He’ll incorporate it in his Said Academy, he says, making the Pierre Boulez Saal the most important venue for Arabic music in Europe.

Report here.

Reports in St Petersburg have revealed an unusual cause of death for the great ballet restorer Sergei Vikharev, who died last week aged 55.

Apparently, he was given anaesthetic for cosmetic dental treatment in a private clinic. The anaesthetic used was Propofol, administered in some US states for the death penalty.

Vikharev never emerged from the artificially induced coma.

Awful.

Read here.

From the Telegraph:

When Private Richard Howard began making his violin, he envisaged the day he would return from the battlefield to play it. 

It was a dream cruelly shattered when the soldier met his death on the first day of the Battle of Messines in  1917.

Now, 100 years later, the violin – carefully completed after being found – has been played at his graveside. 

Read on here.

I got taken to a concert of cantorial music last night in Tel Aviv’s Heichal Hatarbut. Not my usual choice of music, but the hall was packed and the four cantors were pretty good.

The orchestra was the Symphonette Ra’anana, described by the compere as ‘one of the best in Israel, in the world, even.’

Not sure about that, but my eye kept being drawn to the clarinet player, sitting in the middle of the last row. Her enthusiasm for the music was uncontained – not just when she played but, more evident still, when she had nothing to do and could sway with the rhythm and mouth some of the words.

Her playing, too, was top-notch.

I believe her name is Michal Beit Halachmi, and here she is in klezmer action.

The first three Toulon performances of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette have been lost to a strike called by unions representing the orchestra musicians and chorus.

The strike is indefinite, no end in sight.

It’s rare for an orchestra to agree on anything without a single dissenting voice.

Donald Munro tells us that in Fresno, which yesterday appointed a music director, Rei Hotoda was the unanimous choice among six candidates both of the orchestra’s board and of its musicians’ search committee.

That augurs well for Fresno.

Donald was laid off last month after 16 years as arts writer for The Fresno Bee. He has started his own blog here. Please share this link among friends.

He’s too good a writer to lose.

Here’s a sample:

On a crisp Sunday in March, the final notes of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 floated into memory at the Saroyan Theatre. The audience broke out in tumultuous applause. Four standing ovations followed. Many people in the audience at the Fresno Philharmonicconcert, including me, had just come to the same conclusion: Rei Hotoda nailed her audition.

That premonition was confirmed today when the orchestra announced that Hotoda is the eighth music director (and first woman) in Fresno Philharmonic history. Her name was revealed at a standing-room only event at Pardini’s.

The St Louis Symphony has appointed Stéphane Denève to succeed David Robertson as music director in 2019.

Denève, 45, has been music director in Scotland and Stuttgart. He is presently with the Brussels Philharmonic.

He has guest-conducted in St Louis since 2003.