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.
Tom Scharfeld created an iPhone app designed to teach people how to play the trumpet.
He called it iTrump.
Lawyers for Donald Trump launched a battle to claim ownership of the app name.
They lost.
Read here on Bloomberg.
Alexander Steinhilber, managing director of the Leipzig Bach Archive has submitted his resignation, giving two weeks notice.
He cites personal reasons for leaving the plum post which he only took up 18 months ago.
The President of the Bach Archive is the British conductor, Sir John Eliot Gardiner.
A petition has been posed calling on the Venezuelan government to release the violinist Wuilly Arteaga, 23, who has been held without charge and brutally treated for the past two weeks.
The first beating actually damaged his hearing.
Wuilly’s only offence has been to play in protests against the regime.
Sign here.
The Swiss conductor will be awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s gold medal at the BBC Proms this week.
press release:
One of classical music’s highest honours, the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal, has been awarded to the Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit. He becomes the 103rd recipient since the medal was founded in 1870 in celebration of the centenary of the birth of Beethoven (London’s Philharmonic Society commissioned Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and enjoyed a close association with the composer).
The medal will be presented to Charles Dutoit at the BBC Proms, on Thursday 17 August as part of a concert at the Royal Albert Hall (and live on BBC Radio 3) by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.* Charles Dutoit is Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and conducts a programme that includes Saint-Saën’s 3rd Symphony, commissioned by the Philharmonic Society in 1886.
Current RPS Gold Medallists include Martha Argerich, Janet Baker, Daniel Barenboim, Alfred Brendel, Placido Domingo, Bernard Haitink, György Kurtag, Antonio Pappano, Thomas Quasthoff, Simon Rattle, András Schiff, John Tomlinson and Mitsuko Uchida.
Distinguished conductors previously awarded the RPS Gold Medal include: Thomas Beecham; Bruno Walter; Arturo Toscanini; Felix Weingartner; Adrian Boult; John Barbirolli; Herbert von Karajan; Leonard Bernstein; Georg Solti; Colin Davis; Pierre Boulez; Claudio Abbado; Charles Mackerras and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
The future Glenn Gould royalties, as well as the rights to his name and image, have been sold to Primary Wave Entertainment, a US agency that squeezes artists’ reputations to the last drop. Story here.
The don’t own this.
photo (c) Don Hunstein/Lebrecht Music&Arts
The Telegraph has picked up the St-Sep’s scandal from Slipped Disc and gone to church composer John Rutter for comment.
Rutter says: ‘What this current vicar seems to be saying is that music is OK so long as it’s part of a worship service. The concerts that take place in just about every church in the land, they’re not OK, and rehearsals are not OK either.
‘That flies in the face of the Anglican tradition.
‘I know Richard Chartres was a great friend of music and he would have been the first to say ‘come on’. But he is gone and so there’s nobody else.’
A sorry state of affairs.
