Daniele Abbado’s new setting of Il Trovatore, the first new production since 2001 in the house where his father was once music director, resets Verdi’s masterpiece intriguingly in the Spanish civil war.

Netrebko sings Leonore. Ludovic Tézier is Conte di Luna. Roberto Alagna sings Manrico. Marco Armiliato conducts.

Slipped Disc will be there.

Valery Gergiev made the extraordinary claim in Belgrade, attributing the statistic to the Russian culture minister.

The Mariinsky now has two theatres in St Petersburg and a third on the Pacific seaboard.

Bolshoi, anyone?

The talks are stalled, reportedly over how much time off the music director gets while on tour, but Thielemann, 57, told the Dresdner Morgenpost today that he intends to stay beyond 2019, when his contract expires.

‘I get on well with the orchestra, they work well with me… In the German-speaking world, my position is the best,’ he said.

The man who protested about Leonard Slatkin’s mild political joke has sent the conductor a prompt apology:

The Budapest Festival Orchestra is due to fly to the US tomorrow.

On the eve of departure, an Iraq-born cellist who has lived in Hungary since 1985 was told by US consular officials that he could not fly.

Conductor Ivan Fischer called the State Department for ‘a long conversation’.

The US Embassy in Budapest later confirmed that the ban did not apply to those holding dual nationality. The cellist has Hungarian citizenship, so the orchestra can now fly to the US with all its members.

Report here (in Hungarian).

It has emerged that the former executive director of the New York Philharmonic will be leaving his post as  co-executive director of the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University.

Mehta, 76, shared the job with  Larry Furukawa-Schlereth, who retired last month.

Now, an incoming chairman has called time on Mehta and announced a search for a single director.

In the last tax returns, Mehta was the highest earner in the California state university system, making almost $486,000 in pay, plus $111,000 in benefits.

Three Yale alumni – Vincent Accettola, Paige Breen and Nicholas Brown – have been working with the National Youth Orchestra of China, modelled on the US version. They have booked a date for the orchestra to make its Carnegie Hall debut in July this year, conducted by Seattle’s Ludovic Morlot.

But it remains to be seen whether, under present circumstances, the Chinese players, aged 14 to 21, will receive visas.

Read on here.

Amy Tobin of Minnesota worked all her life with violins.

After finishing college in Boston, studying with Roman Totenberg, she worked for Fein Violins and was concertmaster in the St. Paul Civic Symphony orchestra from 2008, the year she was first diagnosed with breast cancer.

She also played in the professional Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, while retraining as a medical technician. Then the cancer returned.

Amy died on January 14, her son Liam’s eleventh birthday.

You can donate here to help support her boy.

From the current Lyon Opéra production of Arthur Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au Boucher:

Audrey Bonnet as Jeanne. Photo: Stofleth/ Opéra Lyon

The University of Tübinger musicologist, Professor Jörg Rothkamm, has presented what he claims to be the world premiere of an unpublished Lied, which is partly in the hand of Gustav Mahler.

The song was jointly written by Alma Mahler and her husband in 1910, to a text by Gustav Falke, at a time when the couple were trying to save their marriage. Rothkamm claims that Mahler’s contribution to the score is greater than previously suspected.

The song received its first public hearing yesterday in Tübingen from soprano Naomi Kautt, with pianist Dagmar Schmidt-Wehinger. Rothkamm maintains is has echoes of the tenth symphony.

We’d be curious to hear a recording.

It’s the Mirga effect.

press release:

Herefordshire-based philanthropists Clive and Sylvia Richards have made a £250,000 gift to support the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s extensive educational programme over the next five years.

The gift has been made in celebration of the appointment of the orchestra’s new Music Director, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – ‘conducting’s next superstar’ in the words of The Telegraph – whose initial concerts with the orchestra have attracted universal acclaim.  It will enable Mirga to play a leading role in the future development of the orchestra’s educational programme, and will contribute to the cost of around 30 concerts per year for young people, an extensive programme of musical activities in schools, and the orchestra’s work with gifted and talented young musicians which includes the CBSO Youth Orchestra and the CBSO Youth and Children’s Choruses.

The first instalment of the gift was made as Mirga conducted schools’ concerts at Symphony Hall, Birmingham for 8,000 local children on 30 and 31 January. 

The highly-rated young Canadian Jordan de Souza, newly appointed Kapellmeister of Berlin’s Komische Oper, has signed on with ex-IMG agent Bill Pallant’s new boutique.

He is only the third conductor on an overwhelmingly youthful singers’ list.