One of our joint leaders, James Clark is leaving us after 12 years playing with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Best of luck in all of your music-making adventures, you will be dearly missed. We hope you enjoy your final concert tonight for Back to the Future. pic.twitter.com/H4eUtCe3xB
James resigned two years ago from his other job as co-leader of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
The much-travelled Daniel Oren, 62, has been named music director at Opera Tbilisi, in the capital of Georgia.
Oren, who often conducts in a Jewish skullcap, will start work next month.
The impresaria Lilian Hochhauser has been awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List, belated recognition for almost 70 years of music making in the UK.
Lilian, who is 91, together with her husband Victor, imported the foremost Russian artists from the mid-1950s. They also pioneered inexpensive and unsubsidised family concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. In recent years, she has been presenting summer seasons of the Mariinsky and Bolshoi ballets at Covent Garden.
Among other honours, there is a knighthood for the Beatle Ringo Starr; a Companion of Honour for arts presenter Melvyn Bragg; a CBE for Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, principal of the Royal Academy of Music; OBEs for Sarah Alexander, head of the National Youth Orchestra and Guildhall professor John Sloboda; and MBEs for the violinist Anthony Marwood, for David Temple, director of Crouch End Festival Chorus.
The body of Juilliard-trained Australian pianist David Tong has been retrieved from the wreckage of an aircraft he was flying in the north of the country.
David, 34, survived the crash and made calls on his mobile but bad weather prevented rescuers from reaching him for two days. He had been working as a commercial pilot for the past three years.
Born in Macao in 1983, David Tong migrated to Australia at the age of five. He won the Vladimir Horowitz scholarship at Julliard and performed with all of Australia’s symphony orchestras, as well as many overseas.
The pianist Zsolt Bognar writes: ‘It is with great sadness that I learn my old friend David Tong was found dead on Tuesday from injuries sustained in a plane crash. I remember first meeting him in Texas in 2001 and being struck by his sunshine-filled spirit, his strong Australian accent, and vivacious temperament. He was an incredible pianist with a breathtaking technique–I remember how he burst into my practice room and deployed Chopin Etudes with ease–and as a human being and friend he will be missed. What devastating news.’
It is a universal truth, proved almost without exception, that children who are pushed prematurely into the public eye as performers seldom enjoy the same acclaim or fulfilment in adulthood.
That’s the case made by Andrew Ford in his assessment of the slow disappearance of Tasmanian-born Eileen Joyce.
A heartthrob in the Second World War, Joyce’s diary got thinner after she played the soundtrack in the movie Brief Encounter. The highbrows of the music business wrote her off, or so Ford contends.
There is, however, an alternative narrative. Joyce, with a safe repertoire, faced tougher competition after the war, both from more adventurous pianists and from the new wave of modernists, whom she never touched.
Karen Brooks Hopkins, President Emerita of Brooklyn Academy of Music, shares some of her bleak nights.
Sample:
8. The “We-Are-So-Sorry-But-We-Decided-To-Stop-Funding-The Arts-After-All-There-Are-So-Many-Needs-Out-There-Especially-In-The-Current-Political-Environment” Donor. OK, OK. We get it. We know there is mayhem everywhere, and the needs are great, from defending Planned Parenthood and civil liberties to fighting global warming and malaria. The human race is in real trouble. But can we all take a deep breath (not in any way forgetting these issues), and just consider history for one moment? The human race has always been a disaster, and what is, in fact, the only thing that endures as a positive symbol of the worth of humankind? Art. From Sophocles to Shakespeare to Da Vinci, Mozart to Jane Austen to Alvin Ailey and beyond, art represents the best of our presence on this planet. Today, arts funding from the public sector is 20 percent lower than 20 years ago. And in the private sector, the arts are the recipient of only 5 percent of philanthropic dollars. Hey, donors: I know you are swarmed, but can you just try to see the big picture, here? Without the creativity of a vibrant arts community, the situation is just going to get worse….
When Nikita Khrushchev was toppled by the Kosygin-Brezhnev putsch in October 1964, he became an non-person. Send to live in his dacha, far from Moscow, he was abandoned by all his former friends. A year later, he was sent to live in an even smaller dacha to intensify his isolation.
Khrushchev’s daughter, Rada Adzhubei, relates on the Emil Gilels memorial site that the number of visitors her father received after leaving office could be counted on the fingers of one hand. People were warned off from having anything to do with the fallen leader.
Among the few visitors was Emil Gilels and his wife, Farizet. Risking official sanction, they refused to allow a Soviet edict to interfere with their human relations. It took courage. Gilels was a brave, good man.
