The UK music collections agency has given figures for 2016.

PPL raised a record £212.1 million ($273.6 million) across three revenue streams – public performance and dubbing, broadcast, and international, up by £15.1 million (8 per cent) on 2015.

Some 83,102 performers and 9,589 recording rights holders will receive payments.

Hugo A. Valverde Villalobos, a 22 year-old horn student at Rice University, has won the vacancy for second horn at the Metropolitan Opera.

He succeeds Michelle Reed Baker, who retired last week after 27 years.

Hugo, from Costa Rica, has been studying for this chance since he was seven years old.

Kevin Lin was passing through London with the Curtis Symphony last Friday when he learned that he had won the position of co-leader with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Kevin, 24, graduates this summer and will join the LPO in August.

The death has been communicated of Christopher Roselli, an artist with a busy opera career who also taught at the New School in New York.

Chris sang in Robert Wilson’s Metropolitan Opera Lohengrin, Julie Taymor’s production of Grendel, Peter Sellars’ Tristan Project, Sir Jonathan Miller’s staging of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Mark Morris’ production of Four Saints in Three Acts and Marthe Keller’s Tosca at the Verbier Music Festival.

In all, he sang 40 roles with US opera companies, as well as many concert performances abroad. He was Voice and Speech Coordinator at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute/NYU Program, and Chair of the Voice and Music Department at CAP21 as well as part-time Professor of Voice at Mannes Next and The New School.

He is survived by his parents, a sister and two brothers.

Extraordinary scenes yesterday afternoon at the Royal Opera House.

A packed Bank Holiday crowd were settling in their seats for a Don Carlo matinée when an announcement was made of a change of plan. Kristin Lewis, singing Elisabetta, had fallen ill an hour before the performance and been taken to hospital. There was no understudy as Kristin was covering for another singer and this was the end of the run.

It was announced that part of the cast would sing 90 minutes of highlights and the audience would be fully refunded. The result was that excerpts from Acts 1&2 were performed in front of the curtain and all of Act 3 fully staged, with conductor Bertrand de Billy calling out the next number to the orchestra. Acts 4 and 5 were omitted.

Veterans in the orchestra said they had never known anything like that happen before.

press photo: ROH

Riccardo Muti will conduct Cosi fan tutte at the Vienna State Opera in 2019.

His daughter Chiara Muti will direct.

‘She proved her talent with Manon Lescaut in Rome and Marriage of Figaro in Naples and Bari,’ says Papa Muti to the Italian press.

After the failed experiment with Lionel Bringuier, we hear that the Zurich Tonhalle is about to announce a new music director.

The incoming maestro will be Paavo Järvi, 54, former chief of the Orchestre de Paris, now with NHK in Japan.

The musicians are happy with the decision.

Paavo is good value. Zurich has a terrific group of musicians and a totally soporific audience.

UPDATE: The news has now been officially announced. Paavo starts in 2019.

Press release: Järvi’s five-year contract will include both touring and recording. Prior to taking up the post in 2019/20 he will be present in Zurich to give a performance with the Estonian Festival Orchestra at the Tonhalle Maag in January 2018, and will also spend three weeks during the 2018/19 season with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. 

A bout of drop-outs at the Vienna Opera has required the Israeli soprano Chen Reiss to stand in as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier. She is already in the cast of Fidelio as Marzelline and will sing the two roles back to back.

The German President’s annual benefit concert with the Berlin Philharmonic that took place in March raised almost 140,000 Euros. The money will go to the United Nations Childrens Emergency Fund, for which the orchestra is an ambassador.

The Russian ministry of culture has published the declared 2016 earnings of the top ten arts millionaires.

Valery Gergiev came top with 154.45 million rubles ($2.73 million).

Vladimir Spivakov was third with 76.14 million ($1.35m).

Yuri Temirkanov and Yuri Bashmet were the other musicians in the ten.

These declarations are not definitive. In a kleptocracy whose president hides his billions in Panama, it would be unrealistic to expect artists to maintain all of their assets in the motherland.