We regret to report the death of Pavel Egorov, head of piano at the St Petersburg Conervatoire and an international authority on Schumann.

He has been suffering from cancer for some time.

Boris Bloch writes:

Pavel Egorov was my classmate not only at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory but also a fellow student of Tatjana Nikolaeva in the first two years of our studies there. Pavel and I were also united in our youthful romantic love and affection for the music of Robert Schumann, competition of whose memory he had won in 1974. I was less successful having received only a finalist diploma in the previous edition of 1969. I guess we were the Davidsbündler-brothers. And now one of us has gone on a journry of no return. Dear brother, before it will be my turn to go I will remain faithful to your memory and our common goals and ideals. RIP my dear Pavel!

 

Official biography: People’s artist of the Russia, professor of Special Piano Department, Pavel Egorov was born in Leningrad and graduated from the Moscow P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatoire (1975), under the tutelage of T. Nikolaeva and V. Gornostaeva.

He was a prize-winner at the International Schumann Competition in Zwickau (Germany, 1974). At the same time he made his debut in the Grand Halls of the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatoires. Pavel Egorov performs in the best concert halls throughout the world, has toured in nearly every European country, and also in Canada, China and Japan. He has conducted master-classes in republic of Korea, Holland, Italy, Taiwan, and Sweden.

Pavel Egorov has made more than 40 solo, chamber and symphony programs for many Russian and foreign record companies (Melodia, Sony, HWA EUM, Intermusica).

Musical researcher and scientific editor, Honorary member of the International Schumann Society (Dusseldorf) and of the St. Petersburg’s Philharmonic Society, he was awarded the International Schumann Prize (1989), received the Order of Polish Government “For merits in culture” (2003), and has been elected a member of the St. Petersburg’s branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the area of Education and Development of Science (2007).

Eric Underwood tweets:

After many very incredible years I have decided to move on. I’m hugely grateful for all I have learnt there.

Eric, 33, joined the company in 2006 and was promoted to soloist two years later.

He’ll be missed.

Hours after musicians the world over started signing a petition for his freedom, the Venezuela regime released  Wuilly Arteaga after three weeks’ detention without charge or trial.

Wuilly’s release is subject to certain unspecified conditions.

Xavier Dolan was due to appear at a Philharmonie event in December.

He has now published an open letter on Twitter saying he never agreed to the engagement: ‘I apologies to the audience for the false information… I leave it to you to explain my absence to people who bought tickets for the event and to justify your operating methods.’

He’s not happy.

 

That used to be the catch-all excuse for all musical cancellations from major surgery to an illicit tryst in Hawaii.

I think we finally drove the term out of business.

Now they’re falling back on ‘personal reasons’ – which is even crappier.

What, exactly, is a personal reason?

Leaky bladder? A director with wandering hands? Cat has to be taken to the vet? Pasta’s not up to mamma’s standards? New boyfriend doesn’t like Verdi?

Any more suggestions?

It has been announced in Tel Aviv that Dan Ettinger will replace Daniel Oren in Janury.

This is promising.

Ettinger, 46, is principal guest conductor with the Israel Symphony Orchestra, which operates as the Israel Opera’s pit band. His arrival coincides with the retirement of the Opera’s hard-hat chief executive Hanna Munitz and the start of a less defensive management style.

Ettinger was music director in Mannheim and is now at Stuttgart Philharmonic. He is experienced at working with accomplished singers.

Message received from Princeton, NJ:

August 15, 2017

Dear ABS Community,

I am writing with difficult news about the American Boychoir School.

