The results are in for the first conducting contest where the competitors were unseen by the judges.

It took place in Radom, Poland, from 9-15 July with 39 competitors from 21 countries.

The winners:

1st Prize – Igor Manasherov (Russia)

2nd Prize – Adrian Slywotzky (USA)
3rd Prize – Naoyuki Hayashi (Japan)
Yuri Simonov Prize – Sébastien Thomas Bagnoud (Switzerland)
Orchestra Prize – Naoyuki Hayashi (Japan)

Read more here.

Tim Page, who has written a memoir about life with Aspergers, reminisces today in detail for the first time about his close, mostly long-distance friendship with the compelling Canadian pianist:

 

We “met” over the phone in 1980, when I was an unknown freelancer for a Manhattan weekly called the SoHo News and he was … well, Glenn Gould, the mysterious recluse of the north, the brooding musical titan who had simply walked away from live performance at the height of his career 16 years before.

It was supposed to be a brief interview; instead, it went on for four hours and the next day my subject (who, to my amazement, had insisted that I call him “Glenn”) rang again, and we picked up where we left off….

Read on here.

From the Professor of Leisure Studies at Leeds:

Despite the separation of sport and the arts in government and popular thinking, a number of recent initiatives at local level show what can be achieved by bringing them together…

Artists bring something different to sport and sport can present artists with inspirational ideas of physicality and movement. We found that such collaborations disrupt stereotypes of what constitutes art and sport; stereotypes that see (some) sports as being the preserve of working-class males and (some) arts as being for middle-class females. Just as the idea of competition is attracting increasing interest in the arts, so too is creativity in sports. This increases the chance of both arts and sports attracting new participants or audiences…

Read on here.