Oregon Symphony were first onto the teenage craze.

Now it Norway’s NRK radio symphony.

It plays an aria from Candide.

bernstein-cigarette

Hessische Radio symphony orchestra has named Maximilian Junghanns, 29, as second concertmaster.

He has been playing in the orchestra for the past four years.

maximilian-junghanns

The troubled tenor has called off a recital in Gütersloh tomorrow which should have marked his comeback after two months of vocal injury.

Apparently, he has a severe cold.

Report here.

jonas kaufmann godfather

The cellist Josetxu Obregón is playing at the Palacio Real in Madrid next week on the 1700 Stradivarius that belongs to the Royal Collection of the Spanish Crown.

But here’s the thing: he’s got permission to have gut strings installed on the instrument for the first time in modern times and that is setting the Spanish strings world all aquiver.

There’s a Hebrew version, too. Nowhere near:

The Passionstheater at Oberammergau is staging Wagner next summer, apparently for the first time.

The Flying Dutchman will be conducted by the Latvian Ainars Rubikis and directed by Christian Stückl.

Orchestra is being imported from Munich. The chorus is local.

flying-dutchman

The London Symphony Orchestra has pumped up its pet biographer Richard Morrison to proclaim that its dream of a new hall is not dead, despite the Theresa May Government withdrawing its support.

The hall, a condition for Sir Simon Rattle becoming the LSO’s music director, was backed by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, costed at £278 million and killed last Friday in a Downing Street press statement. The LSO read of its fate in a newspaper report.

Morrison writes today: Supporters of the project* are understood to be pinning their hopes on a wealthy individual who would probably be given naming rights for the new venue. This practice is common in the United States, which has the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Carnegie Hall in New York.

Come on, LSO, it’s over. This is not California. It’s cloud-cuckoo land.

A hall built in the wrong location and without a shred of public consultation was never going to fly, even if Brexit hadn’t happened and the world was squarer than we thought.

Like anti-Trumpers who can’t bring themselves to believe the result, the LSO needs to stop wasting energy on might-have-beens.

Museum_of_London

*Morrison’s supporters/sources appear to be the LSO’s Kathryn McDowell, the Barbican’s Nick Kenyon and the faceless Corporation of the City of London.

The budgets have been published for the commeration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020.

Culture Secretary Monika Grütters has allocated 27 million Euros and Chancellor Angela Merkel has just nodded it through.

A significant chunk of money will go to the composer’s birthplace, Bonn, which has been a bit of a ghost town since the government moved to Berlin.

beethoven 2020

grange-park-opera2

The new Grange Park Opera, going up at West Horsley Place, a 350 acre estate inherited by author Bamber Gascoigne from his aunt, the Duchess of Roxburghe, will have a topping-out ceremony tomorrow.

Modelled on the four-tier shape of La Scala, the house will stage its first opera in June 2017.

Lyrics here.

It’s coming to America first
The cradle of the best and the worst…

The Südwestdeutsche Philharmonie Konstanz has been included in a list of six national orchestras that will receive 4.5 million Euros in federal funding over five years to boost players’ salaries and maintain high standards.

The other orchs in the booster basket are in Bochum, Hamburg, Jena, Munich and Stuttgarter.

Konstanz is in an area of natural beauty and widespread poverty.

konstanz-orchestra