Hartmut Haenchen has pulled out of Parsifal.
The old dependable Marek Janowski (pictured) has taken over.
The Salzburg Festival is donating 50,000 Euro to facilitate musical education for Syrian refugee children in Jordan over the next two years.
The money is the net profit from ticket sales for the dress rehearsal of Aida, conducted by Riccardo Muti and directed by Shirin Neshat, with Anna Netrebko in the title role.
photo: SF/Silvia Lelli
The Austrian tourist board has issued nationality statistics as the city records its highest-ever tourist half-year.
Most visitors came from Germany – 1.4 million nights (+3%) – followed by Austria (1.3m –1%), US (396,000, +8%), and the UK (305,000, +3%). Then
5 Italy (294,000, –7%).
6 Switzerland (214,000, 0%)
7 Russia (211,000, +34%)
8 France (204,000, +18%)
9 China (175,000, +45%)
10 Spain (174,000, –2%).
Visits from Australia were up 19%, from India 15% and Brazil 21%.
The German tenor has been named ambassador for the José Carreras Leukaemia Foundation.
He will join a Munich gala concert in December.
No, the other tenor.
All 80 members of the European Spirit of Youth Orchestra were rushed to the Santa Chiara Emergency Room in Trento, Italy, suffering from dehydration after an outbreak of vomiting and diarrhoea.
About twenty young musicians received prolonged treatment and two were detained in hospital overnight.
The problem was traced to a picturesque fountain in the small town of Belluno, where the orchestra had stopped for a drink of water. Officials say this was due to current repairs to the aqueduct.
The orchestra aims to continue its tour with conductor Igor Coretti-Kuret.
We hear that Seton Ijams was given the bum’s rush at CAMI this week.
He used to be Man Friday to the vastly unpopular Andrew Grossman, whose dismissal was so disruptive it required lawyers to be stationed at exits and security men to escort him to the elevator.
Word got round that Seton was still doing Andrew’s bidding, so the willing coat-hanger had to go.
A shy man, his only previous claim to public attention was getting pistol-whipped at lunchtime outside a midtown bank where he had just withdrawn $149,000.
Unusually, this was an agent crying tears all the way *from* the bank.
Who said music agencies are boring?
A piece of research by the EU claims there are 37 million choral singers in the Union.
That’s fairly meaningless.
What’s more interesting is where you find the highest concentration.
In the Baltic states? Germany? France?
No. It’s Austria in first place with 11 percent of the population engaged in choral singing. Second is the Netherlands with 10.7 percent and third Slovenia with 8.3%
At the bottom of the pile are Poland (2.3%), Spain (2.4%) and Denmark (2.6%).
Portugal was too low to be measured.
More here.
Another tale of musical woe.
The Cleveland music director is to be awarded the 2017 Pro Arte Europapreis award tomorrow by the Herbert-Batliner-
The citation reads: ‘Franz Welser-Möst is not only the ambassador of European culture in America, but has also set new standards with his particular interpretation of 20th century works.’
The biennial prize, worth 30,000 euros, was previously awarded in 2013 to Zubin Mehta and in 2015 to the outgoing Salzburg Festival director, Alexander Pereira.
The BBC classical station lost 6.3 percent of its listeners in the second quarter of 2017, compared to the same period last year.
Classic FM was up 4.9 percent.
Radio 3 reaches just over two million listeners, Classic FM 5,781,000.
Source: Rajar.
I just withdrew this new release from my player and it cracked.
Are major labels saving on raw materials?
Anyone else experience this?
The papers of the Austrian conductor Karl Böhm have been consigned to the University of Salzburg, which will curate and make them accessible to researchers.
Although the acquisition is being presented in a positive light, the announcement makes clear that Böhm twice accepted key positions from Adolf Hitler – as music director of the Semper Oper in Dresden and later at the Vienna State Opera.
He also lived in a mansion that had been stolen from Jewish owners and presented to him by the Vienna Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach.
Curiously, Böhm never joined the Nazi party though he made no secret of his enthusiastic support for its aims.
Böhm died in August 1981.
Read on here.
Tha Salzburg Festival describes him as its most influential post-War conductor, after Herbert von Karajan.