably won’t answer. If you get a response, it is a non-answer.

I contested the fine, and my court hearing was yesterday.

The New South Wales Government has announced plans to upgrade the iconic building, 43 years after its opening, with a view to improving the appalling acoustics of its concert hall and opera auditorium.

But the amount allocated – A$200 million, or US$154 million – looks far too small, given that it will also be spent on a new function centre and other structural upgrades.

Both of London’s concert halls have spent similar sums on revamps in recent years without achieving more than marginal and temporary improvements to the prevalent murk. It won’t be easy or cheap to make the Sydney Opera sound as good as it looks.

MüllerBBM, a German company, were appointed accousticians for the Concert Hall element in September 2015.

She had been playing in Argentina with Daniel Barenboim and his West-East Divan orchestra, but the great pianist does not feel well enough to perform at the summit festival.

Barenboim will play the concerto in her place, conducting from the keyboard. He will play Mozart K595 instead of the scheduled Liszt concerto.