From the New York Post:
In past years, the Lincoln Center school let students live in the Meredith Willson Residence Hall for $150 a week. But this year, it is shutting down to “address necessary facility issues” and because, in the past, only about 15 students chose to stay, said school spokeswoman Alexandra Day.
Juilliard offered list of housing options, such as the YMCA and hostels, but they cost more than $150, and some students felt nervous bunking in the flophouses.
Read on here.
From the violinist Rita Manning:
Yesterday I was attempting to fly from London Gatwick to play the Four Seasons in Jersey with the Locrian Ensemble at the Jersey Opera House.
We got to check-in early, three violinists and one viola player. I had deliberately taken the smallest shaped violin case possible to be on safe side, but I got a flat refusal from the BA check-in team.
She said BA had recently changed its policy (which we know is not true) and told us we had twp options – to put the instruments in the hold or buy seats for them.We had no option but to buy the seats for £240 each to ensure we got to Jersey on time to do the concert.
We were also told that our return flight back to Gatwick this morning was full so we wouldn’t even have the option of buying extra seats again. We ended up buying new tickets with Easy Jet later in the day.
We’ll leave some space below for British Airways to explain itself.
José Antonio Abreu, revered founder of Venezuela’s El Sistema, has a PhD in petroleum economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
That’s what it says in Sistema’s official biography, Venezuela en el cielo de los escenarios (2010), published in English in 2011 as Venezuela, The Miracle of Music. Its author, Chefi Borzacchini, dedicated the book to Abreu and thanked him for his support in creating it. Abreu’s academic credentials are also mentioned on the Sistema website, and on in his Wikipedia entry, stating 1961 as the year he received his PhD.
Two researchers have checked independently with the University of Pennsylvania archives. On the UPenn master alumni roster, which lists all students who attended between 1753 and 1977, Abreu’s name is nowhere to be found.
The PhD has vanished overnight from the Sistema website (we have a screenshot of the previous version).
Looks like the doctorate joins a lengthening roster of Sistema myths.
Abreu (r) with protégé Dudamel and Venezuela president Maduro
We hear that Eoin Andersen is leaving the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra after two years.
The Wiconsin violinist, formerly principal second violin of Zurich Opera, maintains a second home in Berlin.
His departure was reported on classical radio.
We hear from insiders that Leipzig Opera is planning to replace Katharina Wagner’s Tannhäuser, called off last night, with the 2015 Antwerp production directed by the iconoclastic Spaniard Calixto Bieito.
Be careful with the air-kisses.
VAN magazine has a thoughtful piece from a writer, Ben Miller, whose father was a cellist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra when James Levine was music director.
The artcle is titled ‘On Knowing and not Knowing about James Levine’.
Sample:
When I was 12 years old and James Levine began his tenure as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, my parents sat me down and told me that there were serious rumors swirling around him. They told me they had heard he had been inappropriate with young boys. At that time, I was often backstage at the BSO and Tanglewood, hanging out with friends who were also the children of BSO players, listening to rehearsals. They told me never to be alone in a room with James Levine. They told me to walk the other way if I saw him coming.
Over the next four years, at BSO concerts I attended (seated in empty second-balcony seats or on the sides of the Tanglewood Shed by friendly ushers), James Levine gave me an introduction to and education in the orchestral repertoire. My thinking about orchestral music—the way that it sounds right, when I hear it in my head—was profoundly shaped by his programming and his interpretive stance. There is a wide swath of music that I cannot think about without thinking about James Levine….
Read on here.
Backtrack: How the Levine story unfolded.
The Italian pianist Alberto Ferro was named winner of the International Telekom Beethoven Competition in Bonn.
Ferro, 21, takes home 30,000 Euros.
Second was Tomoki Kitamura (Japan). Third was the Korean Ho Jeong Lee,
The chamber music prize was awarded to Ashok Gupta of the UK.
In contrast to past competitions, none of the winners appear, on first sight, to be students of the competition’s founder and jury chairman, Pavel Gililov.
The opera soprano Julie Fuchs sang Ave Maria, accompanied by the pianist Yvan Cassar and the cellist Gautier Capuçon, at yesterday’s obsequies for the French rock star Johnny Hallyday.
They also played an arrangement of Edith Piaf’s torch-song l’Hymne à l’amour and the Médiation from Massenet’s Thaïs.
A million people turned out on the streets of Paris.
Watch.
The opera soprano Julie Fuchs sang Ave Maria, accompanied by the pianist Yvan Cassar and the cellist Gautier Capuçon, at yesterday’s obsequies for the French rock star Johnny Hallyday.
They also played an arrangement of Edith Piaf’s torch-song l’Hymne à l’amour and the Médiation from Massenet’s Thaïs.
A million people turned out on the streets of Paris.
Watch.
