The Szymanowski Quartet is pleased to announce its new member Robert Kowalski and is excited by the musical expertise and personal qualities he will bring to the quartet.
Agata Szymczewska and Robert Kowalski have known each other for twenty years. They met, as members of different ensembles, at masterclasses when they were still children.
He studied in Germany and Switzerland with Waleri Gradow, who followed his artistic development throughout the years. His education was influenced also by Kolja Blacher and Ana Chumachenco as well as the masters of the earlier generation: Bernard Greenhouse, Ivry Gitlis and Ida Haendel. He has many years of chamber music experience at festivals and concert series around the world.
Robert is the first concertmaster of the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (Switzerland).
The Coliseum is being rented out next summer to Bat Out of Hell, a musical based on the music of the rock star Meat Loaf.
The revenues will be used to sustain the ailing opera company.
But while previous occupants of the Coli have been stage musicals and ballet shows in roughly in the same genre as ENO, mightn’t the invasion of rock music damage the brand – not to mention the fabric of the building?
A new setting by the pianist and composer Stephen Hough:
This rare image of the transformational composer was taken in Buffalo, upstate New York, in March 1968.
It has been rediscovered and is now represented by Lebrecht Music&Arts.
The photograph, by Jim Tuttle, shows Cage taking part in a performance of David Rosenboom’s To That Predestined Dancing Place. Buffalo, in the late 1960s, was a hive of modernist activity.
An Austrian named as Arthur Magnus, aged 31, has been found dead on a highway after apparently falling from the Williamsburg Bridge in New York.
Austrian media have identified him as the grandson of the great conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who died in March this year. Arthur was the son of Elisabeth von Magnus, a deputy vice-chancellor of Graz University and an accomplished mezzo-soprano who made many recordings with her father.
We send her and the whole family our condolences at this tragic loss.
Arthur Magnus worked as a manager for the freestyle motocross event, Masters of Dirt, and ran his own company, Next Level Entertainment, Gmbh.
Harnoncourt lost his son, Eberhard, a promising film director, in a 1990 road accident at the age of 33.
In a Q&A posted by Jessica Duchen on her site, the octogenarian post-minimalist was asked about the future of music. He sounds quite upbeat:
I’m no longer young and sometimes foolish, so I’ll quit while I’m ahead. But, I can tell you this, in the English-speaking world, there’s a huge group of wonderful young composers, so many good ones – like Nico Muhly and Bryce Dressner here, and Jonny Greenwood (- pictured – of Radiohead, who performed Electric Counterpoint at Glastonbury in 2014) in your country.
It belonged to the composer’s sister and stayed in the family.
Now. it is going on display at the Handel House in Halle.
It is thought that an anonymous painter copied the portrait from the London original by Thomas Hudson and that Handel sent the copy as a gift to his family.
Sofya Tsygankova, who was accused of smothering her two daughters with pillows in March of this year, has been found unfit to stand trial in Fort Worth. She will be sent for 120 days of treatment in a mental health facility, after which she will be brought before the court for reassessment. Court report here.
Sofya, 32, is the estranged wife of the international pianist Vadym Kholodenko, Ukrainian winner of the 2013 Cliburn competition. It was Vadym who discovered the bodies of their children at the former marital home.
He has continued to live in Fort Worth, closely involved in its musical life.
