press release:

The London Symphony Orchestra [LSO] today announced full details of its performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s orchestral masterpiece Gruppen which will take place at 16.30 and 18.15 on Saturday 30 June 2018 in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The announcement comes as Sir Simon Rattle’s second season as LSO Music Director, which runs from September 2018 to June 2019 at the Barbican, goes on sale.

Stockhausen at Tate Modern

Gruppen requires three separate orchestras playing simultaneously, each with its own conductor. 109 LSO musicians will be split into three groups in the Turbine Hall, conducted by Simon Rattle, Matthias Pintscher and Duncan Ward. The audience will be right in the middle of the performance space, enveloped by the sound and encouraged to move around as the work is performed. BBC Radio 3 will record the performances in binaural sound for broadcast later the same evening, allowing listeners on headphones to recreate the aural experience of being in the Turbine Hall.

The LSO and Simon Rattle will also perform Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (And I await the resurrection of the dead), written by French composer Olivier Messiaen to commemorate the fallen in both World Wars.

Both works were inspired by the vast scale of the Alpine mountains surrounding each composer as he worked, Stockhausen in Switzerland and Messiaen in south-eastern France, and both are well-suited for performance in non-traditional venues like the Turbine Hall.

A true landmark in the history of music, Gruppen treated the construction and performance of music in a completely different way, challenging both performers and audiences. Its title refers to 174 ‘groups’ of which the work is comprised – cohesive groupings of musical notes which are not brought together because of their pitch (like a traditional chord), but share a particular characteristic, such as speed, or richness of colour or dynamics. The world premiere took place at a concert in Cologne in 1957 in the Kölner Messe, an international trade fair and conference centre, conducted by three of the most significant avant-garde musicians of the day: Stockhausen himself, Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna.

This is the first UK performance of Gruppen not to take place in a concert hall or other venue traditionally associated with classical music. Gruppen has been performed nine times in the UK since it’s British premiere in Glasgow in 1961. The Turbine Hall – a huge industrial space at the heart of Tate Modern – has been used for a wide variety of performances and events since the gallery first opened in 2000, from Kraftwerk’s eight-day retrospective of concerts to Michael Clark Company’s spectacular residencies.

Stockhausen at Tate Modern is produced by the London Symphony Orchestra, in association with Tate Modern. There will be two performances on Saturday 30 June, at 16.30 and 18.15. Tickets go on sale in April. For full details please visit: lso.co.uk/tate

 

The Russian Sergei Dogadin was named winner in Singapore tonight, with a $50,000 prize. He is a pupil of the juror Boris Kuschnir, who also judged when he won the Joachim competition. So it goes.

Second was Chisa Kitagawa, a student of juror Takashi Shimizu.

Third, Oleksandr Korniev, a teaching assistant at YST Conservatory in Singapore and past student of jury president Qian Zhou.

If this was sport, it would be banned.

 

 

The Rajar audience figures for the fourth quarter of 2017 make grim reading for the BB’s classical team.

Radio 3 lost 0.6% of its listernship over the last three months, but a massive eight percent over the whole year, despite a policy of dumbing down and easy bites.

Classic FM, by contrast, was up 4.4% on the quarter and 5.7% year on year.

Classic FM has a weekly reach of 5.7 million against R3’s 1.95 million.

Jazz FM was down 10.7% on the quarter.

Read theraw stats here.

A reader of the New York Times has contributed the paper’s first balanced assessment of the firing of an 84 year-old director of unblemished record for making an allegedly inappropriate remark.

Here’s today’s letter:

To the Editor:

I was deeply disturbed by the Metropolitan Opera’s firing of John Copley, described as “one of the opera world’s foremost directors.” I am not an opera fan, but I was dismayed to read that he was fired because “a member of the chorus reported that Mr. Copley had made him uncomfortable at a rehearsal on Friday with a sexually charged remark.”

There is no longer any doubt that our culture is in the grip of a moral panic the likes of which we haven’t seen since the day care child abuse hysteria of the 1980s, and, before that, the congressional witch hunts to root out supposed Communists nearly 70 years ago.

In ordinary times, a possibly inappropriate remark at a rehearsal would have warranted, at most, advice from a superior that it not be repeated. But these are not ordinary times.

As quickly as you can say “Harvey Weinstein,” we have moved from an overdue cultural wake-up call about sexual predation to the frightening point where a comment or gesture, no matter how casual or innocent, can destroy a brilliant career. What matters is not the intent, but whether the recipient felt “uncomfortable.”

Alleged “crimes” such as this have resulted in the resignations or firings of fine men like Senator Al Franken and the former WNYC radio hosts Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz. Eventually, we will return to our collective senses, but apparently not before we have added even more names to our modern-day blacklist.

KENNETH M. COUGHLIN, NEW YORK

The mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, has asked for the Order of Montreal to be removed from the conductor Charles Dutoit, following accusations of sexual misconduct.

‘I do not believe that a person with such a heavy baggage of allegations should hold this honour,’ she said.

The Order of Montreal was created in 2016 for the city’s 375th anniversary. Dutoit was among the first to be awarded it, alongside his fellow-conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

 

Sergio Morabito, head dramaturg of Oper Stuttgart, will join Vienna in the same position in October.

His job is to cover for the incoming director Bogdan Roščić, who has no experience of working in an opera house.

The appointment was announced by Roščić’s interim operation, not by the Vienna Opera itself.

The monthly magazine and website Limelight has gone into liquidation. The March issue has been cancelled and staff have been laid off.

Originally a broadcast magazine called ABC Radio 24 Hours, the publication was renamed Limelight in 2003, sold to Haymarket (then owners of Gramophone) in 2006 and rescued by a local independent in 2014.

Last year, it was transferred to a not-for-profit company called Arts Initiative Australia.

Sad to see an entire continent left without local classical coverage.

UPDATE: Back from the dead…

The city council voted overwhelmingly last night not to apply for the EU’s rolling title of City of Culture.

The reason given is that it will cost tens of millions of Euros that could be better spent on culture itself, rather than the trappings of a title.

Salzburg’s decision suggests that the title has been hopelessly devalued by being rolled around provincial fishing and mining towns in obscure corners of the EU under some all-must-have-prizes rule.

 

Bradley Garner, the Cincinnati flute virtuosos accused of misconduct with nine students, lost his job last night at New York University.

The Steinhardt School said: ‘NYU was unaware of allegations surrounding Bradley Garner until we recently received an inquiry from a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter. As of today, Mr. Garner is no longer an adjunct faculty member at NYU.’

Garner is no longer listed either on the pre-college faculty of Juilliard.

He denies the allegations.

Randy Bowman, who told journalists that Garner showed videos of himself having sex with students, is principal flute of the Cincinnati Symphony.