The principal trumpet of the Hamburg Philharmonic, André Schoch, has been recruited by the Berlin Phil.

Schoch, 30 and a graduate of the Karajan Academy, starts in Berlin on September 1.

He is listed as the fifth member in the Berlin section.

 

No, he’s not starting in first position.

Matthew Trent was principal artist with Australian Ballet and the Royal Ballet in London before dancing in Billy Elliot on Broadway.

Today he joined G. Schirmer as Promotion Manager.

The arts will be saddened to learn of the death of Henry Wrong, director of the Barbican Centre from 1970 when it was not even a hole in the ground, to 1990 when it was a fully functioning arts centre. Henry was 87.

Described by Brian Redhead on Radio 4’s Today programme as ‘the Tower of London with carpets’, the Barbican was an aesthetic nightmare that no-one loved, but Henry did his damnedest to change that with a fount of good humour, good management and general bonhomie.

He hated the architects who designed the Barbican, along with some meddlesome members of the Corporation of the City of London, but he bore malice to few others and was exceedingly well liked by artists.

A Canadian, he started out as assistant to Rudolf Bing at the Metropolitan Opera before becoming head of programming at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The best thing about Henry was his supreme self-possession. He told the truth as wittily as he could and condescended to no-one (see below).

Bless his memory.

 

Sky News reports today that Deborah Lamprell has been formally identified as a victim of the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June. Debbie, 45, was an enthusiastic member of front-of-house staff at Opera Holland Park.

Out thoughts are with her family, friends and colleagues.

The death of Barbara Cook has been announced by her publicist.

Once the supreme soprano of the Broadway stage, she evolved over time into an authority on the American art-song.

She gave recitals at Carnegie Hall and mentored innumerable singers in the DMZ between opera, musicals and pop.

In performance with James Levine and the ASO.

The Austrian National Bank has loaned a 1752 Guadagnini from its vaults to the violinist Daniel Auner, who leads a string quartet that bears his name.

The instrument is valued at 1.3 million Euros.

Stephen Cera has sent us a touching account of Toronto’s homage to the irrepressible Anton Kuerti:

Anton Kuerti has been an adopted musical treasure in Canada since moving here from Cleveland in 1965 to protest the Vietnam War. He had studied with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczylaw Horszowski at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and won the coveted Leventritt Award while still a student.  Kuerti developed into a formidable exponent of the Austro-German classics – above all Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart.  His maverick career path remained true to his distinct musical voice: deeply intellectual yet deeply communicative. Richard Goode has said that Kuerti’s playing was more reminiscent of Serkin than any other pianist, and termed his colleague ‘the most under-appreciated’ of any pianist.    

According to Kuerti’s website, “His anti-establishment inclinations were apparent back in 1975, when an article in Performing Arts in Canada magazine appeared under the headline, ‘Anton Kuerti’s Fight Against Fame.’  It’s a fight he has won: no matter what praises the critics heap upon him, he has no contract with a major record label, and it seems he would rather play at a small festival in Canada’s North than at the Proms or Salzburg.”

Nearly four years ago, Kuerti suffered a stroke while performing a solo recital in Miami, and he has not played in public since.  For Toronto audiences that had grown accustomed to his performances, the loss has been felt keenly.

All the more credit to the Toronto Summer Music Festival (TSMF) that it chose to honor Kuerti with a tribute concert organized by his former student, Jane Coop, a Canadian pianist who retired as the Head of the Piano Dept. at the University of British Columbia.  For this special occasion on August 3, she assembled a sensitively-designed program – mostly chamber music but starting solo, with some early Beethoven Bagatelles for piano.  

For the rest of the program, she enlisted some of her TSMF colleagues, including Joseph Johnson, principal cello of the Toronto Symphony; Douglas McNabney, faculty violist at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music; Toronto violinist Barry Shiffman, and mezzo Laura Pudwell.    The program included Mozart’s E-minor Sonata for piano and violin, K. 304; Brahms’s haunting Two Songs for alto, viola and piano; and Schumann’s radiant Piano Quartet in E-flat.   Schumann was a particular passion for Kuerti.

Probably the finest playing of the evening came from Joseph Johnson.  The cello line in  Schumann’s glorious slow movement sang with beautifully-focused sound.  Elsewhere in the piece, the foursome scrambled some fast passages and never quite nailed the elusive thematic transformations.  The odd acoustical quirks of the space did little to support warm string tone, which only underscored the cellist’s achievement.  

Shiffman’s playing in the Mozart seemed unsure whether to embrace period-performance style or a more vibrato-friendly approach.  The work’s opening sounded bare and unconvincing, but then the violinist became more generous in sound.  Pudwell’s tone in the Brahms never quite found a focused center, but these songs don’t fall within her ideal range, calling for a darker voice and more tonal solidity, if not opulence (…very much Maureen Forrester territory, speaking of great Canadian artists.)  Her two colleagues provided stalwart support.  

