Photo: Roland Magunia/ Senatskanzlei Hamburg

The Duchess of Cambridge conducted the Hamburg Symphoniker at the Elbphilharmonie this morning.

We think it’s the first time she has been seen with baton in hand.

She’s going to be Bobbie, in a scheduled London production.

Rosalie Craig will play the New Yorker on the loose.

Read here.

From our diarist, Anthea Kreston:

The uptight Dutch airline has acknowledged a ‘misunderstanding’ at Heathrow Airport which led to them refusing to recognise Steven Isserlis’s purchase of a seat for his cello.

The ‘misunderstanding’ sent Steven rushing round the airport for another flight, putting him to great expense. Over 30,000 people, many of them frequent fliers, have read his story on Slipped Disc.

KLM have now refunded his out-of-pocket expenses, plus a small (really small) goodwill amount on top.

They apologised to his travel agent in an email, but refused to apologise to Steven in person.

Nice.

A contributor to VAN magazine recalls confusing times as a student in London a few years ago:

One evening quite some time ago, in a cramped computer lab, it struck me that maybe my professor had fallen in love with my classmate. Nick Martin was finishing the parts for a piece of his—a nagging job—and the professor was helping him. Recently, I called Martin. “Do you remember [the professor] helping you with your parts?” I asked. A pause. “Yup,” he said. “Do you know why?” “I don’t know.” “Can I tell you what I think? It was because [the professor] was attracted to you,” I said. “Well, I knew that. He said he had feelings for me.” 

Martin was 18 years old, and the professor was turning 40. Martin is good looking, with blond hair and glasses; at the time he wore tight jeans and brightly colored socks. The undergraduate composition class at the Royal Academy of Music in London was always small, with around four new students per year. The professor was highly involved there, “omnipresent,” as Martin described it. He and the professor began spending their free time together. Then other people made assumptions about what was going on. “Many people in the Academy actually thought we were sleeping together. And I remember thinking that was awful. I didn’t want that,” Martin told me. One evening, after a concert, Martin went into the conservatory’s basement bar, and the professor and another professor were there, and this second professor asked them, very casually, “Are you guys fucking?” 

Read on here.

The yellow label today signed Kian Soltani, 25, winner of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival’s Leonard Bernstein Award.

His debut album Home will include works by Schubert and Schumann, together with the world premiere recording of Reza Vali’s Seven Persian Folk Songs.

Born in Bregenz to a family of Persian musicians, Soltani has toured internationally with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and with Daniel Barenboim and the West-East Diwan orchestra. In March, he played the opening week of Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, returning two months later to give a concert of traditional Persian music with the Shiraz Ensemble.

press release:
The conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya has launched Latin Orchestral Music, an online resource devoted to providing a complete and comprehensive source of information about orchestral music from Latin America and the Caribbean. The catalog, which is constantly being updated, currently includes 1,616 composers from 24 countries and features a list of 9,125 works.

Harth-Bedoya, who is Music Director of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and Chief Conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Oslo, has been a longtime advocate for music from his native Latin America. Over the past two decades, he has conducted, recorded, and discovered many composers including fellow Peruvian, Jimmy Lopez and Colombian composer, Victor Agudelo. He has also championed works by less well-known composers such as Diego Luzuriaga (Ecuador), Alberto Williams (Argentina), and Alfonso Leng (Chile), among many others.

Some 47,000 Israelis turned out yesterday to hear the British prog-rock group in Tel Aviv. The band played their longest concert in more than a decade and Jonny Greenwood thanked the crowd with a few choice words in Hebrew.

Among the audience was the violinist Michael Greilsammer, who promptly recorded this tribute.

Just in from Pentatone:

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, winner of the 2017 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, has signed with the label. The French pianist intends to record key works from his repertoire, spanning three centuries and ranging from Bach to Kurtág.  His move to PENTATONE follows an exclusive association with Deutsche Grammophon that began nearly a decade ago.

This significant new partnership will be launched next March with the release of Messiaen’s complete Catalogue d’oiseaux, a first in Aimard’s discography. The pianist was personally very close to the composer himself and his wife, Yvonne Loriod, for whom Messiaen wrote the Catalogue. The cycle is inspired by the composer’s annotation of the birdsong he heard across various regions of France.

A strategy was presented today to make the half-billion-pound concert hall that Simon Rattle is demanding the centrepiece of a Culture Mile in the City of London.

That’s all very well, but there has been no public consultation on the new hall, no value-for-money assessment, no demographic study and no recognition that, once Brexit kicks in, the City will be struggling to pay for luxuries.

The hall is, in our view, an otiose digression from more critical cultural issues.

Here’s the press release:

The City of London Corporation, together with the Barbican, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London Symphony Orchestra and Museum of London, have announced plans for a major destination for culture and creativity in the Square Mile.

Unveiled today as ‘Culture Mile’, this ambitious and transformational initiative will create a vibrant cultural area in the north-west corner of the City over the next 10 to 15 years. Stretching just under a mile from Farringdon to Moorgate, Culture Mile will have creative exchange, cultural collaboration and learning at its core in an area where 2,000 years of history collide with the world’s best in culture.

Culture Mile’s core partners are all internationally acclaimed organisations in their own right and some partnerships already operate across these institutions. Over the next decade and beyond, the five partners, led by the City of London Corporation, will transform the area, improving their offer to audiences with imaginative collaborations, outdoor programming and events seven days a week. Links between venues will be improved and major enhancements to the streets and wider public realm will enliven the area which, as Culture Mile expands and flourishes, will be regenerated.

Crossrail’s new Elizabeth Line connections at Farringdon and Moorgate, which open in December 2018, will make it much easier to travel to, and from, the City. Around 1.5 million additional visitors a year will be within a 45-minute journey of the area when the Elizabeth Line becomes fully operational in December 2019 and the North-South Thameslink line is upgraded. 

Farringdon will have direct access to three major London airports with a 30-minute journey time from London Heathrow. It will be the only place where London Underground, Thameslink and Crossrail all interlink and will be one of the busiest stations in the UK, making the area more connected than ever to London and beyond.

There are three major building projects associated with Culture Mile which enhance its potential scale and ambition: 

• the new Museum of London* at West Smithfield, which is already developing its designs
• the proposed Centre for Music**, for which the preferred site is currently occupied by the Museum of London – has recently announced the shortlist of world class architects competing to develop the concept design for a state-of-the-art building of acoustic and visual excellence.
• the transformation of Beech Street***, which will become a crucial axis for Culture Mile. The City of London Corporation is assessing how best to transform Beech Street, to make it a more welcoming environment, particularly for pedestrians and cyclists, including new measures to improve air quality, introducing retail units and providing better access to the existing cultural destinations either side of it. There will be consultation on the proposals to achieve these aims.