Lawyers for the former music director of the Metropolitan Opera have filed suit in a New York court claiming unfair dismissal.
He is seeking $5.8 million in damages and the restoration of ‘Levine’s name, reputation and career.’
He alleges that the Met and its general manager Peter Gelb by ‘cynically hijacking the good will of the #MeToo movement, brazenly seized on these allegations as a pretext to end a longstanding personal campaign to force Levine out of the Met.’
... success led to a contract from the publisher Tito Ricordi in 1913, which assured her a fixed yearly income and resulted in the publication of her prize-winning cantata. In 1916, Ricordi further published …
The vocal composer and chorus leader signed with Columbia Artists today, presumably to gain traction in symphony halls.
Friends are lamenting the death, from a heart attack, of Blair Lawhead, a professional violinist on Broadway who also ran a successful hair-replacement clinic. He was just 55.
In 1989 Blair Lawhead came to New York City with a violin, a pair of scissors and a dream. Today, Blair Hair is being toasted by New York nightclub personalities and the Gay Press as a legendary part of the city’s lavender landscape and as much a part of queer culture as the Chelsea neighborhood in which the business is located.
A really useful service.
The 2018-19 season of La Monnaie, announced today, features the world premiere of Frankenstein, an opera by the American composer, Mark Grey.
The Brussels date is three years behind schedule, but the horror stuff should feel timely for Brexiteers.
From the newly published memoirs of Andrew Lloyd Webber:
Among the proudest moments of my career was when one of my heroes, Dmitri Shostakovich, saw the production in 1975, said he wished he’d composed it and really liked the way the rock section underpinned the woodwind and the brass.
DSCH was a very polite man.
I’ll be elaborating about Marion von Weber at the Liverpool Phil tonight.
The world owes Mahler’s First Symphony to Marion von Weber, his Leipzig love…
Now for the nagging detail. In an excess of local patriotism, Leipzig scholars trawled through the rest of Marion’s life to find some exceptional trait, and came up with no further incident from the day Mahler left in 1886 until her death in 1931. But tracing her origins, they found an inconvenient fact. Marion was not from Leipzig at all: she was from Manchester. Fancy that.
An English researcher, Nigel Simeone, has furnished me with further details. Marion was born into a German-Jewish family called Schwabe, living at 313 Oxford Road …
Their colleague and friend had been suffering from a bipolar disorder and talked about it with the group, but no-one expected the awful outcome.
Now, for the first time, the survivors talk frankly about suicide and mental health in an interview with Zsolt Bognar.
A compelling video, essential watching for everyone who is involved in music, where so many live close to the edge.
Scott Caizley grew up on a council estate in Rothwell, the son of a labourer.
He became obsessed with the idea of becoming a concert pianist.
But when he got into Trinity Laban music college in London, Scott floundered. ‘I was struggling. I felt as though I was not ‘fitting in’. I felt like a fish out of water. My accent was funny, my schooling was not great, I was not as cultured or as well-travelled as the other students and I did not make one single friend whilst at the music college…’
Renaud Capucon has succeeded in reviving one of the more respected international competitions, the Long Thibaud, after it ran out of cash two years ago.
Founded in 1943 and named after a mediocre pianist and a fine violinist, the competition’s winners include Samson Francois, Dmitri Bashkirov, Jean-Philippe Collard, Philippe Entremont, Christian Ferras, Peter Frankl, György Pauk, Vladimir Spivakov, Cédric Tiberghien and Tamás Vásáry – an intriguing mix of French and East European talent.