Kahn designed Point Counterpoint II, a floating concert hall, for the American Wind Symphony Orchestra during the 1976 Bicentennial. It is now docked in Ottawa, Illinois and will be dismantled if a buyer is not found soon. 

 

Yo Yo Ma has written this appeal in the New York Review of Books:

At a time when our national conversation is so often focused on division, we can ill afford to condemn to the scrap heap such a vibrant ambassador for our national unity, so I humbly ask that your readers join Robert and me in finding a new home for Point Counterpoint II. Please share any suggestions with Robert and Kathleen at awso@consolidated.net.

 

The violinist Leonidas Kavakos, who suffered ‘a very close family bereavement‘ in May, has called off appearances at Vail, with the New York Philharmonic, and at Verbier for the first of four planned concerts.

The reason given is ‘a family emergency’.

We wish him strength.

Hazard Chase Ltd, the British agency renowned for only signing male conductors, broke its duck today.

Media announcement:

Hazard Chase is delighted to welcome the Swedish-born choral conductor Sofi Jeannin to the roster. Currently Music Director of the Choeur de Radio France and Director of the Maîtrise de Radio France, Jeannin takes up the post of Chief Conductor of the BBC Singers in July 2018 – the first female conductor to hold the title. 

Rare video was posted roday of a Mozart duet played by Vladimir Horowitz with Gitta Gradova, a pianist who vanished from the music scene in 1942, never to be heard in public again.

Admired by Rachmaninov and Toscanini, Gradova apparently succumbed to demands from her physician husband to give up the career and devote herself to family.

Her son believes the decision almost destroyed her.

This private tape is dated Chicago, 1950.


Anyone in Chicago remember hearing her play?

The morning after we posted Steven Isserlis’s harrowing account of his treatment by the KLM desk at Heathrow – they refused to recognise the ticket he had bought for his cello – we were bombarded on social media with adverts from KLM offering to fly us practically anywhere in the world. Dream on.

At this stage, our advice to fliers is: don’t go Dutch.

Despite admitting their Heathrow error, KLM have neither apologised to Steven nor refunded him. They told Slipped Disc they had been ‘in touch with the customer’, but that was PR flammery. They have done nothing.

Customer care at KLM is conspicuous by its omission.

As we toast this month’s nonagenarian maestros Herbert Blomstedt and Michael Gielen, let’s not forget their formidable contemporary Kurt Masur, who died of the effects of Parkinsons in December 2015.

Kurt would have been 90 today. He’s in our thoughts, warmly missed.

In the first part of a fine BBC Radio 4 documentary series on Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s opening year as music director in Birmingham, the Telegraph critic Ivan Hewett is asked to reflect on her strengths and weaknesses. He proceeds to get his metaphors somewhat in a twist:

There are areas of the repertoire where she’s trying things out. Perhaps that symphony (Mahler 1) and others like it might have a certain maleness built in to them, actually…. It’s the sheer size of those musical statements that requires perhaps a more directing personality… Maybe she’s going to have to find her inner man, as it were, just to pull off those really big, rather showy extravagantly subjective pieces… I am sure she’ll crack it. She’ll master anything she turns her hand to.

Listen here.

UPDATE: He apologises.

Deicola Neves, owner of Camden Guitars and supplier and repairer to musicians great and small, has lost all of his stock in the Camden Lock fire. He does not yet know when he will manage to reopen.

At least £12,000 worth of guitars went up in smoke.

He retired three years ago in failing health, but Michael Gielen can sit back in his armchair on Thursday and listen as German and Austrian radio stations mark his 90th birthday with fulsome retrospectives.

His legacy is considerable. As music director of SWR from the mid-1980s he was a leading driver of modernism, from Schoenberg (to whom he was related) to Ligeti and Lachenmann. His own compositions are written in strictly serial form.

SWR have since done their best to wreck his legacy by merging two orchestras.

A routine clearout of the library of a community orchestra in New Zealand has turned up two manuscripts by the English composer Gustav Holst, both registered as missing since 1906.

Justus Rozemond, Music Director of Bay of Plenty Symphonia, says: ‘Our librarian, Gloria Pheasant, and I were cleaning up the sheet music library a few years ago. We were throwing away tons of old photocopies and found these hand-written scores. We didn’t really believe we were holding genuine Holst manuscripts, but there was just enough of a tingle of excitement not to throw them away.’

They agreed that the handwriting looked like Holst’s, and that he had lived at the Richmond address at the foot of the page, but they put the scores in a drawer and forgot about them for several years. Now, the scores have been validated as Holst’s originals for ‘Folk Songs from Somerset’ and ‘Two Songs Without Words’.

They appear to have been brought to New Zealand in the 1960s by an English flute player, Stanley Farnsworth.

‘Folk Songs of Somerset’ consists of ten folk songs collected by Cecil Sharp. Holst conducted the premiere in Bath in 1906 before converting three of the songs into his Somerset Rhapsody, published in 1907. It is thought that the Bath premiere was the only performance of the full Folk Songs score.

BoP Symphonia are planning to rectify that omission.

photo: Lebrecht Music&Arts