The board of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic, based in Scranton, has cancelled the 2017-18 season.
The Philharmonic ended the 2016-2017 season with a $235,000 deficit and cannot find the $1.1 million it costs to stage another.
We hear that Petra Lang lost her voice and had to be covered from the wings by Ricarda Merbeth.
Petra made all the moves, Ricarda sang all the notes.
Both were richly applauded.
Thielemann conducted.
Eleanor Stubley, 57, associate dean of Graduate Studies at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, Montreal, has not been seen since Monday.
A sufferer from multiple sclerosis, she uses a wheelchair and drives a 2004 blue Dodge Grand Caravan, license plate number 238 RQL.
Stubley needs medication, which she did not take with her when she disappeared. She has brown hair and brown eyes, weights 90 pounds (41 kg), and speaks English and French. Anyone with information, please call Info-Crime Montreal at 514 393-1133.
From her current McGill’s page:
Her current research initiative, Reaching Beyond the Given (sites.music.mcgill.ca/es/), will culminate in a book/film project tentatively entitled Moving Words, Moving Hands. The work takes as its starting point the schism that has traditionally existed between the ways in which we describe and explain music in words and its experience in and through the body in performance. Building on the doubleness of her own hands as the hands of a scholar and a performer, she explores the relationships, resonances, and dissonances between the movements of her hands and those of a sculptor, dancer, and visual artist, among others as she builds musical worlds in performance. This work will, in turn, be used to expand traditional musical discourses to include musical performance and the embodied cognition that lies at the heart of the nature of music. Her phenomenological approach has been the subject of an extensive analysis in Wayne Bowman’s, Philosophical Perspectives of Music (Oxford University Press) and has been applauded for the way in which it uses film as a medium for integrating her artistry as conductor with the scholarly interests of her hand as a writer and for the ways in which research-creation projects use the exploration of movement in a variety of different artistic media to explore the infinite possibilities of the hand and music in all of its variety.
UPDATE: Ends sadly.
General Director Charles Mackay, 67, has decided to retire after 11 years in the job:
Dear Friends,
Earlier this afternoon during our quarterly meeting, I advised the Santa Fe Opera Board of Directors that I will conclude my tenure as General Director at the end of next September, after our 2018 season. I wanted to let you know immediately of this decision, which I’ve made after a great deal of thought about the timing for such a transition.
Next season marks fifty years for my career in opera, including two decades with The Santa Fe Opera and ten years as General Director here. As I hope you know, this company has been dear to me since my first Youth Night performance of Die Fledermaus at the age of nine. After that unforgettable evening I was hooked, and thus began a lifelong love affair with The Santa Fe Opera, where I started as a 13-year-old parking lot attendant and went on to positions with the orchestra, backstage, and in the business office. Returning home to lead this company was an incredible honor, and I am deeply grateful as I reflect on my years here.
Thanks to your wonderful generosity and friendship, this company is stronger in every way than ever before. So much has been accomplished thanks to so many, and I am excited to watch — from here in Santa Fe! — as The Santa Fe Opera moves forward under new leadership.
As I look ahead, tickets for our exciting 2018 season are on sale and we will soon celebrate the very successful completion of our $45 million Setting the Stage campaign. Beyond this, I am pleased to report that the 2019 season is planned, with the 2020 season nearly set, too. I firmly believe that The Santa Fe Opera is well positioned to build on its tradition of excellence and will work with the Board to ensure a smooth transition.
For now, it is back to work. I look forward to seeing many of you during the remaining weeks of this season — one that I hope you have enjoyed as much as I have.
Gratefully,
General Director
Bruce Zemsky, senior partner in the New York agency Zemsky Green, died on August 6.
The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome.
The agency has a terrific list of singers, whom Bruce served to the best of his ability.
They included Jonas Kaufmann, Pretty Yende, Anja Harteros, Ermonela Jaho, Nino Machaidze, Eva Maria Westbroek, Gwyneth Jones, Charles Castronovo, Brandon Jovanovich and Erwin Schrott (pictured with him).
He tended to sign his artists for recordings with Sony Classical.
An opera fanatic he lived for the art, having no close family.
He had a private funeral on Thursday at Riverside Chapel in New York.
UPDATE: Kaufmann pays tribute.