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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
