We hear that DG is preparing a New Year release to mark the 75th birthday of the Los Angeles-based composer Morten Lauridsen.

I was unfamiliar with his music.


Now I want to hear more.

 

The critic and artistic director Joseph Horowitz has some interesting observations on the lack of personality in James Levine’s performances. He writes:

James Levine’s high reputation as a musical interpreter has always seemed to me a frustrating mystery. Whether of Verdi or Wagner, his performances evinced no lineage. And his persona, so far as I could tell, remained a blank.

When he first arrived at the Met, he whipped the orchestra and chorus into shape and refreshed the repertoire. No doubt he was a facile musician. Even as a young man, he had evidently acquired a lot of repertoire and practical experience. His readings were typically intense, massive, and loud, sometimes to the point of brashness. In subsequent decades, he mellowed. But I never heard from Levine much evidence of emotional variety or depth. According to my experience, he had little capacity to organize a long stretch of music, or to powerfully shape a climax or pregnant phrase. He did not produce a sonic signature – as Furtwangler and Krips did; as Gergiev and Muti do. He did not possess an ear for color or texture….

Read on here.

I certainly felt much the same about Levine’s performances of symphonic repertoire. It’s refreshing to read this view from a former NY Times critic since the Times has barely permitted reasoned criticism of Levine’s conducting.

 

 

Meet Lola Astanova.

 

She’s 32 and, according to her publicists, she is ‘redefining classical music’.

How, exactly?

Lola tells Sputnik International: ‘I want my outfits to look vivid and organic because it is a part of my presentation.  For the people in the audience the concert is a special event, the event they have been waiting for and paid good money to attend, so the last thing they want to see is some messy figure that just rolled out of bed, and came to the stage to mechanically run through a bunch of notes.’

Oh, and she has interesting friends.

Now that’s what we call redifining classical music.

photo: Lucien Capehart Photography.

N.B. She can play.

Among the major losses of 2017, the death of Jiri Belohlavek hit particularly hard.

Jiri was a conductor of deep reserve, never showy, intensely private. He was elected chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic in Communist times, overwhelmingly re-elected after liberation and then unceremoniously dumped by the players a year later in favour of a German conductor who promised a bigger record deal.

It says much for Jiri’s loyalty and humility that he returned to the Czech Phil when it was in trouble in 2012 and served as chief conductor until his death of cancer on May 31, aged 71.

Jiri was the exact contemporary and schoolmate of my dear friend Tatiana, who died six months earlier. The two losses are inextricable in my mind.

I am listening at this moment to a glistening 2014 performance of Smetana’s Ma Vlast that Decca will rush-release next week. Tears are hard to restrain.

 

Faulty sprinklers at the Deutsche Oper have prompted the cancellation of the family-favourite Christmas Ballet.

It’s not clear when the house will reopen after flooding on Christmas Eve.

There’s a Magic Flute and Barber of Seville coming up in the next few days.

Laura Van Der Heijden won the BBC Young Musician contest in 2012, when she was 15.

 

Two of her successors – Martin James Bartlett and Sheku Kanneh-Mason – have since leap-frogged Laura to a record contract. But what was always apparent about Laura was that she did things her own way, in her own time.

Now 20, she has a debut record coming out next month on the Champs Hill label.

Titled 1948, it presents Russian works for cello and piano that were composed in or around the fateful year when Stalin launched his second assault on composers.

Not the average launch-pad for a new artist.

Not the average artist.

In 1948, at the start of Australia’s Musica Viva – the country’s chamber music circuit – the first pianist who took music to the outback was Maureen Jones, home bred and brilliant in every way.

Maureen has played a Beethoven concerto with the Sydney Symphony when she was 10 and attended the Conservatorium alongside Charles Mackerras and Barry Tuckwell.

She stayed with Musica Viva for two years before moving to Italy where she married, successively, the pianist and the cellist of the Trio de Trieste. She gave a performance in Trieste on her 90th birthday in June.

We wish Maureen many more years of happy achievement.

 

We have received documentation that validates the case we reported of a Juilliard student sleeping rough over Christmas, and other times, in Penn Station.

The person is a bona fide student who applied for accommodation help to all the appropriate offices, up to Dean level, at Juilliard. The responses to his appeal were courteous but unyielding. The young man would have to pay $16,000 to $19,000 a year for a room in the dorm. The cost could be covered by a loan, but he would start life after college – while looking for a job – with an $1,800 yearly repayment charge.

That’s life.

Juilliard is a tough college in a tough town. You could argue that it serves as a burning fiery furnace through which all will pass who wish to make a life in music in the USA. We cannot deny the logic of that argument.

But in shutting its dorms over Christmas, throwing foreign students onto the streets, Juilliard crossed an invisible line between good business practice and bad reputation, much as the unfortunate Bethlehem innkeeper did a while back. Juilliard is not to blame for the established rules of the US college game but it has show itself to be tone-deaf to individual need and social expectation.

There are other music colleges in the US, no less demanding than Julliard, which show a higher level of pastoral care while making sure that their students learn to look after themselves.

Juilliard survives and thrives on bequests and donations from happy students of times past. It has a public responsibility of care for its present-day students, a duty it does not exercise with sufficient diligence.

 

 

The orchestra’s outgoing manager has no regrets. None at all.

Must be why she’s leaving.

Heather Menzies Urich, who played Louisa von Trapp in the movie, died on Christmas Eve, aged 68.

A Canadian actress, her other films included Hawaii (1966), How Sweet It Is! (1968) and Hail, Hero! (1969). She worked mostly in TV serials.

 

 

Jerome Lowenthal, a legend among pianists, showed how it’s done this summer at Bloomington, Ind.

You are among the first to watch this video.

The tabloid newspaper waited until just before Christmas before publishing a story which admits that its allegations about Joseph Colaneri were fundamentally unfounded.

The paper published a denial by the Met staff conductor, together with a statement by Mannes School of Music that its investigation showed he was not involved in the dismissal of the woman who claimed he sexually harassed her.

The woman, who was the Post’s sole source, is known in music circles for false complaints against colleagues.

The Post has not named her.