Roderick Cox, associate conductor with the Minnesota Orchestra, is the only African-American baton on staff at a major US orchestra. Now why is that?
From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Daniel Barenboim shares with the composer a breezy agnosticism and a love for English moderation. His approach to The Dream of Gerontius is broadsided, utterly secure, without shocks or fancy gestures….
Read the full review here.
And here.
photo: Chris Christodoulou/Lebrecht
He pulled out of the Met’s Tosca because it meant spending too long away from his family.
Australia, however, is no problem. He has taken the kids along for a run of three Parsifals.
Plenty of beaches and diversions while Dad’s doing his singing.
‘I will continue to travel, because I know I cannot continue this career from home,’ he said in Sydney. ‘There is no beaming, no virtual reality that can let me appear on stage magically from my living room. As long as this hasn’t been invented, I will have to travel, and I will.’
Kaufmann separated from the children’s mother three years ago.
London musicians are putting on an Emergency Fundraising Concert for Juan Manuel Gonzalez Hernandez, a player in the BBC Concert Orchestra who is trying to get his family out of Venezuela to a place of safety in Mexico.
Juan writes: I am a violinist from Venezuela living in London. My country is seeing one of the darkest, saddest and most violent times it has ever experienced. The crisis there has reached levels that for us living in Europe are difficult to imagine. There is no food, and when there is, people have to queue for many hours. Inflation is currently at 720%. People are destitute. There are no medicines, the health system has collapsed, people are dying because of shortages of medicines or hunger. I am trying to raise money to help my family leave Venezuela as soon as possible and move to Mexico where friends will help them to settle.
During my time in Caracas, I joined my sister Daniela and my 18 year old nephew Daniel at a peaceful protest that turned into a bloody nightmare, a nightmare that Venezuelans endure every day. The police shot stone bullets into the crowd, my nephew was shot in the neck.
It was very frightening. He was taken to a hospital and he survived, only to then have to escape the hospital to evade the police waiting at bedsides to arrest and then torture protesters.
Concert details here.
Crowdfunder here.
The Turkish cellist Gülşah Erol was arrested at Kadıköy Metro Station accused of keeping a bomb in her cello case.
She was handcuffed, locked in a room and beaten up.
Erol writes: ‘I was battered by two police officers on August 2. They declared my instrument a bomb and me a terrorist and closed me in a room. I was handcuffed and punched and kicked several times. They hit in my face with Turkish flag. They were telling me ‘We are citizens of this country’, what about me? When I told them I was a musician, please be careful about my arms and hands, they hit harder. They said that the people like me should leave the country, we are traitors. They threatened me with sending me to jail. They insulted my family. I didn’t put the photos of the damages in my body because they look horrible. I am a musician! I am an artist who labor for this country. Is this what I deserve?! My whole body aches but mostly my heart. I could have died yesterday…’
From an interview with Erica Jeal in the Guardian today:
Some of the (LSO) players asked whether I’d have taken the job if I had known. I said it would have made me extraordinarily wary, it’s true – but we will make the best of it we can. And a lot of our European counterparts have said, ‘We are going to try to do more work with you rather than less!’”
Full interview here.
Hartmut Haenchen has pulled out of Parsifal.
The old dependable Marek Janowski (pictured) has taken over.
The Salzburg Festival is donating 50,000 Euro to facilitate musical education for Syrian refugee children in Jordan over the next two years.
The money is the net profit from ticket sales for the dress rehearsal of Aida, conducted by Riccardo Muti and directed by Shirin Neshat, with Anna Netrebko in the title role.
photo: SF/Silvia Lelli
The Austrian tourist board has issued nationality statistics as the city records its highest-ever tourist half-year.
Most visitors came from Germany – 1.4 million nights (+3%) – followed by Austria (1.3m –1%), US (396,000, +8%), and the UK (305,000, +3%). Then
5 Italy (294,000, –7%).
6 Switzerland (214,000, 0%)
7 Russia (211,000, +34%)
8 France (204,000, +18%)
9 China (175,000, +45%)
10 Spain (174,000, –2%).
Visits from Australia were up 19%, from India 15% and Brazil 21%.
The German tenor has been named ambassador for the José Carreras Leukaemia Foundation.
He will join a Munich gala concert in December.
No, the other tenor.
All 80 members of the European Spirit of Youth Orchestra were rushed to the Santa Chiara Emergency Room in Trento, Italy, suffering from dehydration after an outbreak of vomiting and diarrhoea.
About twenty young musicians received prolonged treatment and two were detained in hospital overnight.
The problem was traced to a picturesque fountain in the small town of Belluno, where the orchestra had stopped for a drink of water. Officials say this was due to current repairs to the aqueduct.
The orchestra aims to continue its tour with conductor Igor Coretti-Kuret.
We hear that Seton Ijams was given the bum’s rush at CAMI this week.
He used to be Man Friday to the vastly unpopular Andrew Grossman, whose dismissal was so disruptive it required lawyers to be stationed at exits and security men to escort him to the elevator.
Word got round that Seton was still doing Andrew’s bidding, so the willing coat-hanger had to go.
A shy man, his only previous claim to public attention was getting pistol-whipped at lunchtime outside a midtown bank where he had just withdrawn $149,000.
Unusually, this was an agent crying tears all the way *from* the bank.
Who said music agencies are boring?