The Italian conductor Marzio Conti has told the Oviedo Filarmonía in Spain that he’s giving up in June.

Not just as Oviedo’s music director, which he has been for six years, but conducting altogether. ‘It exhaust you,’ he tells Codalario. ‘I want to do other things.’

He plans to study history of art.

First Generalmusikdirektor Kent Nagano sicks out of Mahler 8.

Now Thomas Hengelbrock has told NDR Elbphilharmonie he can’t make next week’s concerts.

The Italian Antonello Manacorda jumps in.

From the latest Lebrecht Album of the Week, a 5-star:

In the dying years of the Soviet Union, I became aware of dozens of symphonists who survived on the fringes of musical society, tolerated by the authorities but never given a proper hearing. Once I got past the immense, historic figures of Mieczyslaw Weinberg and Galina Ustvolskaya, both pivotal in the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, I kept discovering other samizdat composers who, for some reason, seemed to speak my language. At a time when western musicians were subjected to a dictatorship of style and serial ideology if they wanted to get on the BBC, these covert Russians were free to write as they pleased….

Read on here.

And here.

And here.

Portrait by Tatyana Apraksina

From a revealing 2013 interview by the superb German tenor, who passed away tragically this week:

‘My most unfortunate career-defining moment was when I sang Parsifal in Bayreuth, where I had already made successful appearances as Walther von Stolzing and Erik. I argued with the director, Christoph Schlingensief, who insisted on his own, very peculiar and solipsistic vision of the piece. His production was a mishmash of satanic rituals, orgies, garbage and hundreds of video projections, while I tried as much as I could to keep to Wagner’s intentions. The German media, which solely advocates provocative opera productions, criticised me harshly for arguing with Schlingensief. I was too naïve at the time to calculate what the consequences of disagreeing with him might be.

‘I’m still proud of what I did, and that I stood up for Wagner’s music, but in the end I lost not only the love of my life – Katharina Wagner – but also my conviction of the good in most people, which I assumed prevailing in my early life. Schlingensief died of cancer in 2010. That whole period was very unhappy.’

Erato has signed the up-and-coming Francophone Arod Quartet, multinational protégés of the Berlin-based Artemis Quartet.

That how Europe works, at its best.

The quartet is composed of Jordan Victoria and Alexandre Vu (violin), Corentin Apparailly (viola) and Samy Rachid (cello).

Cast your mind back to a golden era when labels could sell solo and orchestral performances by wind and woodwind virtuoso…. Even then, it’s hard to imagine that one label devoted 40 CDs to a clarinet player.

RCA did.

Richard Stoltzman’s 40 CDs are just about to come together in a boxed set.

We have been sent a funeral director’s notification for Bruce Brewer, a lyric tenor who once lit up the world stage. The critic Bernard Jacobson wrote that he possessed ‘a voice of superfine delicacy and a technique that enabled him to pass from the bottom of his range to stratospheric high notes without any perceptible break between registers.’

Originally from San Antonio, where he made his stage debut in 1970, he went on to sing at Covent Garden, La Scala, Florence, Paris and Boston. He was married for a while to the mezzo Joyce Castle.

Bruce died at the beginning of March, at St. Fraimbault, Lassay-Les-Chateaux, France, aged 75.

Patrick Nolan has been appointed artistic director of the carelessly named Opera Queensland.

He’s the former the former artistic director of Sydney’s Legs on The Wall contemporary dance and theatre company.

Dr David Dao, who has reached a private settlement with United Airlines after being dragged off a plane in Chicago, has been recognised as a prominent musician at the former Saigon National Music School.

The author of two prizewinning songs, “Tat Nuoc Dau Dinh” and “Ta Ve Ta Tam Ao Ta,” he founded a group called Bach Viet.

At the fall of Saigon in 1975 he fled to the US and requalified as a medical doctor.

United is known for being especially horrible to musicians.

And we thought this was an assembly of classics scholars…

Michael Dugher, 42, Labour’s former shadow culture secretary, is stepping down as MP for Barnsley East to become chief executive of UK Music, a lobbying and promotional group.

He was sacked by Jeremy Corbyn in January for ‘serial disloyalty’.

Lior Shambadal, chief conductor of the Berlin Symphoniker, has informed us of the death this week, from cancer, of the orchestra’s long-standing director, Jochen Thärichen.

Thärichen, who was 73, was Berlin musical royalty.

The son of Werner Thärichen, principal percussionist of the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwängler and Karajan from 1948 to 1984, Jochen played trumpet for 20 years in the symphony orchestra until he took over as its director in 1989. After his official retirement in 2004, he continued running the orchestra without pay. He underwent surgery for cancer last October, but remained in charge until the day he died.

Lior Shambadal will conduct a Berlin concert in Jochen’s memory on May 21.