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A spokesperson for McDonald’s said: ‘We have tested the effects of classical music in the past and played it in some of our restaurants as it encourages more acceptable behaviour.

‘Typically, classical music would be played from early evening onwards and, in some cases, on certain nights in a small number of restaurants.’

 

The conductor Vladimir Jurowski today signed ‘a long-term, multi-album agreement’ with the Dutch label, Pentatone.

But the recordings he will be making are not with his first orchestra, the London Philharmonic, where he has been music director since 2006.

It is confirmed that Jurowski will record a cycle of Prokofiev symphonies with the Moscow-based State Academic Symphony Orchestra ‘Evgeny Svetlanov’ and other repertoire with the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, where he becomes chief conductor in September.

The LPO will not be pleased by this development. It may signal the unravelling of their relationship.

The BBC announced proudly today that the Welsh crooner Sir Tom Jones will make his Proms debut on September 1 in a concert marking the 50th anniversary of Stax Records’ 1967 tour. Stax is an American pop label, based in Memphis.

 

This commercial pop celebration is as low as the BBC has gone in dumbing down the Proms.

The Proms were supposed to be the BBC’s bastion of serious music. The BBC has dozens of pop events and channels but only one classical redoubt – the summer Proms.

Previous controllers have defended the Proms vigorously from populist incursions. But the present BBC Proms director David Pickard and his Radio 3 boss Alan Davey are weaklings who bend the knee to BBC superiors demanding ‘inclusivity’ and ‘relevance’. This last concession amounts to total capitulation.

This year’s Proms have gone all Sir Tom. Knickers will fly in the Royal Albert Hall and the last reason to defend the license fee for the purpose of public elevation will go down the Kensington drain.

It’s a day of shame.

UPDATE: David Pickard has just tweeted:

Askonas Holt have signed James Gaffigan, American chief conductor of the Lucerne Symphony, securing him dates in the next season with Chicago, Philadelphia and the Met.

Gaffigan, 38, was previously listed with Nick Mathias at IMG.

press release:

On July 6 and 8, over 200 Italian and Iranian musicians will make history with two concerts, performing together on stage in Tehran and Ravenna led by Italian cultural ambassador, Riccardo Muti. The project, instigated and curated by the Ravenna Festival in collaboration with the Roudaki Foundation, Tehran, celebrates 20 years of “The Roads of Friendship” – an annual lay pilgrimage, re-establishing ancient ties to places of historical importance.

Joining Riccardo Muti on stage in both Tehran and Ravenna are the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra, musicians from Italy’s major theatres, the chorus of Piacenza’s Municipal Theatre and members of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra and Choir. The programme is dedicated to highlights from Verdi’s operas with Italian soloists Piero Pretti, Luca Salsi and Riccardo Zanellato.

This significant occasion comes to light less than two years after the re-birth of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra – whose eight-decade history has accompanied the events of the Country – and is the first international collaboration of Iranian and Western orchestras.

Following three days of rehearsals in Tehran, the first concert will take place on July 6 in the elegant Vahdat Hall, home to the Roudaki Foundation. Following their return to Europe, the Italian musicians will host their Iranian counterparts for the second concert on July 8 at Ravenna’s 4000 seater concert hall – the Palazzo Mauro de André – and the event will be filmed for international broadcast by RAI TV.

In advance of travelling to Iran, Riccardo Muti commented “Better than economy, better than politics, better than verbal languages, music can provide direct communication, tugging at the heartstrings with no need for mediation. And this leads to the concerts of the “Road of Friendship” programme, to the heart of their very reason for being.”

The sudden death has been announced of the generous publisher Barrie Pettman, founder of Emerald Group Publishing and ex-president of Burke’s Peerage. He was 73.

A major donor to the UK Conservative Party, Professor Pettman also founded the Dare Foundation which supports opera studies at Leeds University in conjunction with Opera North.

Richard Mantle, general director, called him ‘a much-loved member of the Opera North family’.

He also supported musical and academic causes in New Zealand.

Dr. Katherine Snyder looks after some of the most difficult child abuse cases in Denver, Colorado.

The stress is unimaginable.

For relief, she sings with local opera companies.

In November she can be seen in La Bohème at Opera Colorado.

Read an uplifting report here.

Garsington Opera, 50 minutes’ drive from central London, has turned in record attendance figures for this summer. If the season were longer and the pop-up house larger (just 600 seats), it could probably do twice as well.

The performance quality just keep on getting higher. We saw Rossini’s Turco in Italia yesterday – a piece of fluff for a summer’s night, redeemed by quicksilver comic direction (Martin Duncan), pinpoint orchestral playing (conductor: David Parry) and a sex-manic, melting, matchless account of Fiorilla by the inexhaustible Sarah Tynan – so swift about the stage you couldn’t imagine the role sung or played any better.

The laughs came thick and fast. Geoffrey Dolton kept the cuckold role of Geronio just the right side of farce, Quirijn de Lang was a convincing Riviera Turk and if Katie Bray’s Zaida all but disappeared in the second act that was more Rossini’s fault than hers.

Compared to the 1954 Callas recording from La Scala, this was lighter and more musical in every department. The notion that an English country house could match the home of Italian opera in a Rossini repertoire piece might sound absurd, but Callas’s voice was too shrill for Fiorilla, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni was portentous as the Turk, the rest of the cast was variable and the orchestra was decidedly poor. Give me Sarah Tynan at Garsington any summer’s night.

 


photo: Alice Pennefather/Garsington Opera

Saturday’s night’s Great Sounds of Italian Cinema at Vienna’s Konzerthaus was disrupted by a fire alarm.

The sold-out house – including 95 players of the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra and a 60 singers in the Neue Wiener Stimmen chorus – was cleared within a commendable four minutes.

The fire was traced to the roof and extinguished. The concert resumed after a 30-minute break, according to our source in the orchestra.

The Irish Arts Council has announced the merger of Opera Theatre Company and Wide Open Opera to become its ‘preferred provider of main-scale opera in Dublin’, from 2018.

Both companies have Fergus Sheil as artistic director. The Arts Council says the merger ‘will result in the return to the Dublin stage, after a gap of some eight years, of regular Irish productions of the great operatic repertoire.’

Irish singers are hailing the move as a breakthrough and a blessing.

More here.

Any chance of some matching blue-sky thinking in England?


Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin