Emmanuele Baldini, Italian concertmaster of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in Brazil, has been named music director of the Orquesta de Cámara de Valdivia (OCV), in Chile.
Congratulations all round.
The Nielsen Soundscan sales figures are in for the crucial Christmas week.
Top of the pile at Il Volo, with almost 5,000 sales for Sony.
Next are Decca’s Benedictines of Mary, with 800.
Third are the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, boosted by their booking to open the Trump White House. The Mormons have two further hits at numbers 6 and 8.
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The Hamburg and Montreal music director Kent Nagano walked out on his agent just before Christmas to join HarrisonParrott.
Nagano is a huge earner and a coup for any agency. He is the third conductor to leave Stephen Wright’s ICA this month.
On December 22, 2016, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Steinway Musical Instruments,Inc.’s corporate family rating to Caa1 from B2, probability of default rating to Caa1-PD from B2-PD and $300 million first lien senior secured term loan due 2019 to Caa1 from B2 due to the Company’s weak operating performance and the risk that metrics will remain soft for an extended period.
More here.
The Russian state news agency Tass reports that Sarah Chang, the US soloist, was robbed of valuables and luggage on a flight from Philadelphia to Moscow via London. It is not clear at which stage the theft took place.
Ms Chang has filed a police report in Moscow saying that valuables worth $12,000 had been taken from her luggage.
She is due to give a concert tomorrow at the Moscow Conservatoire.
Unusually, Ms Chang has made no mention of the incident on her very active twitter feed.
Miriam Pirazzini, one of Italy’s foremost mezzo-sopranos of the post-War decades, died on Christmas Day.
Born in 1918 she sang opposite Maria Callas in the 1958 Rome Norma that the diva abandoned at the end of Act 1.