Over the course of the summer, our anticipated enrollment for the 2017-18 school year declined unexpectedly. Students whom we had expected to return decided not to do so, and our recruiting efforts for new students failed to materialize at the levels we had seen in recent years. At present, we believe we would have only 19 to 21 boys with which to open the school in three weeks. This is at best the bare minimum for us to be able to present a professional choir that is up to our standards. In addition, at that level of enrollment, the amount of tuition we can expect to collect, after taking into account substantial grants of need-based financial aid, would be sharply lower than we had anticipated. Even with the continued generous support of the ABS community, the anticipated revenues would not support our operations, which include the satisfaction of our obligations under our Chapter 11 Plan of Reorganization. We worked very hard with our committed staff to try to fashion a reduced-cost “break even” budget within these revenue constraints; it just could not be done.

Our enrollment and budget projections for this school year are only part of the problem. As I explained last spring, to be in a position to open the school confidently this fall, ABS needed not only to finish last school year with a balanced result (which we did, thanks to an outpouring of contributions in May and June), but also to raise additional funds as working capital to give ABS a cash cushion that would carry it through the fall semester, while we waited for holiday concert revenues and contributions to cover operating costs. I told you then that ABS needed to raise a substantial portion of that working capital before this September. We have worked diligently to try to locate additional working capital from our donor base, and we have had some limited success. When we take a hard look at the numbers, however, it was clear that ABS does not have enough working capital to get through the fall semester.

When the lower enrollment and related lower tuition revenue are taken together with the constricted cash position, the conclusion is as clear as it is unpleasant: ABS does not have the cash it needs to open the school and cannot reasonably anticipate revenues that would allow it to finish the school year if it did open. If the school were opened in that position we expect that we would be forced to close it within one or two months. We cannot do that to our students, to their families, or to our staff.

On Monday evening, after a second extended meeting in as many nights, the Board of Trustees decided that the school cannot be opened this fall. We will proceed to wind down operations as soon as practicable, return all tuition deposits, notify Rambling Pines that ABS will not renew its lease, address the impact on our staff and students, and cancel all concert commitments.

I know this is deeply upsetting news for all of you, just as it is deeply upsetting for all of us. We regret the result for our students and for our staff, and for our long history as an American music institution. We simply could not see any other way. After all of our financial struggles over the past several years and a successful year of operations in 2016-17, we are stunned that our enrollment was not what we had anticipated it would be and that we do not have confidence that we have the resources to continue.

We thank our staff for its dedicated work, and we thank our families for trusting us with your boys. We hope that they will look back on their time in the American Boychoir School as a great learning experience and that they will flourish in the years ahead.

Sincerely,

Rob D’Avanzo
Chairman of the Board of Trustees
American Boychoir School

 

Amber Wagner has walked out on Francesca Zambello’s Aida in Washington.

Personal reasons, it says.

Her replacement is Leah Crocetto, who played the same production in San Francisco last season and happened to be free next month.

Emma Dunch, the SSO’s new CEO, used to be its PR in the 1990s.

press release:

Today the Board of the SSO has announced the appointment of Australian expatriate and New York-based performing arts executive Emma E. Dunch as CEO of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Ms. Dunch was raised on Sydney’s North Shore. She has lived and worked in New York City since 1999.

Emma graduated from the League of American Orchestras’ prestigious Orchestral Management Fellowship Program in 2004 and has worked with leading international orchestras including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Houston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, New York Pops, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and American Composers Orchestra. She returned to the League of American Orchestras in 2012 to serve as its chief fundraiser and help launch the League’s centre for best practices in symphonic orchestra governance.

Emma Dunch is currently President of DUNCH, a New York-based cultural management firm she founded in 2008 that has advised more than 125 creative organisations across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia on fundraising, financial management, strategic planning and leadership development. To date, Emma has worked with 38 leading classical music organizations internationally and has helped raise more than $250 million for cultural causes. In 2016, she curated a U.S. Fundraising Best Practices Tour for the Australia Council for the Arts and was a featured keynote speaker at the Culture Business Sydney Conference.

According to Terrey Arcus, Chairman of the SSO, Ms. Dunch will bring intensity and energy to the leadership of Australia’s flagship orchestra and capitalise on a wealth of experience developed over her 20-year cultural management career with creative organisations across the U.S., U.K. and Australia.