Sad message from Gauteng Opera which has trained a generation of South African singers:
Gauteng Opera has for the past 18 years worked to offer the Gauteng public as much opera and classical music as possible and in that time, we have also developed and trained over 150 singers, technical experts and arts administrators. We have managed to offer opera of the highest possible standard while investing in young talent.
Due to the prevailing socioeconomic environment, it has proven very difficult for Gauteng Opera to raise enough funds to cover all its operational needs. So, it is with a heavy heart that the board of Gauteng Opera has resolved to shut down the company and cease all operations by 31 March 2018.
This has been an agonizing decision, and the Board and Management of Gauteng Opera considered all available options, and short of a miracle we will not be able, in good conscience, and indeed within our requirements, carry on and risk putting the company and all its stakeholders knowingly in peril.
The Board and Management of Gauteng Opera will over the coming weeks do our best to make sure we care for the many people who have made this organization what it has been.
We encourage all patrons, supporters and stakeholders to attend our last performance of Sacred Songs at the Tin Town Theatre on Sunday, 18 March 2018 at 15:00. All proceeds and donations will go to ensure a last salary for the artists and staff of Gauteng Opera.
From an interview with Pam Breaux, head of the US National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.
Overall, state governments invest $357.5 million in state arts agencies; that represents about $1.08 per capita. During fiscal year 2018, legislative appropriations to state arts agencies decreased by 2.4%; yet, there are distinctions among the states. Twenty-two state arts agencies reported increases in 2018; fifteen reported flat funding, and nineteen reported decreases (50 states and 6 jurisdictions total)….
On March 5, 1968 in Toronto, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage played a game of musical chess. Titled “Reunion,” the event drew an audience of hundreds to the Ryerson Theatre, where the two creative giants would activate a unique auditory experience through a specially constructed chess board that triggered different electronic compositions with each individual move…
photo caption: John Cage, “Reunion,” Gordon Ryerson Institute, University of Toronto, Ontario, March 5, 1968. Players: John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Teeny Duchamp. Musicians: David Behrman, David Tudor, and Lowell Cross (photo by Shigeko Kubota, courtesy the John Cage Trust)
The composer Thomas Pernes has died at home in Vienna after a severe illness.
A student of the quirky Haubenstock-Ramati, he broke out of the new music ghetto to interpolate elements of jazz, pop, minimalism and electronics in his pieces.
His works were performed worldwide.
IMG’s Nick Mathias has signed the Santa Cecilia concertmaster Roberto González-Monjas to his conductor list.
Roberto has been spending his summers conducting ensembles in Verbier and Nick has been working overtime to replace lost revenues.
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Players’ Association agreed today on a three-year contract extension, six months ahead of schedule.
The players will get a three percent pay rise annuallyover the three years.
An anonymous donor apparently made the deal possible.
The ASO has also agreed to fund11 more seats in the orchestra, restoring a full complement of 88 musicians.
The deal draws the line beneath the residue of a bitter lockout of the musicians four years ago.
Opera Tampa has shared with local media the reason that Daniel Lipton left his job last year.
‘He caught up to me and he kissed me and tried to force his tongue in my mouth,’ says one singer.
Germany’s equality commissioner has asked for the noun ‘Fatherland’ to be removed from the national anthem, along wth the adjective ‘brotherly’.
Kristin Rose-Möhring says these are patriarchal terms that have no place in an egalitarian state.
She proposes to replace Vaterland with Heimatland and brotherly with bravely.
E. Randol Schoenberg, the composer’s grandson, has found a wonderful letter from the old man, declining a chance to introduce one of the Oscar winners in 1938. The winner in question was Charles Previn, for Best Original Music Score, One Hundred Men and a Girl
The letter reads as follows:
Mr. Donald Gledhill, Executive Secretary
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science
1680 North Vine Street
Hollywood, California
I deeply regret that illness during the past two nights will prevent me from attending the banquet tonight. Please express my disappointment and offer my apologies to your board and the guests. I add the remarks which I had planned to deliver and which I should like to have represent me on this important occasion.
It seems to me one of the most estimable traits of mankind, that men like to find out, who are their best. And, that mankind always is ready to venerate outstanding persons in every field, symbolizes to me the tendency of mankind toward progress, toward development, toward improvement, toward a better future.
As almost my whole life as an artist has been devoted–scarcely to the present,–but distinctly to the future, I use with pleasure this occasion to express the hope: there will soon come a time, when the severe conditions and laws of modernistic music will be no hindrance any more toward a reconciliation with the necessities of the moving picture industry.
By its use of music as a means of stimulation, the movie industry has already succeeded in making the people music conscious. Step by step it will educate them also to ideas and ways of expression, which they cannot appreciate today.
Because of this effect, in time to come, every outstanding man in this field will deserve the title of pioneer of culture.
Therefore I congratulate most heartily the man whose Universal Picture Company picture “One Hundred Men and a Girl” has been chosen by so great a majority of votes to be recognized as the author of this years best musical score.
Arnold Schoenberg
116 N. Rockingham Ave.
West Los Angeles.
Telephone: W.L.A. 35077
Given her predilection for cutting-edge contemporary, her Vienna debut opera is rather retro.
Gottfried von Einem’s Dantons Tod will celebrate its première in a new production by Josef Ernst Köpplinger at the Wiener Staatsoper on Saturday, 24th March 2018. To celebrate the 100th birthday of the composer, the work with which he achieved his international breakthrough at the Salzburg Festival in 1947 will return to the Wiener Staatsoper….
In an interview for the State Opera magazine “Prolog” Mälkki describes von Einem’s style: “He was very assured of what we would call “style” and saw it as a crucial element of composition […] In this opera, he introduces a French sound, followed by dramatic and abstract ideas. He doesn’t simply combine these however, in order to create variety, rather it is important for the development of the drama. […] Danton is a piece of theatre in the best possible sense. He simply has a feeling for cause and effect, for theatre itself.”
Friends remind us that today would have been the 70th birthday of Richard Hickox, felled in 2008 by a heart attack while conducting on a Sunday in Swansea.
Richard was at once the most enterprising of British conductors and the least pushy.
He founded the City of London Sinfonia and the baroque Collegium Musicum 90, recording extensively for EMI, RCA and Chandos, championing the works of British composers from Purcell to the present day.
After holding posts with the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, he was, when he died, music director of Opera Australia, a livewire to the last. The shock of his untimely death remains fresh.
Brazilian musicians are in mourning for the French-born bassoonist Noel Devos, who died at the weekend, aged 89.
Devos (born Calais, October 8, 1929) was brought to Rio in 1952 by Eleazar de Carvalho, with aid from Unesco, to play in the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra.
He inspired works from dozens of Brazilian composers and played with such conductors as Heitor Villa-Lobos, Isaac Karabtchevsky, Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim.
