The Boston Flute Academy has announced the death of Fenwick Smith, long-serving second flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and principal of the Boston Pops. He was 69.

Fenwick resigned from the orchestras in 2005 to pursue a diverse chamber music and teaching career.

Passionate about modern music he played in recordings of premiere recordings of Copland, Foote, Gaubert, Ginastera, Koechlin, Dahl, Harbison, Cage, Pinkham, Schulhoff, Schuller, Schoenberg, Rorem, and Reinecke.

The LA Phil music director calls on the Maduro regime to stop tinkering with the constitution and do something to halt the bloodshed in the streets. His final par is probably too diplomatic to have much impact.

As a conductor, I have learned that our society, like an orchestra, is formed by a large number of people, all of them different and unique, each with his or her own ideas, personal convictions and visions of the world. This wonderful diversity means that in politics, as in music, no absolute truths exist. In order to thrive as a society (as well as to achieve musical excellence), we must create a common frame of reference in which all individuals feel included despite their differences, one that minimizes the noise and cacophony of disagreement and allows us to fine-tune, through plurality and diverging points of view.

Full op-ed here. There is an on-page button you can click to read the article in the original Spanish.

 

The Italian-born Argentine cellist José Bragato has bowed his last at a phenomenal age and after a life of intense activity. He died on July 18 in Buenos Aires.

Arriving in Buenos Aires at age 13, he was named principal cellist of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946, moving two years later to the Colon orchestra, where he played for two decades. Most famously, he played in the Buenos Aires Octet with Astor Piazzola.

During the 1970s military dictatorship he migrated to Brazil, playing in the Orquestra Sinfonica de Porto Alegre until 1982, when he returned home.

Bragato was also a composer of 50 published scores.

A December 1940 New York performance of the Paganini Rhapsody by Gitta Gradova has been put up today on Youtube. She’s quite a powerhouse.

Gradova stopped playing in public two years later under spousal pressure, vanishing from the musical scene.

Beware the cut and breaks in this recording, but the performance is formidable, at times overwhelming.

Sergio Roberto de Oliveira faced up to his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer by keeping a video diary of his progress through music and life.

Tragically, his struggle ended today.

Tom Moore writes:

My dear friend Sergio Roberto de Oliveira, whom I met almost twenty years ago, after battling pancreatic cancer for a year and a half, has left us here below to go to the World-That-Is-Coming. He suffered so much during these last months, but with a nobility that shows all of us how to live life to the very fullest, to drink the cup to the very last drop, creating his first opera at the very end, which ends not with sadness, but with transcendence, and a conclusion that is not a closed door, but a hand beckoning us upwards and onwards. Sergio showed me how to be the best man that I can be. He will be remembered as one of the greatest of Brazilian composers, someone who not only created his own lasting oeuvre, but was fundamental to contemporary music in Rio in the 21st century.

The composer tweets: ‘Voila! Completed manuscript of new opera Girls of the Golden West. 2 yrs of panning for nuggets. Time for a break.’

Elsewhere, in an interview with John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune, he sounds gloomier:

‘It can be a challenge to fill those enormous halls with an entire program of just my music,” he said. “I was reminded that classical music is what people say it is, largely music of the past. It takes great time and effort to write music that might have a chance of entering the repertory, eventually.

‘One thing that disturbs me is that the friends I have dinner with — people who bear the same intellectual, social and political interests as I — don’t listen to my music. Very few of them even listen to Beethoven. They listen to — I don’t know — James Taylor or the Gipsy Kings. I realize I travel in a small cultural arena.’

 

The Guardian is getting quite heated over the Arts Council’s withdrawal of funding from the Music Venue Trust, which keeps places going for small and esoteric gigs.

Under the headline ‘Small music venues are dying – blame the obsession with classical music‘, today’s rant reads:

The trust argues that while Arts Council England does much to support new music, with money for the internet radio station NTS, live-streaming Boiler Room and contemporary music curators Capsule to name but three, 85% of its music funding has been allotted to opera and classical music, according to the charity, with £96m given to the Royal Opera House alone. With the next round of funding applications in 2022, it’s hard not to foresee that many more small music venues might close in the next four years.

 

More here.

Maria Agresta has pulled out of two concert performances of Verdi’s I due Foscari in order to undergo an operation.

Her replacement is the Chinese soprano Guanqun Yu.

Nasreen Qadri will be on stage with Radiohead in Tel Aviv tonight. Born in Haifa and raised in Lydda, two towns with mixed Jewish-Arab populations, she has issued this rebuttal to the BDS campaign to block Radiohead’s visit:

I am a Muslim Arab woman. I am a singer. And this Wednesday, I will share the stage with Radiohead in their concert.

I was born in Haifa and grew up in Lod—two cities with a mix of Arab and Jewish communities, living side by side. It wasn’t always easy, but my personal experience has taught me that open dialogue is the only way to overcome our differences. Ever since I won a singing competition on Israeli TV, my music and my story have inspired many in Israel to open their minds and hearts to Arabic music and my people’s culture.

I have dedicated my life to music, and dedicated my music to breaking down borders and bringing people closer together. That is why this past year I did what no other Arab-Israeli has done before, and sang in Israel’s official Independence and Memorial Day ceremonies.

“Playing in a country isn’t the same as endorsing its government,” Yorke wrote in response to (Ken) Loach claims. However, I believe that it has everything to do with endorsing its people, and using music to engage with them. After all, if we don’t engage one another, and work together, we will never find peace between us.

This Wednesday, I will also perform alongside one of Israel’s most talented artists, Dudu Tassa—a Jewish singer—to bring a message of co-existence to every corner of the country. The two of us were fortunate enough to be invited by Thom Yorke to tour with Radiohead across the U.S. earlier this year.

Read full article here.

The Gewandhausorchester has named the Russian violist Elizaveta Zolotova as principal viola after a set of summer auditions.

Born into a Moscow musical family, she has been a regular at Verbier for the past decade and played in the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, She joined the Staatskapelle Dresden as a section player in 2014 and moved to the Gewandhaus last year.

 

Behind these moves, other wheels were turning.

Last year, the Gewandhaus appointed section player Anton Jivaev to be its principal viola.

Clearly that did not work out. Jivaev, from Uzbekistan, was asked to reapply for his position in this summer’s auditions but chose to return to his former tenured position within the section. Another player in the section then won the audition.

This does not look like a particularly happy outcome.

The Gewandhaus has made no announcement of the new principal viola.