McNally Smith College of Music will shut down this week after failing to meet the payroll.

The school is in St Paul, Minnesota. Its chairman said: ‘As you all know, in the past few years higher education has been in an unprecedented decline the like of which has never been seen.’

Keith Cerny has resigned as general director and CEO of Dallas Opera with immediate effect.

He will start next month in the same post at Calgary Opera, which is much smaller.

No reason has been given.

Cerny has put in seven and a half years at Dallas, raising its profile significantly with a program for training women conductors. He appointed both the present music director Emmanuel Villaume and the principal guest conductor Nicole Paiement,

 

An unsung feat of cultural diplomacy has won a future for an Iranian pianist.

From the press release:
Ashkan Layegh, winner of the 2017 Barbad International Piano Prize in Shiraz, has won a full scholarship to study piano and composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He has also been offered a place at the Royal College of Music, a remarkable double achievement.

Ashkan is probably the first young Iranian musician born in Iran ever to have achieved this distinction. Over 100 pianists from all over the world auditioned for the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music this December. Only a few truly exceptional young musicians are awarded scholarships.

Colleagues have alerted us to a (fairly) new site on which the veteran US critic Conrad L. Osborne writes forensic reviews of current operas.

Conrad is now 83 so he’s not out every night at the opera, but his take on The Exterminating Angel, for instance, is the least manipulated and the most quietly objective of any that I have read.

And his justification for opera reviews online is spot-on.

 

Just read him:

And for opera, this is a critical time. Refusal to acknowledge that, a sort of denial by default, is criticism’s greatest failure now. Critics do greater harm through misplaced praise or through indifference, an indolent passing along, than with any considered censure. Opera’s present crisis has two principal components, artistically speaking. (There is also an economic crisis, a crisis of public acceptance. I’ll come to that down the road. For now, let’s stipulate only that these two crises cannot be unrelated.) The first component is creative: not enough new works are proving capable of standing with the masterworks of the classical repertory. This has been the case for a long time. The second is interpretive: the aforesaid masterworks are being inadequately presented, often to the point of being unrecognizable, and so cannot exert their magnetic hold on audiences.

Both components will receive attention here…

A typically wry provocation from Ivan Fischer in, of all places, the Lufthansa flight magazine.

Here’s another:

‘Conducting is a very easy job. I don’t understand why people think it’s difficult. Of course, I sometimes see conductors who are totally stressed out and sweating … That amuses me. And then, yes, then I do feel some sympathy. But only a bit.’

Read the full interview here.