The disgraced ex-Met chief was supposed to conduct Verd’s Requiem at Cincinnati’s May festival.

Here’s who they have booked instead.

The Korean conductor Eun Sun Kim is just starting to make her mark with US opera houses.

Boston Symphony’s Andris Nelsons and Philadelphia’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin have taken bets on this Sunday’s Super Bowl LII between the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles.

If the New England Patriots win, Yannick will wear a Patriots jersey in a Philadelphia rehearsal. If the Eagles win, Andriss will get fitted for their shirt.

Both have issued videos.

Since Slipped Disc revealed what really happened to get John Copley fired by Peter Gelb, more leaks have emerged from the chorus rehearsal room, none of them creditable to Gelb.

It appears that John Copley said jokingly ‘if it were me I’d like to see him naked’ about a singer who was not present.

One member of the chorus, who speaks poor English, somehow thought the remark was directed at him.

On this basis, and without further investigation or consultation with chorus members, Peter Gelb told one of best loved opera directors in the world to get out of his building.

Now Gelb, we know, is under pressure. The Met does not have enough money coming in, either at the door or from donors. He is about to start a new round of negotiations with the unions. And he is losing sleep that the law firm’s investigation about who knew what about James Levine might point a finger at him.

That’s a lot of pressure. Under pressure, people make mistakes.

Peter Gelb needs to be man enough to own up that he was wrong to fire John Copley, and to ask him to return. No-one will hold it against him, and he will have the good feeling of restoring an old man’s reputation.

We don’t mind how he does it – even through the tepid New York Times – but that apology is required to redress a horrible injustice, one that has left many singers feeling very angry at the Met.

A senior executive has sent us a friendly denial of our previous story:

Reading your blog from my desk at Juilliard this morning (as I often do and have for years!) and eager to clarify – Juilliard doesn’t block (and has never blocked!) access to Slipped Disc! 

Based on some informal polling, it sounds as though some our students and faculty are trying to access your site through slippeddisc.com (two “d’s”), rather than the correct address slippedisc.com, which loads for all of us without a problem.  I’m checking with our CTO as to whether there could be some other technical issue, as well as why the incorrect slippeddisc.comdomain is posing problems both here and off campus (malware?), but please note this is most certainly not an editorial choice on the part of Juilliard management, as my colleagues and I have been able to access your blog without a hitch in recent days / months / years.

Well, that’s really good to know.

Opera Nostalgia reports the death of the tenor James McCray, who sang 300 performances with Israel National Opera before becoming a fixture in New York, San Francisco, Miami and Seattle.

He finally settled in The Hague, Netherlands, where he ran a successful voice studio. The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek and her husband Frank van Aken were among his students.

The veteran director, sacked by Peter Gelb for an ‘inappropriate’ remark, has posted the following on social media:

Just to thank you all for your generous support and loving wishes. This is a very difficult time, helped by you all. Uncle John.

Beautiful. Dignified. Human.

JC with Renata Scotto

We hear that staff and students at Juilliard who try to read the latest Slipped Disc reports while at the college receive a ‘403 Forbidden’ notice and cannot access the site.

Insiders tells us that the college management went apeshit over our exclusive reports that students were left homeless over Christmas and have acted ever since like a tinpot dictatorship, searching for internal leakers and banning the news site from house computers.

It’s now easier to access Slipped Disc in Pyongyang than at the Juilliard School, Manhattan.

Anybody at Fortress Juilliard heard of the First Amendment?

Munich is up in arms today – literally – at a report on the Kremlin website that Valery Gergiev took part this week in a show of strength by President Putin and the Russian military.

The Abendzeitung reporter, Robert Braunmüller, spotted this paragraph in a Kremlin report on Putin’s assessment of the Syrian conflict and the future military options.

In this part of the exhibit the President was met by Valery Gergiev who conducted the symphony orchestra concert in Palmyra after its liberation. The President and the Maestro had a brief conversation and then listened to a piece from the Preobrazhensky Regiment March – it was played by Mariinsky Theatre musicians invited to the exhibition.

photo: Tass

Gergiev is music director of the city orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic. It was leaked at the weekend that Gergiev’s Munich contract is to be renewed until 2025.

But the has still to be approved by the city council in February 21, and that may not be a foregone conclusion.

press release:

SOMM Recordings are about to release a recording with pianist Mark Bebbington and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jan Latham-Koenig. The CD includes the … world premiere of what Grieg left of his incomplete Second Piano Concerto, edited and orchestrated by Robert Matthew-Walker.

Although Grieg’s Second Piano Concerto, commissioned by his Peters Edition in 1882, was never completed, the approximately 150 bars he sketched hint at what might have been. Following Grieg’s few instrumental indications, Robert Matthew-Walker has orchestrated ­the complete sketches in the sequence in which they were left, to make a coherent single movement giving, for the first time, the clearest indication of what Grieg had in mind for a work left tantalisingly unfinished. Just three bars have been added to preserve continuity and overall coherence. It receives its premiere recording here.

