Marc Albrecht has announced he is stepping down after ten years as music director of Netherlands Opera.

His chief exec, Pierre Audi, is leaving this summer. Albrecht will depart two years later.

They have been an outstanding team.

Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra has named Sebastian Weigle, music director of Frankfurt Opera, as its next principal conductor. He succeeds Sylvain Cambreling next April.

Weigle presides over probably the broadest opera repertoire of any company on earth.

He will remain MD at Frankfurt.

 

The influential teacher Irena Orlov died yesterday after heart surgery.

A professor at the Levine School of Music at Washington DC she was highly regarded by such rising artists as Dmitri Masleev, Nikolai Lugansky and Lucas Debargue.

Her life story covers two generations of Russian dissidence.

Her father, Abram Isaakovich Rozhansky, was chief defender in a series of Soviet anti-Jewish trials between 1969 and 1975.

Irena mingled with dissident poets and smuggled out their works, while playing in Andrey Boreyko’s period instrument ensemble. In 1980 she left for Israel, where she developed an advanced practice in music therapy. Six years later she moved to the US.

Peter Ruzicka has decided not to renew his five-year term.

He says: ‘I enjoyed my temporary position, planning and bringing about the Salzburg Easter Festival together with Christian Thielemann – and will continue to do so. I will carry on with full commitment until mid-2020.’

The video below is a fake.

We can state this with reasonable assurance because Gould’s secretary, Ray Roberts, has clarified that Gould never played Beethoven’s 7th Symphony in the Liszt transcription. He once considered doing all nine Beethoven symphonies but changed his mind after recording the fifth (Columbia) and sixth (First movement, Columbia & Full Symphony, CBC).

This rather compelling recording has been viewed one third of a million times.

Does anyone have a clue who the real pianist might be?

The photo is (c) Don Hunstein/Lebrecht Music&Arts.

The Latvian violinist and director will establish a British base next season as artist in residence with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Its music director, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, is an admirer of Kremer’s and she is planning 23 concerts in a series titled The Baltic Way, on the music of the seaboard states, 30 years after their liberation from Russian rule.

Kazuki Yamada will become principal guest conductor, it was announced this morning.

 

The Berlin Philharmonic will not be conducted next week by Sir Simon Rattle in Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri.

He has cancelled ‘for family reasons’ (aus familiären Gründen).

Mikko Franck flies in.

The American Karina Canellakis is to be the first woman music director of a major Dutch orchestra.

She has just been named chief of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, which ranks third in the hierarchy behind the Concertgebouw and the Rotterdam Philharmonic.

She will succeed Markus Stenz in September 2019.

Canellakis, 36, was assistant to Jaap van Zweden in Dallas and is being introduced to Dutch media as his protegée. She credits her first conducting opportunity to a spell at the Berlin Philharmonic Academy, when Sir Simon Rattle offered her the baton.

A New Yorker, she won the 2016 Georg Solti conducting competition and is agented from London by AskonasHolt.

She made her debut with the radio orchestra just eight weeks ago.

 

 

Having seen her Lugano fest close for lack of Swiss francs, the inspirational pianist has been asked to curate a festival of her own with the Hamburg Symphony.

Martha will play four-hand with Daniel Barenboim and various chamber works with Mischa Maisky,Thomas Hampson, Ivry Gitlis and her own daughters, Lyda Chen and Annie Dutoit. Barenboim’s son Michael will also take part.

The festival starts on June 25.