The incoming music director of the Bavarian State Opera will relinquish his London position.

 

The Lebrecht Album of the Week features music by Geraldine Mucha:

Late in the Second World War, a Scottish composer in London fell in love with a Czech journalist. Geraldine Thomson was a rising talent at the Royal Academy of Music. Jiri Mucha was the son of a world-renowned artist, the man who had remade the fin-de-siecle image of Sarah Bernhardt in a style as unmistakable and widely imitated as Gustav Klimt’s.

Newly married, the Muchas returned in autumn 1945 to Prague…. When the Communists seized power, Jiri was arrested as an enemy of the people and Geraldine’s music was banned…

Read on here.

And here.

One of the Boston Symphony’s regular viola players has won the audition for a vacant seat.

Kathryn Sievers, who was born in Boston and grew up in the Marshall Islands, has been playing in the orchestra since December 2007.

She has an Eng. Lit degree from Yale, a Masters from Juilliard and some post-grad qualification from Cincinnati.

It’s the Boston Symphony. Even the janitor’s got a degree.

He started out with a guitar and another guy.

Then he picked up motley folk and jazz ensembles.

On his farewell tour, we hear, he’s taking the New York sextet yMusic, a contemporary-classical group.

 

 

From our diarist Anthea Kreston:

Last night’s concert in Milan was wonderful. I had flown in early enough to be able to have a nice stroll to the Duomo. Climbing the winding stairs to top of the church, I was able to see all of Milan through the hundreds of marble filigree spires piercing the sky, covered in cherubs and all manner of sculpture. The church itself was so ambitious in size and detail – it reminded me in that way of Gaudi’s Sacre Familia in Barcelona – no detail overlooked, too ambitious, too small or too large. The entire, endless floor of the church was made of interlocking colored marble designs, the story-tall oil paintings, the walls of stained glass dwarfed the alters, the intricate mausoleum, the archeological dig below.

Our concert was in the Conservatorio di Musica “Giuseppe Verdi” di Milano, Italy’s largest music school. With a history of over 200 years, it is housed in the cloisters (dating to the late 1500’s) of the attached Baroque Church (Santa Maria Della Passione). As I stood on stage, holding the Testore violin generously on loan to me by a Viennese investor, I was happy to bring this violin home, to the city where it was built over 300 years ago. What would Testore have thought, listening to his instrument playing the brutal, unforgiving Shostakovich 5th String Quartet? In the haunting second violin solos, I have found new voices in my Testore – the opening of the second movement, a slow, desperate, exhausted descending chromatic line, played high on my A string, each descending note a series of the same finger, dripping down, it has a sound up there which cuts to the heart. And again, the third movement begins with a second violin solo – this time low on the G string – empty and yet noble – in the echo I have a new place I can play – if I play with the lightness of a feather, I can move my bow dangerously down the fingerboard, and I found a sound there that is so hollow, so throaty. There is no forgiveness here – if I don’t precisely control my speed, angle and weight of the bow, the sound will crack, squeak, or disappear. But if I have the courage, it can be magic. This is one of the pieces we will record this spring for our Shostakovich CD.

The Testore name has a complex mix of lore surrounding it. The maker of my violin, Carlo Antonio Testore, was a student of the famed Grancino, and the father of a short dynasty of Testores who continued making and selling their instruments under “the Sign of the Eagle”, the family shop the heart of bustling Milan. My Testore was built during the Golden Age of violin making (it is 1710). Back-handed compliments abound for the Testore violins – comments such as “remarkable sound, considering the choice of inferior woods”, “beautifully made, of one doesn’t look too close at the odd-shaped, roughly hewn scrolls”. But – really – what was it like for a Luthier in the Dutchy of Milan during the height of the War of the Spanish Session (1701-1014) – a major European conflict that embroiled the greatest houses of Europe, and went as far as North America, under the name of Queen Anne’s War. Maybe Testore deserves more – give the guy a bit of a break – it can’t have been easy to source materials and retain a violin shop while the world around you was crumbling. Maybe he deserves to be heralded as a maker who persevered under impossible circumstances, who was meticulous while fearing for his life and the lives of his family. Was creative with materials and found his sound in different woods, with unconventional techniques.