Mark Bebbington said:

“It is fascinating to see and hear what was in Grieg’s mind as he embarked on this Second Concerto; certainly the jaunty opening idea shares a similar character to the main Allegro theme of the A minor Concerto’s Finale, but elsewhere there are simply tantalising glimpses of what might have been…”

Robert Matthew-Walker said:

“Grieg’s Second Piano Concerto remained unfinished, its thematic and harmonic fragments largely unknown until they were published towards the end of the 20^th-century. Since then, several composers have written full-scale works based upon Grieg’s material, of which a number have been performed and recorded. But as in each instance around 95% of the finished score is not by Grieg, none can be considered a ‘completion’ of Grieg’s Second Concerto in the sense of Deryck Cooke’s performing version of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, or Anthony Payne’s elaboration of what Elgar left of his Third Symphony…

…As Grieg’s Second Concerto is unperformable, it seemed to me that rather than let the music remain on the printed page, it should be perfectly possible to present his sketches in such a way that they can be heard in a manner as close to his sound-world as we can get. The sketches, when placed together in sequence, make a broadly coherent single movement, although it is very unlikely that Grieg intended other than a three-movement work. None the less, in hearing those sketches, one after another, flowing as naturally as they do, the listener is at last able to hear just what was in Grieg’s mind at the time.

The distinguished Italian conductor was appointed artistic director of the Paganini Competition in Genoa in 2014 and served as president of the jury the following year.

He was busily preparing for the next competition in Genoa in April 2018 when, after a local political upheaval, the city’s new ‘Assessore e Marketing Territoriale’ for cultural affairs, Elisa Serafini, informed him that she was appointing additional ‘prestigious’ names to the jury.

In order to eliminate corruption, Luisi had cut out the usual roomful of incestuous jury members – the likes of Zakhar Bron, his pupils and his pals – and replaced them with objective conductors, musicians and critics.

Ms Serafini told him she was recruiting Igor Ozim, Dmitri Berlinsky, Roman Lasocki and Tatsumi Akiko to the jury. She was also appointing Zakhar Bron to be the competition’s ‘global ambassador’.

Fabio Luisi, one of the most honest maestros in the music world, resigned ‘irrevocably’ on Monday.

The Paganini Competition is now as rotten as the rest.

We hear that Jean-Jacques Cesbron at CAMI Music has retained the services of Andrew S. Grossman as an independent contractor.

The move was prompted by a drastic drop in revenue resulting from Lang Lang’s year-long absence.

Grossman, a hard-nosed entertainment agent, was fired as a director Cami after Ronald Wilford’s death in lurid circumstances reported in Slipped Disc.

All employees of Cami were legally prohibited from having any contact – written or otherwise – with Andrew S. Grossman following his dismissal. Seton Ijams was terminated on suspicion that he communicated with Grossman during office hours using Company property.

These strictures, however, do not apparently apply to Cami’s spin-off, Cami Music. Its boss, Cesbron (pictured right), needs cash flow. That brings Grossman back into play.

Like a bad fish soup, you just can’t keep some guys down.

John Copley, 84, is one of the world’s best loved and most experienced opera directors, a fixture at Covent Garden for more than half a century. When he turned up at the Met last week to direct a revival of Rossini’s Semiramide, singers vied with one another to have selfies taken.

So when a mole at the Met told us yesterday that Peter Gelb had called in John Copley and fired him for some remarks overheard in the rehearsal room, we refused to believe the whispers until we had three firm sources.

Last night the Met issued a statement through the New York Times, its trusted mouthpiece, to the effect that ‘following a complaint from a chorister about inappropriate behavior in the rehearsal room that was received on Monday, Jan. 29, John Copley is no longer directing the revival of ‘Semiramide’ that will open on Feb. 19.’

The New York Times has no further information and nothing more to say on the matter.

We do.

Here’s what happened. In a rehearsal, male choristers they were told to show different reactions to the ‘ghost’ of Assur (sung by Ildar Abdrazakov*, who was not present). They were asked for a range of ideas. John Copley jokingly said ‘if it were me I’d like to see him naked.’

One chorus member reported this joke upward. Peter Gelb fired John Copley. He caught the next plane home.

The vast majority of the chorus, we are told, are horrified and upset at his dismissal. Other singers are posting sympathy messages and photographs of Uncle John.

Company members are saying that it is ridiculous that a single, unguarded remark by an elderly man should have got him railroaded out of town. No-one was being threatened, hardly anyone was offended. For most of John Copley’s long and distinguished life, a remark like this would have been considered a pleasantry.

At worst, he should have received a mild reprimand and told to get back to work.

Gelb’s panicky over-reaction is indicative of the poisoned atmosphere at the Met in the post-Levine climate. No-one admits that they saw or heard anything during 40-odd years of James Levine, so now the slightest misdemeanour by a harmless old man has been made into a hanging offence.

John Copley emerges from the incident without blemish.

Peter Gelb is left looking helpless and ridiculous.

You did not read this in the New York Times.

John Copley (r) with David Daniels

UPDATE: John Copley responds to Met dismissal

UPDATE2: The Met must apologise to John Copley

*Ombudsman correction: Samuel Ramey and Sir David McVicar have pointed out in comments below that the ghost referred to was not that of Assur, and the director therefore cannot have had  Ildar Abdrazakov in mind. Evidently, our immediate sources confused his role with that of the murdered Nino. We apologise for that misperception.