The Kremerata Baltica were due to fly yesterday from New York (Newark) to Toronto. Extra seats had been booked for four cellos, and confirmed by email.

At the check-in desk, Air Canada announced that is was ‘policy’ not to carry more than one cello per flight. Prior to check-in, all four cellos had been officially confirmed by Air Canada representatives, and confirmation emails for all of them were presented at the airport.

Unable to take their instruments, the four cellists had to wait for hours for other flights to Toronto. In the end, they took three different flights and just made in on stage in time.

Lesson to orchestras: Don’t fly Air Canada until they clarify their attitude.

Arturo Toscanini, asked what was required to cast Il Trovatore, is said to have replied: ‘Only the four best singers in the world’.

Vienna did not quite achieve that elite distinction in its first new Trovatore of the 21st century, but it came close, breathtakingly close.

It is hard to imagine there is a more moving Leonora anywhere at the moment than Anna Netrebko, visually eye-catching and vocally incomparable. She commands the stage with ease and uses her pianissimo to even greater effect than her formidable great fortes.

Roberto Alagna gave his all as Manrico, sometimes more than his all, so determined was he to surmount the massed sound of two armies and an orchestra. In tender moments, notably in duet with his doomed mother Azucena, he was compassion itself.

Luciana D’Intino’s Azucena walked the edge of madness across four acts while simultaneously giving the impression of being the only sane person on stage, secure in her vocal serenity.

Ludovic Tezier was beyond evil as the Conte di Luna, expressing his awareness of the wrong he was doing with several shades of musical subtlety.

Daniele Abbado directed with taste and discretion, setting the opera in the Spanish Civil War; Marco Armiliano conducted with an Abbado-like cohesion; and the chorus and Vienna Philharmonic orchestra were, as so often, in a class all their own.

The bonus? Jongmin Park, was a flawless Ferrando, rolling out the complicated backstory without one superfluous gesture. A Vienna ensemble member, aged 30, he may well be the next great bass.

When opera is this intense, you wonder why it can’t always be like this.

 

Netrebko with conductor Armiliato. Photo (c) Michael Poehn

The incomparable Victor Borge.

Who’s the singer?

Le Figaro reports that the pianist and her ex-husband Charles Dutoit were refused entry to the composer’s museum, which is at the centre of a testamentary dispute.

Read here.

A report from our weekly diarist, Anthea Kreston, on the world’s newest concert hall:

 

As we approached the series of peninsulas in the heart of the industrial area of Hamburg, a rippling wave began to emerge above the city skyscrapers. As if in motion, the structure caught the light of the sky, of the water surrounding it on three sides, and the multi-colored lights of the city. This was the famed new hall – the Elbphilharmonie, covered in 500 individually designed pieces of glass, each curved and shaped, build upon a massive trapezoidal historic 7 story brick warehouse. 

Inside houses three concert halls, the largest of which is arguably the most advanced acoustic structure in the world. In addition – offices, restaurants and stores, a public floor which breaches the old and new structures, and the highest habitable residencies in Hamburg, yours for the lowest astronomical price available. This is a building which has already begun to shape the city, if not the country, in the way the Sydney Opera House has done for that city. 

When I first got the call from my quartet manager, the inimitable Sonia Simmenauer, asking me to put together a string trio for a performance at the opening festival for the Elbphilharmonie, Jason and I immediately thought of our old friend, Volker Jacobsen, the original violist of the Artemis Quartet – someone we had known from our student days together working with the Juilliard Quartet. The piece – notoriously difficult Schoenberg String Trio (written in 1946 while in a fitful and uncertain recovery period following a nearly fatal heat attack), would require hard practice and detailed score study to overcome the natural tendency to overthink in such pieces – to be unable to find flow and group swing.  We were all up for it, and had two “warm-up” concerts in Berlin to get ready. 

As our taxi crossed the bridge, traffic came to a standstill – people were bulging over the sidewalks and a line of cabs was dropping and picking up visitors. The dark red brick underbuilding itself is huge – and perfectly fills the unusual shape of the peninsula – only space for a slim walkway separates building from water. People crowded against the ticket lines – a rush of many languages – the hoity toity and hoi polloi next to one another. The entrance looks like a movie theater in some ways – not grand – and all visitors enter the structure through one portal – the longest escalator I have ever been on – it undulates and only towards the end can you glimpse the destination – an entire floor, open to the public, which is between old and new. As you enter this floor, you feel as if you are outside, not on the 8th floor of a building, with another 18 floors above. There was a strong breeze, and it was cold. The walls themselves are all tall, curved glass – open to outside, with moveable panels. The floor is a pedestrian brick. 

