October 2017 - Page 9 of 17

A lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is due to appear in court in Glasgow charged with sharing sexual images with a child, aged 13 to 15.

The man’s name has been removed from the RCS website.

The incident was reported in the Sunday Mail, but there is no trace of it online.

Presumptions of innocence apply until guilt is proven.

Zurich’s Tonhalle is undergoing a three-year renovation.

The orchestra has moved out to an industrial estate in the burbs.

One in five concertgoers has cancelled their subscriptions. Read here.

Air Studios in Hampstead has fought off an attempt by rich neighbours to dig a swimming pool in their basement, an excavation that would have put the studio out of action for several months.

Thousands of musicians rallied to support the studio, which spent £200,000 in legal fees to fight the neighbours.

Story here.

The Russian president has posted birthday wishes on the Kremlin website to the celebrated baritone.

Putin writes: ‘Let me heartily congratulate you on your birthday and express my sincere admiration for your talent, strength of mind and firmness.’

Dmitri Hvorostovsky is receiving treatment for brain cancer.

Congratulations to Dr Francis Jackson, master of music at York Minster from 1946 to 1982 and former president of the Royal College of Organists.

He turned 100 on October 2nd and continues to compose.

Help Musicians UK has set up a task force to address high levels of mental illness in the music professions.

A new study identifies four contributory factors:

– Money worries – A career in music is often precarious and unpredictable. Many musicians have several different jobs as part of a portfolio career, and as a result get little time to take a break. It can be hard for musicians to admit to insecurities because of needing to compete with others and wanting to appear on top of things. Musicians can also find it hard to access affordable professional help for mental health issues.

– Poor working conditions – Music makers can be reflective and highly self-critical, and exist in a working and personal environment of constant critical feedback. As many musicians are self-employed, their work can result in feelings of isolation when it comes to dealing with mental health problems.

– Relationship challenges – Family, friends and partners play an important role in supporting musicians, but these relationships can come under huge pressure and strain.

– Sexual abuse/bullying/discrimination – Musicians’ working environment can be anti-social and unsympathetic, with some people experiencing sexual abuse, harassment, bullying and coercion.

More here.

The Danish National Symphony Orchestra has just closed applications for the Nikolai Malko Competition.

To its consternation, the number of candidates was more than twice the previous record – 563 of them, aged 18 to 35.

Recent winners include Rafael Payare and Joshua Weilerstein (pictured).

The Venezuelan-born pianist Gabriela Montero, a persistent critic of the Caracas regime, has been honoured with the 2018 Heidelberg Spring music prize.

The prize money is 10,000 Euros.

The death of the bass singer Nikolai Okhotnikov has been announced by the Mariinsky Theatre.

An international artist, he was nominated for a Grammy for his role in Prokofiev’s War and Peace.

The director Jonathan Meese was sacked last year by Katharina Wagner, officially for going over budget with Bayreuth’s Parsifal. Unofficially, there may have been other reasons.

Meese was asked to stage his concept for the Wiener Festwochen, a production that has now reached the Berliner Festwochen. So did Bayreuth miss a masterpiece? Our anonymous reviewer thinks not.

Meese’s Dramaturg, introducing the long evening, stipulated that we were not about to see the original Bayreuth concept. Four hours and 15 minutes later, we were still confused.

Meese insisted that he was sacked by Bayreuth because he loved Wagner too much. No hint of that here. The subtitles projected Wagner’s recognisable but slightly changed text, with (in red) Meese’s pop cultural commentary underneath. Gurnemanz was dressed as Meese himself, Parsifal was a countertenor, Kundry was Wagner, Klingsor was Doctor No, Meese made frequent Hitchcock appearances and the foyers were full of installation boxes.

A cross between Christoph Schlingensief’s operatic self-indulgence, a school play, and the worst drag show you’ve ever seen, complete with an audience of talkers, sleepers and iPhone photographers. If I had not been familiar with the original Parsifal, I might have been one of the many who left in the two intervals. But the “recomposed” score by Bernhard Lang was a continual source of fascination, and with such illustrious ensembles as the Klangforum Wien and the Arnold Schönberg Chorus, the evening could have at least been halfway worthwhile. An orchestral highlight, spontaneously applauded, was the opening of the second act, Klingsor’s Magic Garden music (saxophone!) .

Unfortunately under Simone Young’s big, wavy, symmetrical, conducting, the orchestral potential was thwarted, and the singers often swamped.

When the ideas run out, show a film. Long excerpts from Fritz Lang’s “Siegfried” and “Kriemhilds Rache” almost distracted from this Theater der Schlampigkeit, and a longer film sequence of Meese organising his action comics broke the monotony of the stage business and untidy choreography. Meese has his fans, a few of them, and the Berlin event-culture crowd has three more nights to cheer him on.

I have seen the Meese Parsifal and it doesn’t work.

The Guardian newspaper published a singularly ill-informed, politically-correct editorial today, denouncing Music Theatre Wales for casting an opera set in a Chinese restaurant without Chinese singers.

Peter Eotvos’s opera The Golden Dragon had been performed without much fuss outside London, until Hackney Empire bowed to unnamed pressure groups and refused to grant it stage time.

The Guardian acclaims this act of censorship as a victory for diversity.

Many of its readers appear to think otherwise.

Among almost 200 comments, you will find:

– Opera has never been a realist medium.

– Peter Eötvös’s previous opera *Three Sisters* (after Chekhov) was originally produced with all three sisters sung by male singers.

– If there were queues of Chinese opera performers who had been refused parts, then you know there might be a point. But somehow I doubt it. What the bloody hell are people supposed to do to get the seal of Guardian approval. The Welsh Music Theatre creates an opera production to illustrate the immigrant experience in a supportive way & it’s still fucking wrong.

– Speaking of diversity and relfecting how the UK looks today here’s a link to the Guardian’s editorial board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Media_Group#Corporate_governance

– Guardian keeps banging on about diversity meanwhile elections throughout the west are increasingly being won by candidates who represent the opposite. People are clearly bored by having diversity shoved down their throats at every instance. This is why Brexit happened.