The city auditor has issued a highly critical report on the Wiener Symphoniker, finding that the finances are a mess and many of the musicians are not fulfilling the number of services required.

The orchestra’s current deficit stands at 64 million Euros, apparently.

Report here (in German).

Jacob Shaw tells us:

Terrible KLM turns into another anti-cello airline: On the way to concerts at the Salida Del Sol festival in Marbella,I have been stranded in the airport today as KLM refusing to rebook my cello after they cancelled my flights this morning.

Their system “doesn’t allow cellos to be re-booked after cancelled flights on the same day”…. I had to buy flights with Norwegian for 700 euros in order to make it for tonight, with no guarantee from KLM to pay it back as “it’s your own choice to travel with a non-KLM partner”.

Charles Pikler, principal viola of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), is playing his last concerts this week, after 39 years in the orchestra.

Pikler was originally appointed to the violin section by Sir Georg Solti in 1978, winning the viola audition eight years later on the retirement of Milton Preves.

A student of Bronislaw Gimpel, he has also played in the Minnesota Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic  and the Boston Symphony.

There has been a torrent of speculation about the composer’s paternity. Michael Lorenz has found new documents of the composer’s parents and their financial circumstances.

Read here.

Sample:

 
In 2004, in an article titled “Schubert: Family Matters“ in 19 th -Century Music XXVIII/1(2004), Maynard Solomon presented thehypothesis that Bishop Joseph Spendou was the biological father of Franz Schubert’s elder brother Ignaz. This theory remained unsupported by primary sources and turned out to be the sole product of Solomon’s imagination.Undeterred by his limited knowledge of the actual sources, his ideas soared,but were forced back to the ground by the same two problems that had been plaguing this particular field of Schubert research for decades:1) the fragmentary and outdated status of Otto Erich Deutsch’s Schubert  Dokumente, which resulted in the neglect of a large number of sources, and 2) the specific method of not accommodating a hypothesis to the documents,but rather, of interpreting the sources according to a preconceived opinion…