If you’re planning a musical divorce, avoid Canada

If you’re planning a musical divorce, avoid Canada

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norman lebrecht

January 24, 2017

The marriage of singer-heiress Eleanor McCain and ex-Toronto Symphony prez Jeff Melanson continues to be dissected in the courts, in full glare of public media.

It has emerged that Melanson got a $420,000 payoff for leaving the Symphony, but now claims he is too poor to fund his side of the case and – he complains – cannot get a job amid all the publicity.

Read more here.

Comments

  • Ian says:

    Right, because UK press would have been much kinder and gentler.
    Perhaps it should read “If you’re planning a divorce, invent a time machine and go back to tell yourself not to marry someone who can afford a top notch legal team to wage a war of attrition and take you to the cleaners”.
    When power couples divorce, the results are explosive

  • Olassus says:

    Wah, wah, wah, wah!

  • V.Lind says:

    Well, maybe the readers of Musical Toronto — a niche field if ever there was one. I can’t tell you how low the impact of this story is outside Toronto and perhaps some national classical musical circles. Nobody I know in musical circles is in any way following it, and casual canvasses of people in Toronto and elsewhere show total blankness at the story.

    And the only papers covering it at all are the Star and the National Post. I think divorces n England and the States probably get considerably more saturation coverage. Not sure why you are picking on Canada — there is more coverage of it here, supplied mostly from a blog you write for, than anywhere else.

    • Steven Holloway says:

      And so too total blankness in Vancouver. Very much so, for Toronto is not exactly everyone’s favourite city here, and the TSO has for long been an orchestra of no great significance. The Montreal Symphony has long been recognized as Canada’s finest. If you’re not overly interested in the orchestra, the shenanigans of their ex-CEO and his missus, nor even the half-wits who appointed him in the first place, are a cipher in the musical world.

  • Andy says:

    Caution! Don’t click on “here”. There’s a good story, sure, but also a photo of a very hairy, very sweaty JM in bathing trunks splayed on a beach cushion alongside a woman who might have inspired Fats Waller to write his song “Your Feets Too Big”. Once seen, you won’t be able to unsee. Please pass the Gravol.

    • Bruce says:

      …So of course I had to look.

      Not that bad. You’re likely to see much worse (or “worse”) if you ever go to an actual beach.

      (And the feet are not huge, it’s just foreshortening — that visual trick where things closer to the camera look enormous and things farther away look tiny.)

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