The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music has fortified its piano team with the appointment of Norman Krieger as professor of music (piano).
Krieger, a noted concert pianist, has been plucked in a close-season transfer from USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, where he taught for 19 years.
The orchestra has posted a $1.5m deficit and its new president Malia Tourangeau says it is running low on donors. The musicians’ contract expires next week.
There’s a looming $10m hole in the pension fund and the Heinz Hall lacks basic cabling for HD streaming.
Everything needs an upgrade. Report here.
A memoir from Chicago Symphony principal timpani, David Herbert:
One of the most profound and devastating days in my musical life was in 1990, an otherwise beautiful Friday morning before a welcome “Spring Break” week at the St. Louis Conservatory of Music. This day would anger and motivate me in ways that were previously unimaginable. The newly-appointed President of the Conservatory called for a sudden school assembly meeting in our concert hall to inform the student body and faculty that there would no longer be a Conservatory of Music in St. Louis and that we would be allowed to finish out the rest of the academic year with our private teachers and remain in our regularly scheduled (and paid for) academic classes…. But that would be it. He said that the Conservatory Model was “ECONOMICALLY UNFEASIBLE” and that the school was “LOSING MONEY AT AN ALARMING RATE.” At that moment, I was heartbroken and devastated. I loved my teachers and was planning to stay another year at The Conservatory. I was just starting to gain employment as a substitute musician with the St. Louis Symphony under Maestro Leonard Slatkin’s direction, and I also had launched a small teaching job at a local music store to help make ends meet. This was not too bad for a young musician trying to pay his own way through a very demanding undergraduate degree course! Things had just started to look up when the news hit all of us like a ton of bricks…
Read on here. There are lessons to be learned…
The incoming music director of the New York Philharmonic – already the top-paid maestro in America at $5m last year in Dallas – has a fulltime second job with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, which he recently extended.
But that leaves his summers free.
Er, no more. He has signed up to lead the Gstaad Conducting Academy, which pays in Swiss francs. Two years to start with a renewal option.
The six finalists of the inaugural Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition were named today. They are:
Richard Lin (United States/Taiwan)
Mayu Kishima (Japan)
Sergei Dogadin (Russia)
Stefan Tarara (Germany)
Ming Liu (China)
Sirena Huang (US)
We warned before the contest opened that two of the judges tend to pick their own students as winners.
That’s exactly what has happened.
Kishima and Tarara are students of the compromised Zakhar Bron. Tarara works as Assistant to Prof. Zakhar Bron in Interlaken, Switzerland. Impossible to imagine that Bron’s judging could be objective.
Dogadin is Boris Kushnir’s pupil. He has already won the Joseph Joachim Competition, which Kushnir judged.
This is why we keep campaigning for competitions to be cleaned up.
UPDATE: David Stern: My father would have been proud of this competition
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has reviewed the Ian Bostridge recital in which (as we reported) an audience member stood up and shouted at him to learn German.
Patrick Bahner in the FAZ writes that the most shocking thing was the passivity of the audience. They should have stood up and chased the elderly heckler out.
Das Schockierende nach dem Befehl zum Deutschlernen, der einem Künstler erteilt wurde, der für sein Buch über die „Winterreise“ eigene Übersetzungen der Liedtexte angefertigt hat: Es entsteht zunächst absolute Stille. Man spricht von der Schrecksekunde, aber was heißt das? Hier: völlige Passivität. Bostridge und Drake auf der Bühne sind erschüttert, wir im Saal tun und sagen erst einmal nichts. Dann gibt es natürlich Buhs gegen den Störer, aber erst nach einem weiteren Moment des Schweigens fällt uns ein, durch Klatschen unsere Solidarität mit den Künstlern zu bekunden. Niemand von uns steht auf und sagt zu dem Mann: Verlassen Sie den Saal!
We disagree. It’s the festival management that should have stepped in and removed the disrupter, banning him from future concerts.
Read full review here.
We are saddened to report the death of Mary Gallagher O’Rourke, the most talented and enterprising Irish violinist of her time.
Mary, who was 76, was founder-leader of the New Irish Chamber Orchestra in 1970 and, later, of the Orchestra of Saint Cecilia.
Her pride and joy was performing Four Seasons for Dmitri Shostakovich in Moscow. She was a lodestar for two generations of young Irish musicians.
Irish Times obituary here, rest her soul.
Mary Gallagher, violin solo
The nation is mourning Juan Gabriel, its most popular balladeer, who has died of a heart attack.
A shrine has been improvised in Mexico City’s Plaza Garibaldi.
May Juan Gabriel rest in peace.
The festival has just lost 600,000 Euros a year as a result of the withdrawal of JTI Tobacco.
Hold that news.
You mean Salzburg were still taking money from cancer peddlers? Even though it’s illegal in Austria to advertise tobacco products? And now they’re weeping over lost cancer dollars?
Yes, to all three.
Go figure. Here’s the story.
The Sydney baritone Morgan Pearse came top in the Innsbruck baroque competition at the weekend. Morgan, 28, is a graduate of the Houston Opera studio.
Second was Austrian mezzo Sophie Rennert, 25.
Third was US countertenor Eric Jurenas, 26.
A teenaged Austrian, Florian Pichler, was hired as second trumpet in the Berlin Philharmonic in August 2014.
We understand his two-year contract has now ended without renewal.
Florian played his last concert with the Berliners at the end of July. It’s tough out there.
The Putin TV channel has been counting westerners who migrate to the Russian haven.
Two conductors among them, an Italian…
and a Greek.
