The quirky French pianist has proved so iconic that his label has splashed out on another of his ilk. Adam Lalloum will launch with the Brahms concertos this time next year.
Press release:
Paris / New York, November 18, 2016
Sony Classical is delighted to announce the exclusive signing of French pianist Adam Laloum. A young musician of extraordinary technical prowess and searching poeticism, Laloum was awarded first prize in the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition in 2009. Since then his career has included highly praised performances in the world’s leading venues and festivals.
Born in Toulouse in 1987, Laloum began to learn the piano aged 6. From the very first, his instinctive gift for lyrical phrasing and visionary intensity was matched by a remarkable independence of spirit. At the tender age of 12, having commenced studies with Daniel Beau at the Conservatory of Toulouse, he disobeyed Beau’s orders and auditioned for the National Conservatory of Paris without telling him. He was accepted, and then began to study with Michel Béroff. Beau was initially furious, but the relationship has now been fully healed, and the men are friends again…
The NY Phil has awarded the $200,000 Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music to the distinguished Dutch minimalist composer, Louis Andriessen.
In addition to the prize, Andriessen wins a commission for a new orchestral work to be conducted in his opening season by the incoming New York Philharmonic music director Jaap van Zweden.
The New York Philharmonic will commission a new orchestral work by Andriessen to be premiered during the 2018–2019 season, led by Jaap van Zweden in his first season as Music Director.
The Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music at the New York Philharmonic, which recognizes a composer for extraordinary artistic endeavor in the field of new music, has been awarded to Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. Andriessen was chosen to receive the Kravis Prize for his lasting contributions to new music by a Selection Committee of leading artists and administrators who have close ties to the New York Philharmonic and a demonstrated interest in fostering new music. One of the world’s largest new-music prizes, the Kravis Prize for New Music is awarded every two seasons, and includes $200,000 and a commission to write a work for the New York Philharmonic.
The New York Philharmonic will give the world premiere of a new orchestral work by Andriessen during the 2018–2019 season, led by Jaap van Zweden, who will then be in his first season as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic. Of note, the Philharmonic also performed the New York premiere of Louis Andriessen’s De Staat in May 1986, led by Gunther Schuller, as part of the Orchestra’s new-music seriesHorizons.
Andriessen remarked, “It is an immense honor to receive The Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music, and I send my deep and solemn feelings of gratitude. Being preceded by such masters as Per Nørgård and Henri Dutilleux is in itself already a great inspiration. I admire them both and have known and adored Dutilleux since I was 18 years old. My father, the composer Hendrik Andriessen, used to say: ‘We are not important; the music is important, and we have the duty to write as well as we can.’ It is in this spirit that I will write for the New York Philharmonic.”
“This study gives clear neuronal evidence supporting the view that artistic music is of intelligence, while popular music is of physiology,” writes a team of researchers led by Ping Huang of South China Normal University in Guangzhou….
Huang and his colleagues created very brief musical excerpts (12 to 24 seconds apiece). Half were taken from opera, while the others were from pop songs. While in an fMRI machine, each participant listened to five classical excerpts, five pop excerpts, and seven similarly brief clips of “meaningless musical notes.”
We’ve omitted the soloist’s name from the sample text below to keep you guessing:
In this live concert with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle, ****** is more languorous and, one suspects, more herself. The opening phrases are so leisurely you can imagine half the orchestra taking an illicit sip of tea from an under-chair flask, knowing there is plenty of time before they have to come in. But her tempo is immediately convincing and musically coherent. It pays off with a transcendent pair of inner movements in which beauty is never defeated by melancholy, and the tremors of an old man’s regrets are laid to rest with a blessing.
The cellist in the picture is Beatrice Harrison, who gave the first performance of the concerto outside London.
An editor and presenter across BBC Radio 2, 3 and 4, Richard Anthony Baker was the ultimate go-to man on the British music hall, and musical theatre in general.
This is the Berlin Phil’s irrepressible Sarah Willis in Toronto:
The tenor was due back this week from a two-month layoff with a vocal injury. But what was first described as a minor delay with a severe cold is now classed as ‘health problems’.
He has cancelled next week’s recital at the Teatro Real in Madrid.
The Polish-American violinist Henri Temianka, who was born in Greenock and spent his childhood there, will be commemorated tomorrow, his 110th birthday, with the presentation of a bronze bust to his home town museum.
He left Scotland at the age of nine to study with Carel Blitz in Rotterdam but he remains Greenock’s most celebrated son.
Aside from his solo career, Temianka founded and played first violin in the Paganini String Quartet.
He died, aged 85, in 1992.
Headline in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian outlet today: Australia’s biggest taxpayer rip-off: Is it time for the fat lady to sing?
Headline in Murdoch’s London Times today: Taxpayer’s bill for English Opera hits £155,000 a show.
Do we catch the drift?
The Aussie article argues: Is opera the ultimate waste of public money? We give them big sums, but not many people actually attend. I have nothing against opera as an art form — I have been and enjoyed it. I support arts funding in general. But opera is just one genre of live music and we’re clearly putting too much money into it.
The English one claims: The cost to the taxpayer of each English National Opera performance has risen to £155,000 after the company scaled back its work to cope with funding cuts. The figure, an increase from £112,000 of subsidy for each show last season…
Since when was opera a value-for-money proposition?
And who’s stoking the flames of rampant philistinism?
The Government will sustain music hubs in schools over the next four years at a cost of £300 million – up from £271m for the past four years.
The hubs are designed to draw a wider demographic spectrum into playing instruments, singing in choirs and other musical activities, as well as providing casual employment for music teachers in deprived parts of the country.
Critics call them a patchwork solution, but they fill some of the wasteland left by local authority cuts.
It gets dark enough in Norway at this time of year without the musicians having to get kitted out in mortuary black.
So the Norwegian radio orchestra is trying out shades of green – women in green or blue-green frocks, men in ties of varying verdancy.
Does that work for you?
photos: Alexandru Dole
The Boston Symphony conductor won’t be back in Bavaria any time soon after last summer’s disastrous falling out with the powers-that-be.
Nelsons has committed twice as much time to Tanglewood in 2017 and – adding insult to injury – he will put on a first Rhinegold with the BSO, possibly the start of a Ring.
He will spend four weeks in Tanglewood, and they look jam-packed.
From the press release:
In what promises to be one of the highlights of the 2017 Tanglewood season, and a significant event in the world of opera, Mr. Nelsons will lead the first BSO concert performance of the complete Das Rheingold, the first of the four dramas that make up Wagner’s masterpiece Der Ring des Nibelungen. The performance will feature Thomas J. Mayer as Wotan, Sarah Connolly as Fricka, and Jochen Schmeckenbecher as Alberich, among other eminent and prestigious singers known the world over for their acclaimed performances of Wagner’s music. Mr. Nelsons will also conduct BSO Artistic Partner Thomas Adès’s Three Studies from Couperin, on a program with music of Haydn and Ravel, and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 with Daniil Trifonov as soloist. Kristine Opolais joins Mr. Nelsons and the BSO for a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 on a program with Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A, with teenaged violinist Daniel Lozakovich in his BSO debut; Ms. Opolais will also be featured in a Nelsons-led opera gala program with baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. For his first Tanglewood Opening Night concert, Mr. Nelsons will lead the BSO in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Resurrection, with soloists Malin Christensson and Bernarda Fink. Mr Nelsons leads the BSO’s season-closing concert, beginning the program with Ives’s “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” from Three Places in New England, prior to the traditional performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Ode to Joy.
