The Southwest Florida Symphony has a new board member.

She is Jovana Batkovic, 38, co-owner of Nice Guys Pizza, in Cape Coral.

This week, Ms Batkovic and her partner are, we read, hosting pre- and post-concert events at Nice Guys. Concertgoers can grab a bite to eat before the concert, then participate in an air-piano contest at Nice Guys after experiencing four acclaimed classical pianists performing “the real thing” at Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall. Tickets for the concert can be purchased at Nice Guys…

 

 

 

No, it certainly wasn’t him.

Laurie Lanzen Harris, in a new history of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, has uncovered an old campaign slogan:

In 1887, Detroit became only the fourth city in the country to establish a permanent symphony orchestra. The first, the New York Philharmonic, was founded in 1842. The next, the St. Louis Symphony, was founded in 1880. The next year, 1881, marked the establishment of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  These first professional orchestras were in part an outgrowth of a movement known as “Make America Musical.” The movement promoted the idea that a permanent professional orchestra was good for society: it was a sign of a city’s progress, a reflection of its industrial stature and wealth, and a measure of its cultural and social achievement.

Time to dust off the slogan and go campaigning again?

 

The British harpist Danielle Perrett went on trial at Ipswich Crown Court today charged with sexual abuse of a 14 year-old boy in 1984.

Perrett, 58, is a successful performer who has played at royal and state occasions. She is accused together with her former partner Richard Barton-Wood of offences against the boy, who was a pupil at a school where Barton-Wood taught.

Perrett and Barton-Wood deny the offences. The trial continues.

Reports here and here.

 

In the new Florence production of Bizet’s opera by Leo Muscato, Carmen gets to shoot Don José dead before he can stab her.

‘At a time when our society is having to confront the murder of women, how can we dare to applaud the killing of a woman?’ says Cristiano Chiarot, head of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale.

Veronica Simeoni (pic) plays the feminist Carmen.

What next, Brünnhilde with a fire extinguisher?

 

Or Aida jumping out of her tomb saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this!’

Feel free to add your own alternative fem-pos ending to familiar operas.

The death is reported of Colin Brumby, a prominent composer who lived all his adult life in Brisbane.

He was music director of the Queensland Opera Company and wrote extensively for stage.

 

Ariane Todes has an enlightened proposal for 21st century concert etiquette:

There are few things as likely to light my fuse as the blue glow of a phone screen during a concert. Recently at the Royal Opera House a lady in front of me took out her phone to photograph Rigoletto mid-aria and I nearly choked on my own outrage.

Yet, if you look at my social media feeds, you’ll see they’re full of slightly fuzzy photographs of soloists, bands or actors acknowledging applause, usually taken on my phone from somewhere at the back of the hall. Cartier-Bresson it isn’t, but these snaps capture something of the moment and serve as a visual focus for my posts, which sometimes spark interesting conversations with music friends and colleagues around the world.

I’ve always had strict rules with myself about this…

Read on here.

 

Several women have accused Shlomo Carlebach, known as the Singing Rabbi, of what the Israeli media describe as sexual abuse. The rabbi, who made it his mission to return wayward youngsters to Orthodoxy, is said to have touched and kissed his accuser as teenagers. I am quite sure he did.

Carlebach’s methods were, at the very least, unorthodox. They did not, in my view, constitute abuse.

Let me testify.

I knew Carlebach in the late 1960s when I was a student in Israel. He used to hang out with us on campus and I found him slightly creepy. He was 20-25 years older than us, unmarried and with no visible means of support or fixed accommodation. He spoke in a strong German accent and wore a tie, for heaven’s sake. But he toted a guitar and wrote truly inspirational melodies that quickly entered the Orthodox liturgy.

He was free with his hands and lips. He gave hugs and kisses. My liberated friends and I felt sorry for him that he probably couldn’t get laid due to his religious observance while the rest of us – this is the late 60s, remember – were having all the sex in the world.

And that was it. No suggestion, then or now, that he did anything more.

He was the gentlest of men. He never forced himself anyone as far as I could tell. Some of my female friends quite liked him, others kept their distance.

He did not, in any sense, abuse his authority as a rabbi – simply, because he had none. He was a wandering minstrel who was preaching a gospel, take it or leave it.

Nothing I remember of him comes under the category of abuse.  Hugging and kissing were not sexual offences at the time. The leading complaint against him is that he violated the Orthodox rule that men and women should not touch outside marriage. He certainly crossed that line, but he is not the only rabbi to have done so, then or since.

Now, however, he is caught up in a wave of #metoo outrage, so much so that his daughter, Neshama, has felt obliged to apologise for his alleged misdemeanours.

In the absence of any allegation that he forced himself sexually on an unwilling person, I am not prepared to regard Carlebach as an abuser of women. I have campaigned for half my life against sexual exploitation in the classical music industry, so I do not take any abuse claim lightly. Ever.

But I think lines have got blurred here. The complaints against Carlebach are not that he was a sexual aggressor, but that he failed to maintain Orthodox proprieties.

Which he did. Proudly, and so effectively that many owe him their adult sanity within the Jewish faith.

Carlebach was not Harvey Weinstein. I shall continue to sing his songs.

Days after cancelling a New Year’s Eve gala in Moscow, the tenor has popped up today in Osaka, wishing everyone a happy new year.

He is due to sing three concerts in Osaka and Tokyo, followed by a Schubert schöne Müllerin on the 15th in Santa Monica and a Carnegie Hall recital on the 20th.

His next opera is Andrea Chenier in Barcelona in March.

… the Russian-German pianist Igor Levit, announced last night.

The $300,000 award is given every four years.

Past winners are: Rafał Blechacz (2014), Kirill Gerstein (2010), Ingrid Fliter (2006), Piotr Anderszewski (2002), Leif Ove Andsnes (1998), Ralf Gothóni (1994), and David Owen Norris (1991).

 

 

We hear that the board of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra has fired Unsuk Chin as its artistic advisor. She was only appointed to the post in 2016 but got involved unwisely (according to insiders) in the intrigues against music director Myung Whun Chung and appears now to have paid the price.

Seoul politics are a pit that musicians enter at their peril.

The orchestra will take a decade to recover from these upheavals.

 

photo: Kairos

The violinist Robert Mann, founder of the Juilliard String Quartet in 1946 (with Robert Koff, Raphael Hillyer and Arthur Winograd) and its first violin until his retirement in 1997, died on New Year’s Day.

The quartet gave 6,000 recitals, made many recordings and premiered 100 new works. Mann, who hailed from Portland, Oregon, also had an independent recording career. Among other milestones, he recorded the Bartok solo sonata, as well as the complete Beethoven violin-piano sonatas with the British pianist Stephen Hough.

Above all else, Mann was a teacher at Juilliard and a mentor to innumerable new quartets, including the Alexander, Emerson, Concord, New World, Mendelssohn and St Lawrence.

Stephen Hough tweets:  ‘I learned as much from him as from anyone else in my life. I saw him last month: he was unable to speak, barely able to move, but gave me a smile which I’ll never forget.’