So many Russian composers of the Shostakovich and post-DSCH era have suffered from the timidity of music directors – their reluctance to propose or perform great music by unfamiliar names.

Weinberg is the premier casualty.

Boris Tischchenko is another.

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

Try as I might, I can’t stop listening to these late works of a Russian composer who was close to Shostakovich but never tried, as others did, to imitate him. The eighth symphony, written in 2008 when Tishchenko was mortally ill, draws the ear into an eerie landscape of ghosts, trolls and spooks, weird and possibly political. The composer thought it might make a good companion piece to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. He was right: it would. But where is the conductor or orchestra manager that dares to do such a thing in timid 2017?

Read on here.

The Halle Orchestra of Manchester intends to open to open a state music school in Stoke-on-Trent, it was announced today.

Pupils from seven to 19 years old will spend at least two-fifths of their time in music classes, taught by members of the Halle Orchestra and Chorus.

The pilot scheme appears to be unique a UK first.

One of the less discreditable secrets guarded at Bayreuth is that Richard Wagner’s son was, behind the facade of marriage, primarily homosexual.

Now, Berlin’s gay museum has begun research on an exhibition to celebrate his complicated life.

Don’t expect Katharina Wagner to attend.

Details here.

Luigi Pestalozza died yesterday, aged 88.

A fighting partisan in the Second World War, he wrote books and essays on Luigi Nono, Schoenberg, Mahler and Russian music. He founded the journal Musica/Realtà in 1980.