Breitbart News, mouthpiece of Trumpworld, reports that the proposed Congressional budget increases the budgets of both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, agencies that President Donald Trump planned to eliminate in his own budget proposal this year….
Additionally, the budget proposal would increase the budgets of both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities by $2 million each, bringing their respective budgets to $150 million in total.
It looks as if lobbying Congress has saved arts grants, for the time being. But Breitbart suggests this was a compromise that was forced on the White House. Next time round, Trump will want total abolition.
The picture Breitbart uses was selected to show the NEA as decadent and useless. We won’t reprint it.
Universal Music has just upgraded Rebecca Allen from managing director to President of Decca UK.
Becks, who started out 17 years ago on the label’s press desk, has enjoyed a stunning run of recent success: Top 10 albums in quick succession with Ball & Boe, Dame Vera Lynn and Imelda May. Ball & Boe’s Together is now double platinum after becoming the UK’s Christmas number one album following its release in November 2016.
She runs like the wind, so long as it’s for charity.
What’s more, she says she has only just got started…
Go, Becks!
Several media outlets are reporting that the new President of France wanted to become a pianist. Some say he won awards.
Boutique label Somm are bringing out 16 unpublished tracks by the British contralto Kathleen Ferrier.
These recordings are from two sources. Several are from the BBC’s own archives and include Ferrier’s first broadcast of Rubbra’s Three Psalms Op. 61, of which she was the dedicatee, five Schubert Lieder, four by Brahms and Parry’s Love is a bable, recorded at the 1948 Edinburgh Festival, which makes a delightful conclusion to the CD.
The other source is the remarkable collection of Kenneth Leech, a composer and engineer who, from the 1930s to the 1950s, recorded numerous broadcasts, mainly using Bakelite and metal discs – the usual way for an enthusiast to preserve radio programmes at that time. This collection is stored at the National Sound Archive in the British Library.
Out next month. Can’t wait.
The troubled post of music director of the Komische Oper Berlin has falled to the Latvian Ainars Rubikis, formerly music director in Novosibirsk until he got into trouble with a dissident Tannhäuser.
Rubikis, 39, won the Bamberg Mahler competition in 2010 and the Salzburg Nestlé award a year later.
The Komische orchestra had rejected the company‘s first-choice music director, Antonello Manacorda. Let’s hope they give Rubikis a warmer welcome.
From our morning …
… tweets: the Dutch baritone Bästiaan Everink, presently singing Marschner’s The Vampire at Theater Koblenz.
Bastiaan is a former combat soldier so be careful with your comments.
