The Metropolitan Opera today granted tenure to a pair of co-principal clarinets, Anton Rist and Inn-Hyuck Cho.
They tower here above the music director, Yannick Nezet-Seguin.
Nina Mishchenko, one of the 23 Russian diplomats expelled from Britain for espionage, has apparently been giving harp recitals in Kensington and Richmond.
Nina, 30 and unmarried, is the only one of the expelled personnel to have no defined role.
More here.
From the Sutton Symphony Orchestra:
The event will begin at 7.30pm, with tickets for adults on the door £10 while under-18s go free. There will also be cakes at the interval.
Irresistible.
Two of this month’s classical covers.
Someone’s not taking their medication…
The Catholic University of America, in Washington DC, is proposing to merge its music department with media and visual arts in order to save $3.5 million in academic salaries. Some 35 jobs will go.
Read here.
We hear that Chad Smith, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the man in charge of its adventurous programming, is about to be named head of the Ojai Music Festival from next year.
He will succeed the veteran Tom Morris.
Chad, 45, was the internal favourite to succeed Deborah Borda when she left for the NY Phil, but the board brought in Simon Woods from Seattle.
He is the latest of the Borda team to look beyond LA, although we hear he is staying put at the Phil for the time being.
The streaming service Idagio is featuring key Vienna Phil players talking about their alltime #1 recording.
First up is concertmaster Volkhard Steude.
The VPhil has signed a new deal with Idagio to livestream some of its concerts.
The violinist, 38, keeps a counter on her website.
Can you remember them all? a German journalist asks her.
Das sieht vielleicht viel aus, aber es ist ja mein Beruf und ich habe mein erstes Konzert mit zehn Jahren gegeben. Zählen Sie doch einmal die Menge der Mahlzeiten, die Sie in Ihrem Leben gegessen haben: Das ist so ähnlich und ergibt sicher auch eine erstaunliche Zahl. So gesehen gebe relativ wenig Konzerte.
No more than I remember all the meals I’ve eaten, she says.
The fortepianist Robert Levin, 70, will receive the lifetime Bachievement award.
In a Guardian interview, the ROH director Oliver Mears admits he has rowed back on some of his predecessor’s more quackpot plans.
In 2013, (Kasper) Holten had announced to great fanfare four new commissions “inspired by the writings of philosopher Slavoj Žižek”. These new operas – by Kaija Saariaho, Jörg Widmann, Luca Francesconi and Mark-Anthony Turnage – were supposed to “challenge opera writers to write about their fears and hopes for the world now”, and the outgoing ROH chief executive Tony Hall said they would be staged by 2020. Oddly, they have never been heard of again, and there is no sign of them being programmed. I ask Mears what happened. “Two have fallen by the wayside for different reasons,” he says. “The other two – by Turnage and Saariaho – are still in our long-term schedules.”
And here we were queuing up, all ready with our pocket Zizeks.
Mears goes on to say the company cannot afford more than one new opera a year.