press release:
The Dallas Opera is proud to announce the names of the six distinguished professionals selected to participate in the third annual residency of the Linda and Mitch Hart Institute for Women Conductors at The Dallas Opera taking place November 5 – 19, 2017 in Dallas, Texas:
- Alba Bomfim (Brazil)
- Mélisse Brunet (France)
- Lina Gonzalez-Granados (USA/Colombia)
- Karin Hendrickson (USA)
- Carolyn Watson (USA/Australia)
- Monika Wolinska (Poland)
A total of 161 women conductors and professional musicians applied by the April 30thdeadline.
Prosecutors in Seoul have finally, after a ten-month investigation, dropped alleged embezzlement charges against Myun Whun Chung, former music director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra.
The investigation was triggered by a former chief executive of the orchestra with connections to a powerful political caste. The dropping of the case may be connected to recent regime change in South Korea.
Chung, 64, is now planning to start a new orchestra in the country for players aged 19 to 28.
The celebrated film director was cheered to the rafters last night in Berlin, at the end of Bizet’s Pearl Fishers. Wenders has been pursued for years by Bayreuth to stage an opera, on one occasion pulling out at the last moment.
It took Daniel Barenboim to entice him onto the opera stage, to great acclaim.
No reviews in yet.
Phil Evans, conductor of the Philadelphia Symphonic Winds and until recently director of music at Valley Forge Military Academy & College, has been deported from the US.
PSW is ‘an American band with a British accent’.
Phil has been obliged to open a Kickstarter page here to help his family with relocation costs.
A further sign of diminishing times.
The Romanian critic Alexandru Patrascu, a contributor to the London-based Opera magazine, has lost a libel case brought against him by the conductor Tiberiu-Ionuț Soare, former head of Bucharest National Opera, and the soprano Irina Iordăchescu. The pair claimed 100,000 in damages for Patrascu’s reporting. They were awarded one-tenth of that sum, but it is nonetheless a heavy penalty and an affront to free speech.
The dispute centres on a period when Soare was appointed interim manager of BNO in April 2016 after the turbulent dismissal of the renowned Danish dancer Johan Kobborg and his wife, Romania’s most celebrated dancer, Alina Cojocaru. Patrascu reported these events for international outlets and on his own blog. No other Romanian critic dared to report the story, such is the state of free speech in the EU-member country. (Soare gave his own account on Slipped Disc in May 2016.)
Together with the soprano Iordăchescu, Soare sued the critic both for his own blog posts and for comments that appeared on it.
On Friday, the conductor won. The critic has been given the right to appeal, and will do so.
Meantime, he states his response (in English) on a new blog site here:
I love opera passionately. This is the reason for this blog, which is now in danger to disappear.
In the spring of 2016, I chose to sound an alarm regarding the situation at Bucharest National Opera, during the huge scandal that triggered the ousting of Johan Kobborg, artistic manager of the ballet company, and of Alina Cojocaru, the most important Romanian ballerina. Some tens of important other dancers left the company together with them, and proved afterwards the value they had acquired while working under Johan Kobborg’s management, as they went to international ballet companies.
A unique situation in the musical world: not a single Romanian music critic wrote about those events…