The pressure of playing for her former teacher, Coop confessed, made this a particularly challenging assignment, most apparent in her opening solo Beethoven.  Later in the program, she settled into playing that was invariably assured, conscientious and well-judged in detail.   

The event was held in the 400-seat Walter Hall in the stifling basement of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, a space whose acoustics vary considerably. Walter Hall was sold out. Kuerti attended the concert with his partner, Catherine Berthiaume (his late wife, cellist and educator Kristine Bogyo, succumbed to cancer more than a decade ago.)  He still looks good at age 80, but the effects of the stroke are evident.  

The pianist was given two stirring ovations after spoken remarks of appreciation by Coop and by Jonathan Crow, the Toronto Symphony’s young concertmaster and new artistic director of TSMF. Kuerti’s admirers should know that in November 2011, he self-produced and directed a new video, filmed in Australia, of the work he considers Beethoven’s supreme masterpiece for solo piano: the Diabelli Variations, Opus 120.  I attended an August 1 screening of this film. At the start, Kuerti, seated at his Steinway, delivers a 29-minute, unscripted, trenchant motivic analysis of the work.  Then he performs the 55-minute composition complete. Few pianists can summon such musical insight, allied to technical brilliance.  The DVD is available from www.antonkuerti.com.

 

From Peter Dobrin’s report:

The organ project, which is to begin this coming season, will make the orchestra and the Kimmel even more organcentric: commissioning new works; programming additional organ concertos and orchestral works that weave organ in and out of the overall texture; holding community concerts, recitals, and postlude concerts; and providing real-time program notes that explain the way the organ works.

“I would say we had not been programming concertos every year, and now we are,” said orchestra president Allison Vulgamore. “We have had a focus on using the organ clearly in works well known to the audience, such as the Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3, but not canvassing works to introduce to the audience. And that means we are spending time … keeping [the organ] in mind when we do our programming.”

Read on here.

 

From the Wichita Symphony Orchestra:

The Wichita Symphony, along with the greater Wichita music community, suffered a tremendous loss last week with the passing of Dr. Jay Decker. Jay first appeared on the Wichita Symphony scene in 1952 as a member of our cello section, and as a cellist in the Wichita Youth Symphony prior to that. He played with the WSO for four years, and won the Naftzger Young Artist Auditions in 1955.

In 1971 he took the position as head of the orchestra program at Wichita State, and in addition, served as Associate Conductor of the Wichita Symphony until his retirement from WSU as Professor Emeritus in 1998. He also served as conductor of the Wichita Symphony Youth Symphony from 1972 until 1986, and was active as a guest conductor of the WSO for Young People’s Concerts, Holiday concerts, and Riverfest Twilight Pops right up until 2015.

There are few people that can say they’ve had as big of an impact on the Wichita music and arts community, and there is certainly no name more synonymous with the WSO than Jay Decker. We will miss him dearly.

Jay Decker was 82.

 

Patrick Thomas, who once held the title of conductor in residence for all the ABC orchestras, has died at 85.

A founder member of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, he conducted hundreds of times across the continent, possibly more than any conductor before or since. In addition to the radio orchestras, he conducted the Australian Opera, the Ballet and the Sydney and Melbourne symphony orchestras.

Abroad, he guested in Moscow, Manchester, Munich and many places beyond.

An 18 year-old young woman was jailed yesterday in Edinburgh for pouring acid into the viola case of a classmate who was dating her ex-boyfriend. The attack took place at Knox Academy in Haddington, East Lothian.

The victim, Molly Young, was severely injured when she opened the case, requiring surgery and leaving her permanently disfigured. The viola was destroyed.

The perpetrator, Emily Bowen, had searched the internet for ‘acid attack’. She was sentenced to 21 months’ jail.

This happened yesterday at Tanglewood:

After Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of the Schumann Cello Concerto at Tanglewood the cellist, who considers conductor David Zinman one of his great mentors and friends, took a microphone to make a public plea to the 13,924 concert-goers to help find Mr. Zinman’s four-month-old Cuban Havanese puppy Carlito, who was lost earlier that morning. Yo-Yo gave out the numbers of the Stockbridge and Lenox police to get everyone on the case! You can hear him make the appeal here.

Around 7 p.m, Grace Ellrodt, a 19-year-old Lenox resident was driving down Cliffwood Avenue with her boyfriend, 21-year-old Lachlan Tobiason, when the two saw a puppy in the middle of the road. They had heard about the missing dog from their families and friends who were at Tanglewood for the matinee concert. So they lured the puppy over with dog treats and took him back to the maestro.

photos (c) Hilary Scott