Kiev is due to host the 2017 Eurovision Song contest.

Or not, as the case may be.

When the most absurd of media events meets the most corrupt of regimes, anything can happen.

The BBC reports that Ukraine has no-one in place at the moment to manage the event.

Russia is rubbing its hands.

(Ukraine won the last contest with an overtly political song.)

Michael Naura, who died on Monday, was regarded as Germany’s foremost jazz pianist of the post-War era, almost a national institution.

From 1971 to 1999 he was head of the jazz division of the state broadcaster, NDR.

Sofia Gubaidulina, 85, has been given the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Madrid. It carries a rize of 400,000 Euros.

Past winners include Steve Reich, Boulez and Sciarrino.

It may not be strictly accurate to call her Russian, though that is her nationality. Her father was Tatar, her mother is believed to be Polish-Jewish.

Tina Guo, 31, was born in Shanghai and classically trained.

She had appeared as soloist with international orchestras and played with Midori at Walt Disney Hall.

But her career is now in the music she writes for video games, alongside gigs for Hans Zimmer and Justin Bieber.

Mention her name in LA. It will get you a table.

She can also play this.

The BBC is hosting Opera North’s 2016 production of the Wagner epic.

Click here.

And kiss the next 12 hours goodbye.

Or watch the one-minute version below.

From an interview in Strings magazine:

Haimovitz had just started giving a lesson at his Montreal studio on Feb. 2 to Cameron Crozman, a rising young cellist. They were working on the Poulenc Sonata when the 46-year-old Haimovitz got out of his seat to check the score and lost his balance while holding his prized 1710 “Matteo” Goffriller cello.

“I had to make a decision,” Haimovitz says in a telephone interview a week later. “Do I fall on top of my cello, or do I let go of the cello and not fall on top of it?”

As he tumbled to the floor, he pushed the instrument away.

“It was probably a good decision because had I fallen on top of it, it would have been in pieces,” he says. “At least now, it was very narrow [damage]. It just broke. The neck came off . . . . I was heartbroken.’

What happened next? Read here.

The opera, Girls of the Golden West, is scheduled at San Francisco Opera in November.

The director Peter Sellars tells Richard Fairman in the FT:

‘He is six minutes from the end. I’ve heard the first half of the finale . . . The subject matter is the Californian gold rush of 1851-52 and the huge shift that happened as people poured in from around the world, creating the first multicultural encounter. The opera is going to be hilarious, totally high-energy, and the music is fleet and alive, without a shred of self-pity. And its deeper strains are arriving perfectly on cue for the Trump era.’

Full article here.

photo: Chris Christodoulou/Lebrecht Music&Arts

More than two years ago on Slipped Disc, the violinist Aaron Rosand accused the late Isaac Stern of sabotaging his career. ‘I offended him early on when I refused his offers to coach me,’ wrote Rosand, proceeding to list a number of occasions when his path had been blocked by his senior colleague.

Now, correspondence has come to light in the Stern papers at the Library of Congress which shows Stern, late in life, heaping effusive praise on Rosand in letters to the Los Angeles patron and Heifetz friend, Richard Colburn.

Asking Colburn for a copy of a Rosand recording of the Ysaye sonatas he had heard in Colburn’s office in 1993, Stern writes: ‘From what I could hear briefly it was playing of an extraordinary quality. I have known him for many years and would like to congratulate him personally.’

After hearing the record, Stern wrote again to Colburn: ‘I found the playing extraordinary, particularly in the virtuoso works by Ysaye and others. The Bach is well played but somewhat romanticised. But it is played with so much authority, thought and cleanliness that it makes its own valid points.’

These do not sound like the comments of a lifelong adversary. But then life is seldom cast in black and white.

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When he was 19 and at university, Oliver Zeffman took his own ensemble, the Melos Sinfonia, to the Edinburgh Fringe.

Newly graduated from the Royal Academy, he has now been signed by Linda Marks at HarrisonParrott, foremost career-maker for young Finns.

London Jazz News reports the death of Heulwen Phillips, Project Director of JazzUK. Heulwen died on February 8, of cancer. She was 50.

Read on here.