Alison Vulgamore has decided to leave the Philadelphia Orchestra at the end of 2017 after seven storm-tossed years.
Vulgamore, 59, arrived from the Atlanta Symphony and managed to stabilise the artistic side with Yannick Nézet-Séguin as music director.
But the orchestra kept losing money and there’s no easy fix for that.
Read Peter Dobrin here.
The family has informed us of the death of Patricia Carroll, a busy pianist on the London scene in the 1950s and an influential teacher at the Royal College of Music for 37 years.
Among her pupils was the soprano Dame Sarah Connolly, who said that Patricia Carroll ‘was key in building up my confidence.’
An obituary appears in the Telegraph.
The ex-chief of the New York Philharmonic is in line, we hear, to succeed Thomas Hengelbrock at the NDR Elbphilharmonie, where he used to be principal guest conductor.
Hengelbrock announced this week that he’s standing down in 2019. A successor will be announced in Hamburg on Friday.
Alan Gilbert’s name is in the frame, but it’s not fixed.
There is local opposition to an American maestro in a German trophy hall. It could go either way.
Watch this space.
The composer Jacques Charpentier, a student of Messiaen, wrote more than 150 scores and was organist of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris.
His day job, from 1958 on, was as a senior bureaucrat in the Ministry of Culture, deciding on musical proposals and careers. In 1978 he moved south to become director of music for the city of Nice.
He married the mezzo-soprano Danielle Vouaux-Charpentier.
Jacques Charpentier died on June 15 at his home, near Carcassonne, aged 83.
A national committee of Heidi Waleson, George Loomis, Alex Ross, John Rockwell and Arthur Kaptainis has decided on the best new US opera of the past 12 months.
It is Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves, premiered on September 22, 2016 by Opera Philadelphia.
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has appointed Elim Chan as principal guest conductor.
Elim, 30 and from Hong Kong, is presently a Dudamel Fellow with the LA Phil. In September she becomes Chief Conductor of Norrlands Operan in Umeå, Sweden.
She conducted the Scots in February, standing in for Neeme Järvi, and struck an instant rapport.
Richard Toop, former teaching assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen and latterly professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, has died at 71 after a long illness.
Richard was a fine writer about music – I commissioned his biography of Ligeti for the Phaidon composers series – and an inspiring teacher. Students complained of exhaustion at his lessons because his mind ran so much faster than theirs.
Originally from Chichester, he studied at Hull before moving to Cologne as Stockhausen’s aide. He migrated to Australia in 1975.
Richard Toop, Karlheinz Stockhausen & Stephen Truelove at The Stockhausen Courses 2002 photo: ingvar loco nordin/Stockhausen Estate
Conservative members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, alarmed at the recent pace of change, voted out their elected leaders in a secret ballot this morning.
Andreas Grossbauer, who led the orchestra towards greater transparency about its Nazi past and towards greater gender equality in its ranks, was deposed.
The new chiefs are Daniel Froschauer, a violinist (pictured), as chairman and Michael Bladerer, double-bass, as managing director.
The next sound you will hear is the clocks being turned back.
Chicago Opera Theater has announced Lidiya Yankovskaya as its music director, starting now.
Born in St Petersburg, raised in the US, Lidiya is a graduate of Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors. She is presently artistic director of Boston’s Juventus New Music Ensemble and of Boston New Music Festival.
The tenor put in a plug for watching big stars at live cinema relays in a BBC Today programme interview.
Listen to it here, starting at 2:24:00
The Times,a Murdoch newspaper, has published the following notice today among Corrections and Clarifications at the foot of its letters page:
Opera Holland Park has asked us to clarify that, while it was previously part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s cultural portfolio, it has been a fully independent charity since October 2015 (News, June 19).
The paper yesterday published a two-page spread under the headline:
Council made fortune on social housing… and lost it on opera.
The article strongly implied that the poor were left to rot while the rich swilled champagne at Holland Park. That equation was wholly false. But being a Murdoch newspaper means never having to say you’re sorry.
The British pianist Kyla Greenbaum, who has died at 95, gave the UK premieres of Arnold Schoenberg’s piano concerto at the BBC Proms in August 1945, and of his Fantasia, with the violinist Tibor Varga.
Her showpiece was Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande, an exotic work that barely outlasted its composer.
Kyla was a lively London character in the 1960s, fading from the limelight when she accompanied her psychiatrist husband, Andrew Crowcroft, to a posting in Canada.
