It has been announced that the pop singer and former Wham star died ‘peacefully’ over the Christmas period.
London born, to a Greek-Cypriot family, he sold an estimated 100 million records.
Joan Mainzer Kishkis, principal harp of the Minnesota Orchestra for 40 years, has died in the week of her 90th birthday.
She also played for St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and other ensembles.
It has emerged that the doomed Alexandrov Ensemble, which perished in today’s Black Sea crash, was on its way to perform a ‘liberation’ concert in the destroyed Syrian city of Aleppo.
President Putin has declared a day of mourning.
It has also been confirmed that the chief conductor of Russia’s military ensembles, General Valery Khalilov, was among the victims of the disaster.
Major-General Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman of the Russian defence ministry, has told Reuters in the past hour that none of the 92 people on a Syria-bound plane has survived the crash into the Black Sea.
Passengers on the military plane included 62 singers, instrumentalists and dancers of the Alexandrov Ensemble, formerly the Red Army Ensemble, Russia’s most celebrated performing troupe.
This is a musical catastrophe without parallel. A tremendous ensemble has been destroyed in an instant.
UPDATE: Putin ordered the ensemble to play in Aleppo.
UPDATE2: A Moscow music school mourns its sons.
The German lyric tenor died in a domestic accident on 17 September 1966, at the age of 35.
This is what we lost.
The Russian Defense Ministry has announced the disappearance of Tu-154 aircraft with 92 people on board.
The aircraft vanished over the Black Sea. A search effort has begun.
The state news agency Tass reports that the passengers included the Russian army choir, the celebrated Alexandrov Ensemble, as well as orchestral musicians and nine Russian media representatives. The musicians were heading to Syria to perform for Russian air crew at the Hmeymim airbase.
The Alexandrov Ensemble, founded in 1939, was formerly known as the Red Army Choir.
UPDATE: It is reported that 62 of the missing are members of the ensemble.
Our thoughts are with the families.
2nd UPDATE: This is a musical catastrophe without parallel. A tremendous ensemble has been destroyed in an instant.
3rd UPDATE: Putin sent the ensemble to play in Aleppo
The Ensemble featured on the Eurovision Song Contest in 2009.
4th UPDATE: A Moscow music school mourns its sons
Houston Grand Opera are bringing back John Adams’s Nixon in China, which they premiered in 1987.
It seemed to mark a breakthrough, both political and creative. A style of news-headline opera was launched.
But the genre has enjoyed few comparable successes, and US relations with China are frosting over.
From the Houston Grand Opera press release:
A dramatization of President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China that ended decades of isolation from the West, John Adams’s first opera, with a libretto by Alice Goodman and staging by Peter Sellars, broke new ground with its visceral portrayal of relatively recent world events and its bold departures in musical style and instrumentation. The Houston production was televised on PBS’s Great Performances and recorded the same year; the broadcast won an Emmy Award and the recording won a Grammy in 1988. Since then, Nixon in China has been produced worldwide and has become one of the most performed among operas of our time.