Generations of Royal marriages had been negotiated, regal births had cemented territorial rights, the Spanish empire was vast and strong. The much-anticipated death of last Hapsburg King of Spain, the sickly and childless Charles II threw the conflicting kingdoms of France, Austria and Bavaria into a path of war, using the resulting instability to reclaim or claim new lands. I can hardly imagine that a violin maker would have the freedom of movement to travel and source the aged maple favored by Testore’s southern luthier rivals – he opted for locally grown “oppio” maple instead, and spruce. While the world around him was violent and bloody, while his very city was used as a bargaining tool, he stayed, bent over his workbench for 500 hours per instrument, intent on his craft. My violin was born of this determination, this blind passion, and it continues to shine, playing its heart out next to the vastly superior Stradivarius to my right and Amati to my left, and defiantly holding its own.

 

Lorna O’Neill has announced the return of Music Inter Alia, a company that disappeared when it merged with ICA in July last year. Now that ICA has sharply downsized, shedding many artists and staff, Lorna is back in business on her own account.

Here’s what she says:

 

Music Inter Alia (MIA) is back in business.    After a hiatus of 6 months, Lorna Neill re-opens the doors of the boutique agency.   Annette Foerger joins as a consultant with her own list.

 Music inter Alia was originally set up in 2002, providing artist management as well as a gamut of music and arts PR services.  The new, expanded team is planning to devote its full attention to its core business of artist and project management.  MIA has moved seamlessly back into the thriving creative arts hub in Hammersmith,  Riverside Studios, where MIA was previously based.

The relaunched artist list includes conductors Harish Shankar, Clemens Heil and Maxim Rysanov (who also features on the soloist list), pianist Alessio Bax, violinists Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Alexander Sitkovetsky as well as two chamber groups, the Sitkovetsky Trio (pic) and the Albion Quartet.

 

The mezzo of our lives will turn 90 next Friday.

She is still out there, giving masterclasses, never hesitant to venture a strong opinion.

In a class of her own.

Share your memories below.

The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, 84, has informed the Vienna State Opera that he ‘will not be able to complete the composition of Phaedra as discussed between us. Over the previous year I have tried and tried again to work on the conception of the opera but in recent times, adverse circumstances […] have left me with no other choice but to request to be released from our contract. This has been an incredibly difficult decision and all the more, given that such a proposition from such a prestigious and prolific house as yours depends on a deep relationship of trust from both parties. From the very beginning to this very moment, you have trusted in me.’

Dominique Meyer, replacing Penderecki’s work with Manfred Trojahn’s Orest, says: ‘It is an awful pity that Krzysztof Penderecki’s composition project, which we had many productive exchanges about over the last six years, can no longer be brought to fruition. I am, however, thankful that Mr Penderecki was able to act promptly so we had time to alter the programme … The Intendant’s fear that a piece will not be ready in time for the deadline is something that has not changed since the Baroque period. The risk that it might not perhaps all come together at the end is one that we have to take in order to facilitate the creation of new works. And so I am looking at the positives, namely that two further large-scale world premières and two children’s opera commissions are running according to plan.’

Michael Volpe of Opera Holland Park took eight inner-city young people to the Royal Opera House to see Toca.

You can watch the outcome here if you’re in the UK, or read about it here anywhere else in the world.

Mike writes: ‘Cultural exploration isn’t just about a teenager from the inner city becoming an opera buff or that opera or theatre per se ‘improves’ him or her as an individual (although it will enrich them). It is time, I believe, to focus not on developing audiences in a one-dimensional way, but that we should focus on social and personal aspiration by using our extraordinary art forms as demonstrations of the capacity people have to look beyond their immediate horizons.

‘I’ve been a little taken aback by some reaction to the concept. I am asked why ‘Hip Hop’ is used in the title, as though we are using it as a euphemism for the colour of the majority of our participants. Hip hop is the cultural reference point for all of them; they chose the title for the film.’

One of the kids says: ‘I’m not gonna cry.’

WARNING: You may be moved.

The new from Venice is that Myung Whun Chung has dropped out of La Bohème ‘due to injury sustained in a traffic accident’.

He was in hospital for three days and will be off work for two weeks.

‘He was injured when his (Mercedes) Benz car was hit by a truck,’ an aide told a Korean news agency.

Elsewhere, in Cabridge, Stephen Cleobury is making a good recovery after a bike crash.

Research in Slovenia reveals that their ancestors came from the same small village.

Read here.

Separated at birth?