The Spanish government has granted citizenship to the Venezuelan conductor ‘for family and cultural reasons’. Dudamel is married to the Spanish actress Maria Valverde.

He has been unable to return to Venezuela since speaking out against the horrors of the Maduro regime.

His change of nationality comes on the day of the death of his Venezuelan mentor, Jose Antonio Abreu, a regime loyalist.

The US mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey, 25, won the first Glyndebourne Cup tonight, with a cash prize of £15,000 and promises of engagements from several intendants on the competition jury.

A recent Juilliard graduate, Hankey attended the Merola Opera Program in San Francisco.

She is agented by Askonas Holt and will make her Met debut next year.

The death has been announced of Jose Antonio Abreu, founder of Venezuela’s El Sistema of music education, which he turned into a global brand.

He was 78 and had been frail from diabetes and other complications for more than a decade.

He lived long enough to see the regime he supported turn against his protege Gustavo Dudamel and punish El Sistema by cancelling its orchestral overseas tours.

He remained a supporter of the oppresive regime. His death was announced on television by President Maduro.

UPDATE: Did anyone really know Abreu?

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

It feels like I’ve spent half my life trying to persuade people that the next composer they should discover is Bohuslav Martinu. A Czech of limitless melodic permutations, he takes the legacies of Dvorak and Janacek forward into an early modern idiom, infused by a decade of living in Paris. I know no work of Martinu’s that outlasts my interest. He is incapable of being boring. This jam-packed recording presents three of his most scintillating works. If they don’t convert you to Martinu, nothing will….

Read on here.

And here.

An extraordinary new composition by Jessica Krash, based on questions she is asked in Vilna, Lithuania.

Never forget.

The Leningrad conductor has a bad day.

Anyone recognise them?