Libby Abrahams, one of a cluster of boutique agents who fled a crumbling IMG, has signed a very young British conductor Ben Glassberg.

Ben, who is about 23, is assistant conductor at Glyndebourne this summer and founder of the London Young Sinfonia.

Libby’s other artists include Teodor Currentzis, Tomas Hanus and Helene Grimaud.

King Carl Gustav and Queen Silvia of Sweden will attend the festival for the first time, it has been announced.

They will attend the first night of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, directed by Barrie Kosky, conducted by Philippe Jordan.

The death has been announced of his author, Michael Bond, aged 91, yesterday in London.

Here’s his theme tune.

In what our local orchestra says is ‘an unusual move’, the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla has added the title of chief executive officer to John Axelrod’s role as music director.

The decision has been approved by the Spanish city in the hope that the conductor, a Harvard grad, will find ways of raising private and corporate funds to dig the company out of a deep black hole.

More here.

The Joyce Frankland Academy in Newport, near Saffron Walden, Essex, has withdrawn music from the timetable of 11-13 year-olds.

Its head says: ‘By doing this with music, we can be creative and we can continue to protect all the other subjects.’

Note the use of the term ‘creative’. Nothing to do with the arts.

Story here.

I’m seeing Otello at Covent Garden tonight.

Opening nights are not much fun any more so I decided to wait a week for a date when all stars must turn out.

It’s screening night tonight, live at a cinema near you. All the way across the USA and Europe.

Click here for locations.

photo (c) Neil Libbert/Lebrecht Music&Arts

The Salzburg Festival production of Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party has been abandoned by the actors who were meant to play Meg and Petey.

Andrea Clausen and Martin Reinke will be replaced by Nina Petri and Pierre Siegenthaler.

Can’t be easy doing Pinter auf Deutsch.

The pianist, composer and educator Geri Allen died yesterday in Philadelphia of cancer.

Her work, crossing many genres and instruments, earned her a Guggenheim fellowship and international recognition.

Her music speaks for itself.

The guardians of public morality who operate the UK’s ‘Official Classical Artist Albums Chart’ have declared a release by Bjarte Eike and the Barokksolistene to be insufficiently refined for their exclusive weekly listing.

The group’s new release, The Alehouse Sessions, revives vigorously and on period instruments the mixture of music that was played in English pubs in Purcell’s time.

It includes baroque contemplations, sea shanties and bawdy songs.

The Charts keepers say it’s ‘too folk influenced’. (So was Haydn.)

The Charts are presently topped by two albums of Ludovico Einaudi.

Belief is well and truly beggared (sic).