The second concerto for cello by Dmitri Shostakovich is the least ingratiating of the six he wrote, two for each major instrument. Opening with a gloomy, growling monologue, the solo part is matched in misery by the orchestra. The concerto was written in 1966 and first performed by Mstislav Rostropovich at a Moscow concert to mark the composer’s 60th birthday. Knowing that public pessimism was an offence in the Soviet Union, Shostakovich held nothing back….
The violinist and conductor Franco Mezzena is in mourning for the death of his father, the widely cherished pianist Bruno Mezzena.
Friends and students are reporting the death, from a rapid cancer, of Professor Edward Francis – pianist, teacher and influencer of innumerable musicians.
From his official bio:
Ohio born, he moved to California in 1965, where his major teachers were Mildred McGowen-Ryan, and Peter Yazbeck. He entered CSU Northridge, (where…) his principal teacher was French pianist Francoise Regnat. He was an invited participant in the master classes of Polish Pianist Jakob Gimpel for six years…. Shortly after completing his master’s degree he was hired as music faculty at Oxnard College in Ventura County. …In 1998 he was invited by CSUN to replace his former piano professor Francoise Regnat, while she took a one-year sabbatical.
He founded and was chairman of the Thousand Oaks Philharmonic, which produces concerts featuring a professional orchestra with exceptional young artists as soloists.
Edward Francis was 61. A memorial mass will take place on Tuesday at St. Julie Billiart Catholic Church in Newbury Park.
Dmitry Rachmanov writes:
It is with with the greatest sadness and sorrow that we have to announce the loss of our dearest colleague and friend, Professor Edward Francis, which occurred last night at 2:30 AM, PDT.
Rest In Peace, dear Edward, you were a truly unique human being, one of a kind, universally admired and deeply respected and loved! We will forever miss you!!!
Edward Francis was a great friend and supporter from my first steps upon moving to California in 2007. His collegiality, generosity and a sense of goodwill were omnipresent and provided an incredible support on so many levels! His magnanimous nurturing spirit helped and embraced so many fortunate enough to know him. He was a larger-than-life presence in the pianistic world of Southern CA and far beyond, a friend and colleague of great many pianists, educators, professionals. He is irreplaceable and will be sorely sorely missed!
Zsolt Bognar writes: The important and beloved piano teacher Edward Francis has lost his battle with cancer. He touched the lives of so many, from students who went on to have major careers to others he met and nurtured. I met him in Atlanta and will never forget his almost radiant and unassuming kindness. He seemed to embody love and dedication. He was so self-effacing when I met him that I didn’t even realize until later his magnitude in the musical world. He will be missed.
Carlos Gardels writes: Tributes to the legendary Edward Francis. It was impossible to be a pianist in Southern California to do anything or go anywhere without running into him, or feeling his energy. It’s because of people like him that things get done. His life was cut tragically short, but his legacy is as big as someone who lived 5 lives.
Grange Park Opera was founded on a banker’s estate in Hampshire. When the landlords fell out last year with Wasfi Kani, the founder, she took the company – lock, stock and seats – to a green field in Surrey, made over to her on a 99-year lease by the broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne. Bamber had just inherited the site from a deceased duchess and was thrilled to do his bit for art.
It took no more than half a year for Wasfi to knock up a brick opera house with a semi-circular interior, modelled on La Scala. The seats once belonged to Covent Garden – Wasfi bought them when the ROH was redeveloped – and the place smells pleasantly of fresh carpentry. Patrons eat their picnics in large tents and mint tea is served between the second and third act. Could you get more English country garden than that?
And it’s just 50 minutes by train from central London, much closer and quicker than Glyndebourne.
The Jenufa I saw was a 1988 production borrowed from Welsh National Opera but epically well cast with the rising Natalya Romaniw in the title role and Susan Bullock as her unyielding foster-mother. Romaniw is utterly winning as the village good girl who gets involved with a drunken rotter. Bullock starts out almost too stern to be believed (Anja Silja once captured the austerity to perfection), but her granite exterior is an ingenious front, giving way, layer by layer, to a woman broken by life’s betrayals, desperate to save Jenufa from mistakes she herself had made. It is Bullock who draws the most tears in this overwhelming production.
Even more than the women, the two male rivals are richly characterised. Nicky Spence is the bluff seducer with a weakness for the bottle, irresistible and pitiable at once. Peter Hoare is possibly the best Laca I have ever seen or heard, rejected in love and quick with a knife yet compelling as a loser who turns his life around. The BBC Concert Orchestra played well for William Lacey and the small chorus sounded like the Red Army on Grange Park’s confined, claustrophobic stage.
Next year, Wasfi, promises, the exterior will be tiled and the balconies painted. Meantime, she asks patrons to give back the programme books they bought because they have exhausted the print run and can sell them again.
Love it.
Paul E. Kwak, MD, laryngologist and laryngeal surgeon at the NYU Voice Center, has written a fascinating view of current vocal myths for the excellent Schmopera site.
Sample:
We who care for singers are certainly not unused to the chatter, the gossip, the verbal bile that can flow so freely and unbidden in these circles. But at a moment of a singer’s self-professed greatest vulnerability, this kind of backlash is insulting and disgraceful, and blemishes the stone-throwers far more tellingly than it tarnishes Adele’s contributions. This kind of commentary seeks to divide rather than unite those who should work collaboratively to care for and support singers. I constantly reiterate in seminars and conversations with young singers-in- training the importance of multidisciplinary care – as I like to say, the importance of having a voice “squad.” I respect the wisdom of so many voice teachers and coaches, who have built methodologies based on years of experience and training. One of the forefathers of academic laryngology, Manuel Garcia, was himself first a great singing teacher, and indeed, also a forefather of vocal pedagogy. It is right that medical and artistic practitioners should be partners in the education and cultivation of a singing voice. However, what I am addressing here is rather the danger of opinion offered without knowledge of the specific case, or indeed in the absence and disregard of vocal science. This amounts to an insidious vocal fear-mongering that seems to arise out of antiquated anecdotalism, centering on the following myths…
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The roving Hans Gabor International Belvedere Competition – different city every year – held its finals in Moscow this week.
An outlying Russian mezzo, Aigul Akhmetshina, came first.
Second was the Australian tenor Kang Wang, third the South African Mandla Mndebele.
The venerable Norman Ayrton, long-serving head of LAMDA, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, has died at 92.
He coached to the young Joan Sutherland with her wooden acting and helped her at several Covent Garden productions. He directed opera at the ROH, Sydney Opera House, Juilliard and Harvard.
A perceptive publisher of great stage musicals, he was vice-chair of the performing rights organisation Ascap from 1987 to 2007.
The federal cultural minister Monika Grütters has announced a pot of cash that orchestras can apply for to attempt new ideas and initiatives that are beyond their budget.
The fund, worth €5.4 million, is open to all publicly funded orchestras.
Grants will be awarded in tranches of 50,000 to 450,000 Euros.
How clever of Ms Grütters to spot this really vital need.
The former intendant of Trier, Karl Sibelius, and the city’s culture chief, Thomas Egger, are under criminal investigation over two years of overspending.
It is alleged that they ran up million-Euro deficits.
Presumptions of innocence apply. It is rare for the prosecuting authority to get involved in cultural affairs.