As you walk around the perimeter, you feel as if you are on the bow of a huge steamer – the building sailing down the river.  Surrounding this testament to culture is a living, breathing industrial area -cranes, warehouses, ships, and looking down I watch a huge container ship glide by, looking from above like a ship made of legos. 

From here you can access the concert halls, restaurants, hotel and living quarters. Our dressing room was magnificent. A piano, a floor which curved up towards the ceiling, full bathroom, couches and even our own balcony, with an open curved window. The hall (we played in the chamber music hall) was a jewel box shaped hall with wooden walls hand-carved with miniature waves. 

The concert was sold out, but I think also a concert featuring a demonstration on how to make toast out of bread, then the directors cut of “Babette’s Feast” on an iPhone screen would have played to a full hall.  Concerts are overflowing, there is a buzz. The evening before YoYo Ma played in the big hall, and there was enthusiastic applause between his movements of Bach – a sure sign that there are people venturing out to hear music who are not all of the staid, well-trained sort. I always love applause between movements – it means we are forging new audiences. 

So – flow was achieved, and we now have an offer to record the Schoenberg on a label, and a manager. I think this side project of the Humboldt Streichtrio will be a perfect addition to my regular job in the quartet. And, I feel like I was there at the beginning of an amazing addition to the cultural landscape of Germany. 

The president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic has made a rare political intervention, publishing an op-ed in the LA Times on Trump’s closed-border policies.

Here’s what she writes:

 

 

The arts breed compassion, and as Americans, we are at our best when we are compassionate. It is among our founding principles, an ideal inscribed onto the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor…”

As the chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it is the rare occasion that moves me to comment on the actions of our federal government. However, in less than two weeks, our new president has attempted to limit public discourse, diminish cultural exchange and bully our neighbors. The executive order that temporarily — for now at least — bars entry into the U.S. of individuals from seven Muslim-majority nations is a terrible thing for America’s creative community, in whose work we find our common humanity. I must step forward.

My perspective is that of a lifelong musician and orchestra administrator. Having toured with American musicians abroad and invited their foreign peers to our stages for more than 40 years, I have experienced the universality of music firsthand. Music transcends borders; it gives voice to artists and communicates with audiences regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or religion.

In Southern California, we have no desire to repeat history’s mistakes: the shame of Japanese internment camps and of having turned our backs on many fleeing Europe during World War II. In fact, our own Los Angeles musical community was shaped by the émigrés and exiles who escaped the threat of oppressive regimes in Germany, Austria and Russia: Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Korngold, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, Ernst Toch, Max Steiner, Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, Fritzi Massary and Sergei Rachmaninoff among others.

Together, these musicians and composers advanced American music, contributed to our film industry and taught the next generation of musical creators. Like many “foreign” artists who preceded and followed them, their contributions to American culture, from the Tin Pan Alley songbook to film scoring, have been so profound and lasting that we have come to think of those ideas as wholly indigenous, forgetting the far-flung origins of their creators. The president’s executive order betrays our immigrant roots.

Already, artists have had their work and their lives upended by the administration’s actions. Kinan Azmeh, acclaimed Syrian clarinetist and member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, is uncertain as to whether he will be able to return to his Brooklyn home of 16 years when he concludes a concert tour in Beirut this week. Los Angeles-based concert promoter Shari Rezai, who specializes in contemporary Persian music and brings artists from Iran to the United States, has canceled six shows. Performers including London-based Kazakh violinist Aisha Orazbayeva and Berlin-based electronic musician Robert Henke have opted out of U.S. appearances in a show of solidarity with those trapped by the order.

Music animates our society, increases our capacity for empathy and nurtures the public discourse that is central to a healthy democracy. At a time when the world needs more, not less, mutual understanding, we must resist the president’s anti-intellectualism and disregard for the power of the arts.

I urge the administration to rescind the executive order and reestablish an open exchange between artists and audiences worldwide. National security concerns can be addressed while we continue to welcome people from beyond our borders.

Deborah Borda is president and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn. and a visiting leader at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership.

Placido Domingo has sung the young Verdi’s old king at Covent Garden and the Met at the age of 75.

