Philadelphia is mourning one of its most engaging musical citizens.
Robert Capanna, winner of the Koussevitsky Prize at Tanglewood, was a flourishing composer whose works were performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Berkshire Music Center Orchestra, Trio di Milano, Colorado String Quartet nd many more.
For 27 years he was also executive director of the Settlement Music School, with 9,000 students at six locations across the region. Later, he was president of the Presser Foundation.
Robert Capanna died of cancer on Friday at his home in Philadelphia.
Richard Horowitz, principal timpanist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, had a little side job.
From New Orleans Pelicans vs. Houston Rockets last night.
‘Put your hands on your hearts’
Daniel Lelchuk is assistant principal cello at the Louisiana Philharmonic.
The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal has admitted it ignored complaints of ‘psychological harassment’ by music director Charles Dutoit dating back to the 1990s.
The complaints were made by musicians in the orchestra. In 1997, a majority of OSM players signed a letter requesting a meeting with the management to discuss the matter. The request was refused.
Five years later Dutoit resigned from the orchestra, blaming the musicians for his departure.
Le Devoir has published a report on the early complaints here. The OSM is refusing to comment, saying it has appointed ‘an independent individual’ to investigate.
Dutoit, 81, has withdrawn from all conducting activity following a spate of harassment claims, which he denies.
The Scrabin interpreter and musical intellectual Igor Zhukov died yesterday, January, 26, in Moscow.
A student of Gilels and Neuhaus, he conducted the Moscow Chamber Orchestra until 1994 and the Soloists of Nizhny Novgorod. He recorded the complete Scriabin sonatas for Melodiya, along with much else.
More than most artists, he had a passionate interest in the mechanics of recording. ‘I am the best pianist among recording engineers, and the best recording engineer among pianists,’ he would say.
He had little interest in foreign travel and none at all in personal image.
The British conductor Harry Christophers has his own record label, Coro, which turns out a stream of fine performances, mostly with his own group The Sixteen, and mostly unnoticed outside the shrinking pages of record magazines. Which is a pity, since some of them are very fine performances, indeed.
The latest release is with Christophers’ other group, the venerable Handel and Haydn Society of Boston, America’s oldest performing arts organisation. It presents two Haydn works written 20 years apart with Mozart’s G major violin concerto sandwiched in between. This is a brilliant piece of programming for any number of reasons…
A short work for bassoon and piano by French composer Jacques Ibert has been published for the first time after laying nearly silent for ninety-seven years. Written in 1921, likely as the preliminary sight-reading portion of the Paris Conservatoire’s annual solo competition for high-achieving young bassoonists, the sixty-bar Morceau (French for “piece”) appears to have been almost completely ignored after it served its initial purpose, the only publicly available reminder of its existence being a terse listing on Oxford Music (formerly New Grove) Online: “Morceau de lecture, bn, pf, 1921”. To any casual reader, this listing could very easily have been confused with Ibert’s one other work for bassoon, the 1953 Carignane (sometimes titled Arabesque) for bassoon and piano. But the two works are indeed different, as Shenandoah Conservatory Professor of Bassoon, Ryan Romine, found out this past May.
“It was wild,” says Romine, who had secured an invitation to visit an immense private music collection while on a two-week vacation in the UK and Ireland. “I had arrived in the afternoon, but I didn’t have a chance to really go through the collection until late at night. So, as I was going through piece after piece, seeing all of these things I had never knew existed, I was the regular kind of tired but also completely jetlagged. I found this piece, thought ‘Well, that’s interesting. It must be some sort of arrangement,’ and then just took a few scans with my phone. It wasn’t until a few days later, when I was going back through the scans, that I realized what I was looking at!”
Even before returning to the UA, Romine emailed the scans to his good friend, Trevor Cramer of TrevCo Music Publishing. “Trevor has a great eye and immediately saw the value—both musical and historical—of getting this piece in front of the public,” said Romine. “He very quickly began working on preparing a modern engraving and securing copyright permissions from Ibert’s family. “Ibert’s grandchildren were fantastic and I feel beyond lucky and honored that they have trusted us to share this work with bassoonists everywhere.”
With a typical performance of just under one-and- a-half minutes, the piece is indeed tiny, but it is all Ibert—a clockwork accompaniment at the beginning, graceful melodies in the bassoon, and a melancholy yet detached air throughout. At times, one can see the composer trying to trip up the bassoonist. For example, the third line of the melody demands that the bassoonist make some awkward fingering combinations (in four sharps) sound effortless. A few lines later, the piano begins a new musical idea, playing in what is really 3/4 time while the bassoon must stay in 2/4. “The piece really is a joy to play—though a touch trickier than you think it’s going to be at first,” says Romine. “I am really looking forward to hearing players put their own spin on it in years to come.”
Ibert’s Morceau for bassoon and piano is now published under agreement by TrevCo Music Publishing.
(article received from the International Double Reed Society).
An Economist correspondent wonders whether he took his 14 year-old daughter to the right show:
This week your correspondent took his 14-year-old daughter to watch an orgy. It was the opening scene of Verdi’s “Rigoletto”, in a rather explicit production directed by David MacVicar at the Royal Opera House in London. Had we been sat in the opera house itself, she would probably have seen only a faint blur of nudity in the distance. However, we were watching a live telecast at our local cinema, so she saw gigantic close-ups of quivering nipples and flexing buttocks. She thought it highly amusing. It was followed by three hours of licentiousness and blood—like “Game of Thrones”, but with a less credible plot. In other words, a typical night at the opera. What kind of a terrible dad would subject his children to this art form?…
