Cleveland Institute of Music has recruited violinists Ilya and Olga Kaler to the CIM String Faculty from the start of the 2018-19 academic year.

Ilya won the Gold Medal at the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, the Sibelius in Helsinki and the Paganini in Genoa. Olga is an outstanding soloist and teacher.

We have received reports from his students of the death of Grigori Zhislin, an eminent soloist and teacher, latterly at the Royal College of Music in London. He lived in the UK from 1990 and had been seriously ill for some years.

Zhislin, who played both violin and viola, worked closely with the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and premiered his concertos for both instruments.

His pupils include Daniel Hope, Dmitri Sitkovetsky and Sergey Khatchatrayan.

He died on May 2, in Berlin.

UPDATE: His death has been confirmed on his Facebook page.

 

Photo (c) Sergo Kuruliszwili

 

 

Alastair Willis, who grew up in Surrey and graduated from Bristol and Kingston universities, has been named music director of South Bend Symphony Ochestra, starting in July.

He succeeds Tsung Yeh, who retired in May 2016 after 28 years.

Alastair, 46, was until recently music director of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra.

Announcing his final season this morning as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattle ran through some of his desert island repertoire and artists by way of farewell.

One of them, the tenor Mark Padmore, will be artist in residence across six concerts through the season.

Rattle also let it be known that one of his innovations – late night concerts – are being discontinued, for reasons he could not specify. He will play the series out as pianist in Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

Full programme here.

The violinist has shared half of his Genesis prize with 14 music and disability causes in Israel.

Reports here and here.

photo: Musethica

The Kalamzoo Symphony is making progress with its orchestra of Syrian kids.

Watch.

Sixty years after its premiere at the Met, Glyndebourne is planning the UK premiere of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, a work of unabashed romanticism and limited uptake.

Here’s the full Glyndebourne 2018 season:

  • PUCCINI Madama Butterfly
    Annilese Miskimmon’s Tour 2016 production makes its Festival debut, conducted by Omer Meir Wellber.
  • STRAUSS Der Rosenkavalier
    A revival of the Festival 2014 production from Richard Jones, conducted by Robin Ticciati.
  • HANDEL Giulio Cesare
    A revival of David McVicar’s 2005 production, conducted by William Christie.
  • DEBUSSY Pelléas et Mélisande
    A new production from Stefan Herheim, conducted by Robin Ticciati.
  • HANDEL Saul
    A return for Barrie Kosky’s 2015 production, conducted by Laurence Cummings.
  • BARBER Vanessa
    A UK premiere directed by Keith Warner, conducted by Jakub Hrůša.

And here’s how what it sounds like:

Analysis by John Borstlap:

On April 27, the French Radio Orchestra presented a concert entirely dedicated to a French composer who began his career within the established modernism, where Pierre Boulez was arbiter of taste and executive of a ‘party line’.

Bacri’s first works were modernist, dense in ideas, and filled to the brim with dissonance as was custom at the time – until he encountered the works of Giacinto Scelsi. Bacri met the eccentric composer in Italy while spending – in the early eighties – his obligatory period at the French Academy in Rome after winning his Premier Prix. The works of Scelsi, being the extreme opposite of Bacri’s in its concentration on a minimum of material (often merely one tone with microtone oscillations), made Bacri realize that a wealth of extreme material is not necessarily saying more that a single, concentrated tone that has enough of itself.

 

Scelsi’s minimalist works acted like a pin, puncturing the modernist balloon in Bacri’s mind. He came to understand the reason of the timelessness of the great music which already exists and has been able to bridge vast spaces of time and place, and still forming the repertoire of classical music today, alive and kicking in spite of the critique from socialist and populist quarters. From then on, Bacri began to explore tradition, without surrendering to compromise or imitation.

This fell beyond the scope of established new music in France, with the result that Bacri found himself outside the establishment. But with the withering of modernist ideals in recent years, Bacri’s music has got increasingly performed and began to be understood as a viable way out of stagnating modernism. In this he was not alone: Karol Beffa, Richard Dubugnon and Guillaume Connesson are, like Bacri, trying to find alternative ways of looking at new music and of finding stimulating perspectives away from the mental prison that new music in France had become.

So, this concert at Radio France is, in fact, a spectacular confirmation of the place new tonal music has acquired in the heart of the French musical establishment, and it celebrates Bacri as one of its most gifted and muscially profound composers. In 2012 a lecture at the Collège de France by the pianist Jerome Ducros criticising atonal modernism, drew a flood of furious, hateful condemnations from the modernist establishment. The ‘affaire Ducros’ created a flow of articles pro and contra that ran in the media until 2015. But this Bacri concert by the French radio orchestra seals the end of the Boulez domination …. and opens-up a perspective of hope for new music as an organic part of the normal, regular performance culture.

The concert can be heard on this link:

Bacri’s music is not ‘conservative’ because of its interpretation of traditional values, because his interpretations are always personal, expressive and authentic, using a familiar-sounding musical language but what is ‘said’, is always new. Basically, it is a return to normal practice of how a musical tradition functions. As John Allison wrote in The Times: “Bacri is a composer capable of renewing an old-fashioned medium.” But Bacri does not discard the idea of modernism altogether, there is in his music a certain tension breaking-through the harmonous surface and creating moments of ambiguity and instability, with unexpected and subtle surprises. Bacri wrote two very interesting booklets, in which he describes his artistic development and how he came to find a new understanding of the tonal tradition: “Notes étrangères” and “Crise (notes étrangères II)” – unfortunately as yet not available in English.

As he said himself: “My music is not neo-Classical, it is Classical, for it retains the timeless aspect of Classicism : the rigour of expression. My music is not neo-Romantic, it is Romantic, for it retains the timeless aspect of Romanticism : the density of expression. My music is Modern, for it retains the timeless aspect of Modernism : the broadening of the field of expression. My music is Postmodern, for it retains the timeless aspect of Postmodernism : the mixture of techniques of expression.”

Photo (c) Thierry Martinot / Lebrecht Music&Arts

Reuters is reporting that Deutsche Entertainment AG (DEAG), owners of Raymond Gubbay Ltd, are finalising another UK purchase.

DEAG has been criticised by Germany’s Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel for allegedly misrepresenting its financial results in 2014-15. Raymond Gubbay has broken away from the company that bears his name and is starting another venture.

Fashionable and controversial, David Chipperfield Architects have beaten off tough competition to win the design contract for Edinburgh’s £45 million hall for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The losers on the shortlist were David Adjaye, Richard Murphy, KPMB (Toronto), Barozzi Veiga from Switzerland and Cambridge’s Allies and Morrison.

No sign yet of the winning design.

Here’s where the hall will go up:

 

The rock festival has booked Haçienda Classical with Manchester Camerata is to launch its main stage events this year on the opening Friday morning.

No idea what they are going to play.

The press release is quite incoherent with excitement.

photo (c) Andrew Allcock

The Vienna State Opera is offering a free livestream of Tosca, with Angela Gheorghiu and Jonas Kaufmann.

Click here next Monday, May 8, at 7pm Vienna time (6pm London, 1pm New York).