This harrowing video – an ex-home video – comes from the pianist Rudolf Budginas.
Rudolf writes: ‘Many of you asking about us here in SANTA ROSA. Here it is. Shit happens to everyone on the bigger or smaller scale. We always think it is big but there is always bigger. Our house burned down and we lost everything. But … I’m left with people around me and long adventure which I am sure will be uncomfortable and meaningful.’
Artists are mourning Vincent La Selva, founder of the New York Grand Opera Company in 1973 and a regular conductor with City Opera and other ensembles.
In the Verdi centennial year, he conducted the complete works in chronological order.
UPDATE:
The funeral will be held on Tuesday morning, October 17, 2017, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Fifth Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets, New York City. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the New York Grand Opera.
The evening before, in Montclair, New Jersey, a visitation begins at 4 pm at the Moriarty Funeral Home
76 Park St, Montclair, NJ 07042
Phone: (973) 744-4346
From the press release:
Vincent La Selva died on October 9, 2017 at the age of 88 in Cleveland. The cause was complications from dementia.
Maestro La Selva was the founder of New York Grand Opera in 1973, which for 39 years offered fully-staged opera productions free to the public, most of the productions in Central Park. Since the opening performance May 23, 1973 of La bohème, Maestro La Selva led 55 operas in upwards of 350 performances. Over the years, these performances were attended by more than three million people. In 2001 Mr. La Selva finished an unprecedented eight-year cycle of the complete Verdi operas—all twenty-eight of them—performed in chronological order with a special performance of Verdi’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall. He continued to perform Verdi and Puccini operas in Central Park until 2012 and symphonic concerts at Carnegie Hall and at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew in New York City.
The New York Grand Opera’s presentations ranged from such standards as Aida, Rigoletto, Tosca, to rarities such as Leoncavallo’s La Bohème and Verdi’s Stiffelio in their U.S. premieres. New York Grand Opera gave the first fully staged performance in the United States of Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco. The company also gave the first staged performances in New York of Verdi’s Aroldo and Jérusalem, the first New York staged performance in 127 years of his I Masnadieri, the first New York performance with orchestra of his earliest opera, Oberto; the first fully-staged performance of Verdi’s eighth opera Alzira; and the first company to perform both La Bohème operas in a single season. Venturing indoors, The New York Grand Opera played such diverse venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Beacon Theatre, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It also gave free performances at Co-op City, Eisenhower Park (Long Island), Marine Park (Brooklyn), and the Bronx Botanical Gardens.
I’m sorry to hear of the death of Donald Mitchell, the critic and publisher whose lifelong passions were Britten and Mahler. Together with Hans Keller, he promoted both causes in the late 1940s, founding Faber Music to publish Britten after his friend fell out with Boosey & Hawkes and writing several lengthy studies of Mahler that contained profound and original insights into the composer. Donald was 92 and had been suffering from dementia for more than a decade. His wife, Kathleen, died earlier this year.
Two fond memories:
After the great English storm of 1987, Donald called me to say he was still without electricity and was depressed that the storm had blown down a tree that Britten and Pears had planted in his garden. He found comfort, he said, by reading the pages in my book Mahler Remembered where the composer, alone on a rainswept mountain, was starting to compose his ninth symphony. Suddenly, said Donald, ‘life was meaningful again.’
*
We were walking in Stockholm with Henry-Louis de La Grange, the French Mahlerian, who expressed an innocent interest in the works of Michael Tippett in relation to Benjamin Britten. ‘Not to be mentioned in the same breath,’ said Donald, whose loyalties never wavered.
The luminous Maria Joao Pires has told concert managers that she will retire from touring and public performances during the course of next year.
The Portuguese-born pianist is 73 years old and has been on stage since she was five.
Her breakthrough came in Brussels, in 1970, winning the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition.
Reticent, modest and deeply spiritual, she will be sorely missed.
This is her most famous video, the day the orchestra started playing a concerto she had not prepared.
The New York firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro has been picked from a shortlist of six to design a concert hall for Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra on the former Museum of London site.
Where’s the next half-billion coming from?
More here.
The Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, home to the Santa Rosa Symphony Orchestra, has been shut down following fire damage.
Latest update: California Highway Patrol (CHP) has informed Luther Burbank Center for the Arts that the main building appears to have minimal damage, but that classrooms and the Center’s east end are destroyed.
Tonight’s concert has been called off.
I was present when Michael Nyman’s chamber opera on a musician with dementia received its world premiere in the unexpected setting of London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts on October 27, 1986.
I shall be there again when the opera returns to the ICA on November 30, in the company of a new work by Kate Whitley, titled Unknown Position.
What comes round…
The cellist Natalie Clein, who is artist in residence and director of performance at Oxford University, has called in six top soloists to teach there every fortnight.
The new teachers are Alexander Janiczek, Katharine Gowers, James Boyd, Hannah Roberts, Katya Apekisheva and Anna Tilbrook.
In principle, any student can turn up for a one-on-one tutorial, subject to availability.
That ought to blow a few cobwebs off one of the fustiest music faculties.
The German mezzo-turned-director is to receive one of the music industry’s most coveted awards for lifetime achievement. Brigitte Fassbender, 78, is being honoured with an Echo Klassik, it was announced today.
An outstanding performer in an age of outstanding performers, she made some 250 recordings and lived a life that was uniquely her own. She was the first woman to record the great Schubert song cycles, and she blazed many other trails for equality and diversity.
On retirement, she directed operas, ran festivals and taught countless singers.
And she was always such fun.
Possibly my favourite BBC Lebrecht Interview (the one where she came out).