Running him close is Leo Nucci, the specialist Italian Verdi baritone, who is presently singing Nabucco at the Vienna State Opera. Nucci will be 75 in April. He shows no sign of strain. If the voice has lost a little lustre at the lower edge, there is no lack of voltage and the naturalness of his delivery is a delight. At full power, his is still an instrument of wonder.

photo: Vienna Opera/Michael Poehn

Guenter Kraemer’s 2001 production requires him to suffer a stroke during Abigaille’s coup and to make a miraculous recovery in the third act. He brings tears to the eyes with his disability and a little gulp of joy at his incredulous return to full health.

You would not want to meet Anna Smirnova’s Abigaille without an armed escort. She is menacing, brutal and alarmingly lyrical with an apparently limitless top reach. Miro Dvorsky and Roberto Tagliavini were in fine fettle as Ismaele and Zaccaria, but the Tatar mezzo Ilseyar Khayrullova was colourless on her Vienna debut and dramatic tension went limp at the finale. Thielemann’s ex-understudy Guillermo Garcia Calvo conducted with a very long stick. The piccolo, flute and cellos solos from the Vienna Philharmonic deserved threee encores all their own.

The abiding memory, though will be Nucci, a dictator defiant of age, struck down by a cruel disease and finding a stubborn way to cope with disability. Moving, at times, beyond words.

 

The ballerina Maria Alexandrova, 38, has announced on Instagram that she is leaving the company:

My dear beloved colleagues and spectators I want to say heartfelt THANK YOU to all of you for this amazing story we shared together in Bolshoi. But this great part of my life is over. I took the decision to turn this page. Artist’s place is on stage, the rest is just an illusion and unnecessary soul-devastating dither.

 

The Sryian-born clarinetist Kinan Azmeh has been allowed to return to the US at the end of a tour with Yo Yo Ma.

Kinan writes: ‘I was able after all to fly back to NY last night (as  green card holders are no longer included in the travel ban). It is simply crazy.

‘It is incredible how one signature can change the lives of so many people.

‘I look forward to making more music, keeping one’s voice loud and clear is what one should continue to do I guess.’

 

We have been informed by close friends of the death of Gervase de Peyer, the foremost British clarinet player of his time. Gervase was 90.

A founder of the Melos Ensemble, with whom he recorded extensively, Gervase was principal clarinet of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1956 to 1973. He was also a founder of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and an influential teacher.

 

 

His student Thomas Piercy writes:

‘His sound – bold, colorful – was in my head since I was a teenager. I moved to NYC to study with him and continued to learn from him until the last time we spoke. He was always there to give advice and encouragement, both about music and life.

‘His personality and musicality were a great match: bigger than life, full of energy, endlessly curious. His playing was unique and almost instantly recognizable: full of charm and elegance, with a powerful technique always at the service to the music. Many composers wrote their music for him, as they knew he would bring a great life to those little black dots on the page. Playing for him, and with him, was a walk on the high-wire: endlessly exciting and thrilling; always learning and living something new.

‘It was a true honor and joy to become friends with Gervase and his dear wife Katia. So many good laughs; so many good talks about music and life. My deepest sympathies to Katia and the family.

‘Very early on in my lessons with Gervase, he told me to write something down. He said it was important.
I still have that note.

“Do Something,
Say Something,
Don’t be Predictable.”‘

 

Leontyne Price will be 90 this week, on February 10.

 

 

Selected to sing at a 1953 Met fund-raiser, she had to wait eight years before she won a stage role in New York. By this time she had sung in Vienna with Herbert von Karajan and made debuts at Covent Garden, Salzburg, Verona and La Scala, where she was the first Afro-American to take the stage.

She was a trailblazer, an icon and an ambassador for art. In 1966, she opened the new Metropolitan Opera as Cleopatra in Anthony and Cleopatra by her close friend Samuel Barber. In all, she sang 201 times at the Met, blowing away the last vestiges of discrimination.

Happy birthday, Miss Price.


Dr Anna Edwards has been conducting research on why there is still resistance in some orchestras to woman conductors. For instance:

 

In a phone interview with the highly regarded conducting pedagogue Gustav Meier, he emphatically stated, “The main thing is that there is no difference between the men conductors and the women conductors. There is no difference.” Although I believe his heart was in the right place, I respectfully but emphatically disagree. We DO have differences. You can see and hear these differences. You can see our differences by the way we dress, by the gestures we use, by the gender we choose to identify ourselves with. You can hear the differences by the way we talk, by the way we problem solve, and by the way we connect with people.

Read her full essay here.

Dr. Anna Edwards is Music Director of Seattle Collaborative Orchestra and Saratoga Ochestra