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.
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…
Tim Page has written a penetrating review of two books about the enigmatic pianist.
Nice picture, but not exactly what they’re playing.
Emil Gilels and Yakov Flier playing Isaac Albeniz’s Navarra in an arrangement for two pianos. The pair had been the first Soviet pianists to win international piano competitions – Vienna 1936 (second and first) and Queen Elisabeth competition in 1938 (first and third).
From a shrinking, increasingly mean and intolerant island:
Four students at Newark’s world-renowned violin-making school face deportation from the UK.
Lingtzu Chen and Meng-Hsiu Tsai, from Taiwan, Daniel Chick, from Australia, and Yasuhiro Nakashima, from Japan, are due to be deported after July 31 because their international visas have been cancelled by the Home Office…
They include concerts by Jansons, Gatti, Fischer, Nelsons and Blomstedt.
From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Of the two UK finalists in BBC Cardiff Singer of the World last weekend, many felt the English soprano Louise Alder stood a better chance than the Scottish mezzo Catriona Morison. Alder commanded the stage with unfeigned confidence, a breeziness that shines through this, her well-timed debut recording.
Songs by Richard Strauss are not for wallflowers. Everything has to be just-so, shimmering on the surface and hinting at Freudian urges below. Louise Alder, who made an opera debut as Glyndebourne’s stand-in Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier in 2014, sounds undaunted by anything Strauss can throw at her….
This morning’s buzz over Alan Gilbert’s appointment as music director in Hamburg is confined strictly to the music business and few media strap-hangers. Gilbert is a decent conductor, in his fifties. Hamburg has a fine hall. But will anything change? Has word of the announcement made your blood race?
What was the last time you leaped up shouting ‘eureka!’ at a music director appointment?
Kirill in Berlin? Mirga in Birmingham? These are rare exceptions.
Mostly, the negotiations take so long and are so leaky that the actual announcement is greeted with ‘yeah, right…’ or ‘same-old, same-old…’
There has to be a better way of introducing a change-maker.
UPDATE: A tweet from the two orchestras concerned:
