Stephanie Guidera from Liverpool talks to the BBC about singing with a co-ordination disorder.

You can reach the site here, but you many not be able to see the video in some territories.

Sondra Radvanovsky has pulled out of Aida at Chorégies d’Orange for reasons of ‘extreme physical fatigue’.

They don’t have a replacement.

Anyone fancy a shot at it? Anyone free August 2 and 5?

A petition is going around California calling on musicians to boycott a concert of the Santa Monica Symphony to be guest conducted next month by Dennis Prager, a radio host who is some way to the right of the spectrum.

Prager has been ‘enthusiastically’ invited by Santa Monica’s conductor Guido Lamell. He is not a trained conductor, say the musicians who are organising the petition, but that’s the least of their objections.

One of Prager’s recent epigrams is ‘The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.’ He is a Trump-pumping motormouth.

Read the musicians’ protest here.

Jan Vandenhouwe, dramaturg of the Ruhr Triennale, is to become artistic director of opera at Kunsthuis Opera Vlaanderen Royal Ballet Flanders in 2018.

He succeeds Aviel Kahn, who is going to Geneva.

Vandenhouwe, 38, was personal assistant to Gerard Mortier at the Paris Opéra.

Press release here.

The venerable Maya Glezarova, professor of violin at the Moscow Conservatoire, has died at the age of 92.

Her pupils included Boris Brovtsyn, Tatiana Grindenko, Liana Gourdjia, Vladimir Ivanov, Pavel Kogan, Karen Shakhgaldyan, Mikhail Kopelman, Vladimir Spivakov, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Yuri Torchinsky, Tatiana Samuel and many more.

For the first half of her teaching life she was assistant to Yuri Yankelevich at his studio in the Conservatoire. On his death in 1973 she was given her own class, but it was 1990 before she was named professor.

She was was still seeing students at home this year.

The German-British conductor Alexander Joel signed today to the London agency, Intermusica.

Principal guest with Flanders Opera, the experienced Joel is being linked to positions at Opera North, ENO and Covent Garden, where he has worked regularly.

The French oboist, Théophile Hartz, principal oboe of the Malmö opera, yesterday won the principal oboe audition of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Hartz, 30, studied with Jean Louis Capezzali, Jérome Guichard, Thomas Indermühle and Christian Schmitt. He will now be in need of a Hebrew teacher.

On the first night of the BBC Proms, the German-based pianist Igor Levit played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in Liszt’s solo-piano reduction as a token of his opposition to Britain leaving the EU. His was a reasoned and reasonable gesture by an artist who has strong views and wished to express them in music alone.

Not so Daniel Barenboim who, before conducting Elgar’s Second Symphony at the Proms last night, announced that ‘Elgar makes the best case against Brexit … because he was a pan-European composer.’

This was out of order.

The Proms are, and must be, politically neutral. Except on the Last Night, when the conductor gets to say a few words (usually too many) and on rare tragic occasions such as 9/11, the job of the conductor is to be seen, not heard. If he wishes to make speeches he can do so before and after in media interviews but the Proms podium is not a place for sermons, however brief or apposite.

Using the Proms as a political platform risks damaging a national treasure. What if a pro-Brexit conductor were to get up and demands equal time? Or a Corbynist? Or an Erdogan supporter? Barenboim should not have spoken.

Which is not to say he is entirely to blame for the lapse. The fault lies with the weak men – David Pickard and Alan Davey – who are employed (in titular BBC parlance) to control the Proms and their broadcasts but who plainly failed to do so. They need to be carpeted by the BBC’s DG, Tony Hall, if he still has the carpet to do so.

Despite a wonderful performance of Elgar’s less favoured symphony, this was a very bad night for the reputation of the BBC Proms.

photo: Chris Christodoulou/LebrechtMusic&Arts

UPDATE: This post can also be read, likely with a different range of comments, on the Spectator website.

NB: Barenboim made the specific Brexit remark quoted above in an interview with Tom Service that was screened just before the live Second Symphony performance. He made a speech in similar vein to the audience after the performance, attacking isolationism though not making further comment on Brexit.