The pianist Vladimir Feltsman is working on retrieving the lost composers of Stalin’s Russia. ‘They are not known because they never emigrated from Stalin’s Russia,’ he says.
Who, for instance, remembers Sergei Protopopov?
Watch Feltsman discussed the lost Soviet generations.
The interview takes place around a PostClassical Ensemble concert and is conducted by PCE executive director, Joseph Horowitz.
From the Shanghai Daily:
The Gushan Pavilion at the Zhejiang Museum is displaying a series of Jin Dynasty carved bricks, through September 17. The bricks and other exhibits tell the story of the short but powerful dynasty.
The first section introduces a local opera named sanyue（散乐). It originated in the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), when it was only performed at the royal court. It developed during the Southern and Northern Dynasties (AD 420-589) as it spread through the temples. During the Song Dynasty (960-1279), it spread to cover both urban and rural areas.
Sanyue merged music with dance, and many of the carved bricks depict the instruments and the dancers.
More than 2,000 people have signed a petition urging the authorities to allow Zhebo, a composer and teacher from Mongolia, to remain in Leipzig, where he has lived and taught for six years.
Zhebo, 33, faces repatriation at the end of the year. His lifelong dream is to teach where Bach taught.
The ARD competition, Germany’s most-watched and prestigious music contest, fell to pieces last night.
In four categories – piano, violin, guitar and oboe – only one first prize was awarded.
In the other three categories, distinguished juries decided that no-one was a winner. In the oboe event, hopeful rumours of a first prize emerged from the jury room, only to be dashed by the wettest of washouts – the award of three second prizes, one for each finalist. A reminder of the old musical mnemonic, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.
This is a massive, collective failure of a competition. Judges who cannot reach a decision should not sit in judgement. Candidates who are not worthy of winning should not be passed into the finals. Competitions that yield no result should be scrapped.
The ARD competition, founded in 1952, has something of a reputation for withholding top honours, but this year’s results are a travesty. ARD boasted a record intake this year of 640 applications from 53 countries. Surely among the 640 there must have been more than one possible winner? Dozens of young musicians leave Munich, their dreams dashed, their morale crushed.
Here are the final results:
Violin:
1st Prize: not awarded
2nd: Sarah Christian (27), Germany
= 2nd: Andrea Obiso (23), Italy
3rd: Kristine Balanas (27), Latvia
Piano:
1st Prize: JeungBeum Son (26), South Korea
2nd: Fabian Müller (26), Germany
3rd: Wataru Hisasue (23), Japan
Guitar:
1st Prize: (not awarded)
2nd: Junhong Kuang (17), China
= 2nd: Davide Giovanni Tomasi (25), Italy
3rd: Andrey Lebedev (26), Australia
Oboe:
1st Prize: (not awarded)
2nd: Juliana Koch (29), Germany
= 2nd: Thomas Hutchinson (24), New Zealand
= 2nd: Kyeong Ham (24), South Korea
UPDATE: Kyeong Ham, an oboist with the Concertgebouw orchestra in Amsterdam, won second prize at the ARD finals this afternoon together with Juliana Koch, principal oboe at the Royal Danish Opera and Thomas Hutchinson of New Zealand. No first prize was awarded.
The result we reported earlier was based on erroneous information.
The winner of the ARD piano prize is Jeung-Beum Sohn, 26, from South Korea.
A promising Indian pianist with an international following has died after jumping from the 12th floor of a Mumbai apartment block.
Karan Joseph had his own trio and was gaining widespread recognition.
The death is reported of Elisabeth Parry, a member of Britten’s English Opera Group and founder of the London Opera Players, a group that flourished from the 1950s to the end of the century. She nurtured six generations of singers, some going on to international careers.
Among her proteges were Anthony Hopkins and Josephine Veasey.
The death of Pierre Bergé reminds me of the unexpected consequences of the wealthy fashion mogul’s decision to sack Daniel Barenboim as music director of the new Opéra Bastille in 1988. The cause of dismissal was, ostensibly, Barenboim’s $1.1 million salary, which Bergé wanted to cut by half.
Bergé argued that Barenboim lacked operatic experience (true, at the time), that his programme was heavily weighted towards German operas (also true) and that he was too independent (tick that, too).
But when Bergé got on the phone and tried to hire a replacement, he ran into a wall of maestro solidarity. No conductor of any consequence would agree to replace Barenboim. Most shocking of all, Herbert von Karajan cancelled a concert he was supposed to give at the Bastille, saying (through a spokesman) that ‘as Daniel Barenboim has been fired in debatable circumstances, he is no longer coming. He will conduct in Paris, but not at the Bastille.’
Now Karajan detested Barenboim. Richard Osborne, in his biography of the conductor, relates that the old Nazi practically leaped up from his sickbed after a heart attack when he was told that the young Israeli might replace him at a couple of Berlin concerts. Karajan never met Barenboim, never invited to him conduct at Salzburg or Berlin and never had a good word to say about the circle of musicians who hung out in Daniel’s den.
Despite these prejudices, the conductor-for-life of the Berlin Philharmonic joined and actively led a boycott against the Bastille, outraged that a state-appointed dilettant like Bergé could impinge on the powers of a legitimate music director. In a passion, he picked up the phone and called Barenboim in Paris, asking what else he could do to support him. I don’t remember the details of the conversation, which Barenboim once shared with me (‘I was astonished,’ he said), but the essence of it was that all maestros must stick together or the whole of civilisation will fail.
In retrospect, this would prove to be the final roar of the maestro myth. Karajan died in July 1989.
Five years later, record labels sacked their conductors wholesale and the power of the podium was broken.
The death is reported of Michael Friedman, composer and lyricist of several Broadway shows, most successfully with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. He was 41 years old.
The cause of death was complications from HIV/Aids.
