Ever since Kirill Petrenko landed the Berlin Philharmonic, the agency to be with, or around, has been Michael Lewin’s in Vienna. It’s a boutique agency with busy, well placed maestros like Petrenko, Philippe Jordan, Sebastian Weigle and Simone Young.

Today, the Arsis wing of Lewin’s agency signed Yoel Gamzou, an Israeli of 29 who is in his first music director’s post at Theater Bremen. Watch that career start to move.

 

 

 

press release:

The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra Foundation – Fundação Osesp is proud to announce that our Music Director Marin Alsop will become Conductor of Honour at the end of her 8-year tenure, in December 2019.

Since she became Chief Conductor, in 2012 (and Music Director one year later), Marin Alsop has been responsible for many remarkable achievements of our Orchestra. Under her baton, Osesp has appeared twice at the BBC Proms, and it has also played for the first time at the Berlin Philharmonie, London’s Royal Festival Hall, Lucerne and Edinburgh Festivals, and Vienna’s Konzerthaus, among other prestigious venues. It has also gone on tour in Brazil, celebrating the Orchestras’s 60th anniversary in 2014.  A complete cycle of Prokofiev’s Symphonies has been released on CD (for the Naxos label), and two new CDs with works by Leonard Bernstein will be released for the composer’s centennial celebrations next year, as part of a boxed set devoted to Ms. Alsop’s long relationship with Bernstein. In the course of the next two seasons, 2018 and 2019, among other projects we plan to release a complete cycle of Brahms’s symphonies on video, conducted and with commentary by Maestra Alsop.

Her expert guidance has helped raise the profile of our Orchestra both nationally and internationally; and her humanistic approach has been an inspiration to many of our educational and outreach activities too. She has been active at our International Winter Festival in Campos do Jordão (now in its 48th season), where she has taught several promising Brazilian conductors; and she was also responsible for the creation of a Conducting Class at our own Osesp Academy.

To celebrate this long-standing partnership, the Foundation is happy to announce the creation of a Marin Alsop Award for Young Conductors. The details of this prize, which will be for young Brazilian conductors only, will be released in due time.

 

An attorney from Tennessee has contacted Slipped Disc with a recollection that James Levine was arrested with a young man in a public restroom in Memphis during the Metropolitan Opera tour in May 1979.

Our informant was told that the music director was bailed out by tour managers and no criminal proceedings ensued. However, he suggests Memphis Police may have a record of the arrest.

This may be something for the Met’s independent investigators to check, particularly in regard to how the bail funds were accounted for in the company’s books.

It is, of course, quite possible that no offence took place and the arrest was an act of harassment by bigoted police. It is also important to note that our informant does not have firsthand, professional knowledge of the case; he was in Nashville at the time. But he suggests that, alongside other current allegations, this incident might help shed light on how the Metropolitan Opera handled its music director’s extra-curricular activities.

 

 

Elizabeth Murdoch is among seven new members of the ACE’s National Council. The former head of Sky Networks last week established a £1.5 million fund for young visual artists. She is a former trustee of the Tate, where the ACE chair Sir Nicholas Serota was chief exec.

Other new members of the National Council are:

Michael Eakin, Chief Executive of Royal Liverpool Philharmonic;

Catherine Mallyon, a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company;

Paul Roberts, of Nottingham Contemporary;

Tessa Ross, head of TV indy producer House Productions;

Andrew Miller, of the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama;

and George Mpanga, 26, known as George the Poet.

The Universal Music chair David Joseph retains his seat on the Council.

The ACE chair Sir Nicholas Serota said: ‘It is so important that boards address diversity in the process of recruiting new members. I am particularly pleased to welcome not only our youngest member to date, but also a National Council that has an equal number of men and women. This is work in progress.’

Ms Murdoch is the least beholden scion of her father’s media empire, which includes Fox News and The Sun.

The appointment is, nonetheless, counter-intuitive.

 

The American inventor of noise reduction systems has left Cambridge University the second biggest bequest in its history and Pembroke ‘the biggest change to our College in 650 years’.

Dolby came to Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar in 1957 and stayed for four years, reading physics at Pembroke.

He went on to pioneer important innovations in the audio industry before his death, aged 80, in 2013.

The bequest, of which £35m goes to Pembroke and £50m to build a new physics lab, was made by his widow and son.

More here.

 

BBC Radio has lost Rob Cowan, its most knowledgeable presenter of classical records, to its commercial rival.

Rob is part of a general talent and producer exodus from Radio 3.

The station will replace him on Essential Classics with Prince Charles’s speechwriter, Ian Skelly.

 

 

Operanostalgia informs us of the death of the record expert, Harold Wayne, whose collection of early vocal recordings were issued on CD under his own name or as Symposium Records.

Harold died on October 23.

 

The death is reported of Nicoletta Panni, niece of the baritone Giuseppe de Luca and an exemplary performer of many leading roles.

After making her debut at 23 as Blanche in Dialogues des Carmélites in Trieste, she reached La Sacaa in 1962 as Euridice in Gluck’s Orpheus, going on to appear on all major Italian stages.

She arrived at the Met as Mimi in La Bohème in 1963, followed by Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust.

She died in Rome on September 12.

photo: www.nicolettapanni.it

 

The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra sold more tickets than ever before in the year ending August 31 and scored a small surplus of $27,000 on a $26 million turnover.

A new chief exec is expected to be announced any day now.

Details here.

 

 

The bad news is the deficit is up 75 percent on last year.

The good news is the endowment has grown by almost $20 million, from $173.8 to $192.2 million.

The figures were released last night.

It appears the orchestra lost some big donors in reducing its Miami residency and is taking a calculated hit on a discount scheme to get more students coming to concerts.

 

The Verbier Festival, which has failed to answer questions about James Levine’s tenure as music director of the festival orchestra between 2000 and 2009, has announced Valery Gergiev as its next m.d., from this summer.

He succeeds Charles Dutoit, who retired after eight seasons.

The orchestra, with players aged 16 to 29, requires intensive rehearsal.

That is not Valery Gergiev’s forte. He is a last-minute kind of music director.

This is a questionable appointment in troubling times. Martin Engstroem, the founder (below), is earnestly trying to focus attention on the festival’s 25th anniversary.