The New York countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen has won the $10,000 first prize at the 30th Dallas Opera Guild Vocal Competition. He also took the audience prize.

Second was Canadian Tenor Josh Lovell. Third came Mexican Tenor Mario Rojas.

Cohen, 23, was one of the winners of last year’s Met auditions. He’s going places.

The international baritone Håkan Hagegård has resigned from the Royal Music Academy in Stockholm following allegations of sexual harassment.

Hagegård, 72, strongly denies the claims.

A radio documentary on Swedish classical music channel P2 last November titled ‘Don Juan at the music conservatory’ alleged widespread misconduct at Stockholm institutions without naming alleged perpetrators. No charges have been brought.

Unfounded allegations in Swedish media of bullying and discrimination led to the tragic death last month of Anne Sofie Von Otter’s husband, Benny Fredriksson.

Hagegård has made no comment. The Royal Music Academy issued a statement: ‘The Board of the Musical Academy welcomes Hagegård’s decision.’

The best-selling novelist Douglas Kennedy is an orchestra nut. He goes to concerts always and everywhere, even in Geneva where the audience is notorious for bad behaviour. Here’s how Douglas coped with ladies who can’t keep their fingers off their phones. 

The concert hall for me is my church. I must hear over 125 live concerts a year. In this secular sacred place – you don’t talk to others. You don’t use mobile phones. You respect the communal nature of the event, the high seriousness of the musical endeavour onstage, and the fact that, for a few hours, we all come together to shut off the world outside and concentrate on the abstract wonder that is music’s universal language.

Last night in Geneva I spent two hours at the Victoria Hall – a true wonder of Beaux-Arts sryle, redolent of 19th century subdued opulence (as befits Genève, city of John Calvin), with a rather excellent acoustic. The hall was packed, the tickets feriously expensive (I got one of the few remaining seats a fortnight ago – it was a side view up in the Premeiere Galerie – or First Circle – and cost a whopping 130 Swiss Francs… around $135 or £95). But then again the Vienna Philharmonic were in town and this great orchestra can command such prices – especially in the ‘grand bourgeois’ city that is Genève. And Zubin Mehta was supposed to be leading the orchestra – only to fall ill and be replaced by Daniel Harding.

Now truth be told my jury is out on Mr Harding. I often find his performances to veer towards the technically immaculate and emotionally distant, lacking in the great metaphysic that a major conductor brings to the podium. But last night Harding was in febrile form, conducting a dynamic interpretation of Bernstein Symphony No 1 and a highly charged, deeply felt reading of Mahler 5. It was wonderful to see a clearly talented conductor lift his game and turn galvanic and profound.

But during the Bernstein there was a woman in the third row of the stalls filming the entire event. Five rows behind her a woman was texting. Another woman took several iPhone photos, the flash exploding across the semi-dark hall. And five seats down from me an overdressed woman in her fifties, very bling bling, with the sort of big black round spectacles that called to mind some sort of Fellini-esque ‘grande donna borghese’, spent the entire length of the Bernstein on her phone, not just missing the vivid immediacy of Harding and the Vienna Phil’s interepretation, but also causing a distraction for everyone around her.
As the Bernstein was played without pause between movements it was impossible to say anything. But when the first half ended I stood up and said in French:

“Don’t you know that using your phone during a concert is not just against the rules, but the height of impoliteness?”

The woman looked shocked, then turned monied arrogant.

“No one else complained” she said….

What Douglas did next? Read on here...

Reprinted with permission

Edward Francis-Smith, a former member of the European Union Youth Orchestra, has won an audition for a double-bass position at the Metropolitan Opera.

He is a rare British graduate of the Curtis Institute.

Results in the Copenhagen-based Malko Competition:

1 Ryan Bancroft, 28, US, who also won the audience prize.

2 Anna Rakitina, 28, Russia

3 Alessandro Bonato, 23, Italy

Originally from Los Angeles, Ryan Bancroft works in the Netherlands and the UK with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Residentie Orkest, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Ulster Orchestra, South Netherlands Philharmonic, North Netherlands Symphony Orchestra, nieuw ensemble, and the BBC Singers.

Staatstheater Cottbus has placed its General Music Director, Evan Alexis Christ, on immediate leave.

Christ has been the subject of recent ructions from musicians, prompting the resignation of the theatre’s intendant.

He has been put on paid leave until the end of the current season 2017/2018 while the Staatstheater Cottbus reviews the allegations.

The all-conquering young American soprano tells its straight to Zsolt Bognar in his latest edition of Living the Classical Life, shown first on Slipped Disc.

Nadine says it’s her Portuguese mother who keeps her grounded.

‘I was always told the truth in a very forceful way… I always text her in the break and ask her, how did I do? And I know she’ll tell me the truth. And when she does tell me, “actually, it was terrible,” it humbles me and I accept the fact that next time I’ll try to be less terrible.’

Watch.

We hear that the 24×7 “Met Opera Radio” channel on the North American Sirius XM satellite network has removed all recordings conducted by James Levine.

This means the 40 years of broadcasts while Levine was music director has been silenced.

The Levine operas have been replaced with full-length broadcast recordings from the 1930s, 1940s, and especially 1950s with often dubious technical quality despite great singers.

Now everyone knows that Levine and the Met are only speaking through lawyers these day, but this vindictive editing of institutional history is reminiscent of Stalin at his worst, when Trotsky and other undesirables were whited out of party pictures.

The radio channel is emasculated so Peter Gelb can sleep easy at night.

Ridiculous.

Post from the Ukrainian pianist Dinara Klinton:

Just seen a comment on some random channel that posted my other recording of “Feux follets”. The guy was accusing me for not being as fast as Kissin. I hope this one reaches him with my sincere apology for having upset him.

Compare for yourselves.

There’s an illuminating article in History Today on the Tunisian singer Habiba Messika, whose music was received as a covert call for an Arab uprising.

Habiba was brutally murdered in 1930.

Chris Silver writes:

Between 1924 and 1930 Messika released a staggering number of phonograph records – close to 100 – for the Pathé, Gramophone and Baidaphon record labels. She was an accomplished actress, heralded as the ‘Second Sarah Bernhardt’ by her 21st birthday. Her style and looks also earned her a coterie of (male) fans known as the ‘soldiers of the night’, an ‘army’ which included Habib Bourguiba, who would become the first president of independent Tunisia in 1957. That Messika achieved so much, so quickly and did so at such a young age meant that her interwar funeral constituted one of the largest and most significant Tunisian gatherings of the early 20th century….

Read on here.

My hot-headed former MP gets into a horrible tangle with the LA Times.

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

… The Gewandhaus can play this stuff in their sleep and sometimes it sounds as if that’s just what they are doing. There is a lack of momentum in the fourth symphony that is close to soporific and, though the seventh comes to life with those big slow-movement crescendos, it’s hard to feel that real Schwung is sustained to the end. A booklet picture of the conductor having a nap with a Bruckner bust does not help matters….

Read on here.

And here.