Decca’s Sheku advertising campaign has just splashed all over the site.

We hear there are 60 buses driving around Nottingham in this livery.

Do send us some shots.

Meantime, we’re listening to Sheku’s debut record, out today.

Lang Lang and students from his International Music Foundation will pay tribute to Leonard Bernstein at the Grammys’ “Salute to Classical Music” taking place at Carnegie Hall this afternoon.

According to a press release they will perform arrangements of Bernstein’s music, marking his ‘lifelong devotion to building bridges between genres, cultures, and social strata.’

You wonder what Lenny would have made of it all.

 

The Ministry of Culture says it is preparing documents for Russian owners of precious instruments to protect them from theft and customs harassment when travelling abroad.

They will extend the same courtesy to pedigree bows. More here.

Why can’t the EU do the same?

 

Florian Pichler, an Austrian, became the youngest player in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra when he won an audition for second trumpet in August 2014, at the age of 18.

But something went wrong. Two years later the orchestra refused to extend his contract and Florian set out to search a wider horizon in brass ensembles and symphony orchestras.

This week, he won an audition as trumpet in the Frankfurt Opera orchestra, together with the trombonist, Miguel Garcia Casas.

 

The music director has lashed out at the Semper Oper in an open letter, saying this would be his first and last Ring in the city unless conditions changed.

Due to lack of rehearsals, he charges, the Siegfried was of unacceptably low standard.

Apparently, rehearsals were cut back due to extra stage time needed for the social event of the year, the Semper Oper Ball.

 

 

The Leipzig String Quartet made it into the tabloids a couple of years back when its first violin, Stefan Arzberger, was charged with attempted murder after an incident with a fellow-guest in a New York hotel.

The case was never brought to trial and Stefan, who quit the quartet, is now living happily as a US citizen.

His successor, Conrad Muck, today sent us his notice to quit.

Conrad Muck, first violin of the Leipzig String Quartet since 2015, is leaving the ensemble in January 2018 at his own request to pursue new artistic projects. He plans to retain musical ties with the string quartet in the future.

 

 

The Polish tenor waited until he was past 50 before tackling the role of Carmen’s lover.

The Vienna press are in raptures.

You can see him on a *free* live stream from the Vienna Opera next Monday at 7pm local (1pm NY).

Here.

Four singers, speaking anonymously, have raised concerns about an international opera director who mingles his professional messages with sexual innuendos such as ‘I am interested in you’ and ‘I love your legs’.

The director says this is nothing more than innocent flirting, a device common to his profession.

The singers say they feel threatened. They fear that refusing his advances will cost them work in future.

You can read their account here, in German.

We have heard of many similar episodes from other singers. It is so easy in the Facebook era for a director to contact colleagues off-site to make suggestions that he would not dare utter in front of others in the rehearsal room.

This is the new inappropriate.

Caption: No thanks, I’ve got rehearsal!

Next Tuesday, France 2 will show Hippocrate aux enfers,  a documentary on the horrific medical experiments carried out on prisoners by Nazi doctors at Auschwitz.

The programme is made by a well-known TV doctor, Michel Cymes, whose two grandfathers were murdered in Nazi camps. As a GP, he cannot understand how German doctors could have broken their Hippocratic oath in this way.

Dr Cymes insisted that the film should have a new score in memory of the victims. He commissioned the composer Jean-Pascal Beintus and asked his friend Renaud Capuçon to record the soundtrack.

The music itself deserves a wider audience.