Friends and colleagues of the well-liked London clarinettist, who died on Wednesday, are invited to a secular ceremony at his daughter’s house this coming Friday. But do ring to say if you’re planning to attend.

Here’s what Sally tells us:

We are having a ceremony here, as a celebration of Nick’s life, this Friday 23rd September.  I expect you know that Nick was fiercely anti religion and I promised him a long time ago that I would lead a ceremony when the time came.  I would be very happy for you to let any one who would be interested know, and although I’m afraid it will be rather short notice we would be very happy to welcome any one here who would be happy to trek out to darkest Norfolk.  It might be a good idea for them to contact me, but not obligatory!  It will be here at our house at 12.00 midday and there will be lunch.

Best wishes

Sara (always known to Nick as Sally)

Sara Barns Needlework

Toby Spence was supposed to stand in for the German star in Berlin’s Dream of Gerontius tonight.

But it appears he has also pulled out.

Andrew Staples is standing in at the last minute.

So is Catherine Wyn-Rogers, who is replacing Sarah Connolly.

Thomas Hampson is still there. Barenboim conducts.

Announcement here.

The the Donaueschingen Festival, second only to Darmstadt as a fortress of the postwar avant-garde, has invited the British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton to give a lecture next month.

One observer suggest it’s like Martin Luther being invited to the Vatican.

Scruton’s lecture, ‘On Zukunftsmusik’, will take place on 16 October in the Strawinsky Saal.

No they don’t. Turns out it was prerecorded.

Seventy of the orchestra’s musicians hustled onto the field and into their positions at the 50-yard line in less than two minutes to start the show with the four most famous notes in music history: the opening to Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5.”

Led by conductor Osmo Vanksa, the orchestra also played “Purple Rain” as a tribute to Prince.

So what, precisely, was the point.

This is Martin Wray, viola player of the Dulcinea Quartet.

At the end of a tour of Japan, he was flying with quartet’s 1st violinist from Sapporo to Tokyo Narita on Peach Air, a Japanese budget line.

The violinist was allowed to travel but the viola case was denied. Both conformed to dimensions stated on the ailine’s website. However, says Martin, ‘the attendant measured the case from depth right across the width of the case in one measurement. I do speak some Japanese but I was not able to explain that that was not how I had measured it. There was no arguing so I just had to battle to be able to hold the viola and not leave it in the overhead compartments.’

Musicians everywhere, beware of Peach Air.

From the NY Post:

The Washington Heights and Inwood Music Community Charter School will offer two hours of orchestral music and voice instruction to all students in grades K to 5 during an extended school day.

Musical concepts and content will also be integrated with other courses, such as math and science, according to founder David Gracia, a pianist and conductor who is a manager of artistic-training programs at Carnegie Hall.

Full article here.

Arts Council England’s (ACE) has decided to impose a new system for evaluating art quality on National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs), its main clients.

Despite protests by arts organisations that their work can be judged by computer metrics.

This is wrong in so many ways they hardly bear enumerating.

But the idea that art can be quantified and qualified by an objective, empirical process completely misunderstands the nature of art. And the scheme itself will require even more form-filling for hard-press arts orgs that just want to get on with making art.

If Keynes were alive today he would recommend throwing the Arts Council into his famous mineshaft.

But you can see why the ACE like it. The ‘quality metrics’ scheme relieves bureaucrats of all responsibility for their decisions. Computer says: Kill ENO.

Read more here.

You will have read over the past few days that four US orchestras are out of contact and one of them has forced its musicians into a crippling strike.

Not so at Buffalo, where the Philharmonic has quietly agreed a six-year deal with its musicians, involving a 12.6 percent pay increase over the course of the contract, among other benefits.

That’s how it ought to be done.

Read the full story here by our upstate pal Mary Kunz Goldman.

Buffalo is one helluva town. It’s the only place I’ve been to where the music director arranged to meet me at a working men’s sports bar, festooned with football and hunting trophies.

The London-based Russian pianist Pavel Kalesnikov, winner of the 2012 Honens Prize and a BBC New Generation Artist, has taken to his blog to excoriate the corruption at the heart of most music competitions.

He, like us, believes it is wrong for teachers on the jury to vote for and promote their own students.

Sample:

I, thankfully, well remember the times when I was playing in several competitions a year and didn’t dare to whisper a word (but very private ones) against one of the loathsome notable jury members. Neither did I realise the criminal stupidity of many competition organisers, and was letting myself being poisoned by the flood of waste regularly poured into my ears at one of those post-factum jury sessions.

… But the world goes on and Arie Vardi is again voting for his student in the finals of San Marino, as Pavel Gililov recently did in Bonn, and Zakhar Bron did in Shanghai, same as Boris Kuschnir – both there and in Moscow. 

Read full diatribe here.

This rot must be stopped.