The Indigo Piano Quartet – Monique Heidema-cello, André Tendelman-piano and Ron Ephrat-viola – welcome Noëmi Bodden as their new violinist.

A member of  the Rotterdam Philharmonic since 1993, Noemi was concertmaster of the Rotterdam Sinfonia and has played with several other ensembles.

 

Rosa Briceño Ortiz, who has died of a cancer that was diagnosed early this year, was a respected orchestral conductor.

In 1983 she became the first woman to conduct the Simon Bolivar Orchestra.

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

There is no clear western perception of Nikolai Myaskovsky. We think we know Prokofiev and Shostakovich, whether through their music or through their Stalin ordeals. But their senior contemporary barely flickers on our radar even though Stravinsky, among others, held him in high regard.

In a fairly undramatic life, Miaskovsky simply got on with writing …

 

Read on here.

And here.

Message from the LA Phil:

Pianist Yuja Wang‘s originally scheduled May 8, 2018 recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which was postponed because of illness, will not be rescheduled. Due to the artist’s busy schedule, a replacement date could not be identified. Regarding the cancellation, Wang has stated:

I have been working hard to find a date in the next few months to play my postponed recitals in Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Costa Mesa, but I’m sorry to tell my fans that it is simply impossible. I have been given strict instructions by my doctors that I’m trying very hard to follow to ensure that I remain healthy. I thank you all for your support and kindness and I look forward to performing for you again as soon as I am able.  <

The conductor, 74, has been in hospital for three weeks with severe blood poisoning.

‘I nearly died,’ he tells Stern.

We wish him a full recovery.

From our diarist, Anthea Kreston:

 

 

Regret, anxiety, emotional ownership: that’s what it comes down to. I am on a flight to Tokyo (my first business class), where my Quartet, already landed, is waiting for me. I go from airplane to stage for the first concert on this 11-day tour of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan.

Last night, I played with the Humboldt Streich Trio, with my husband Jason and Volker Jacobsen, the original violist for 18 years of the Artemis Quartet. We played in Hannover at the adventurous KünsteFestSpiel, run by the effervescent and boundary-pushing conductor Ingo Metzmacher. Who would have thought, 20 years ago, drinking beer in Schloss Elmau (Bavaria) together, that we would be again playing, laughing, and performing together in another millennium, another castle.

Volker turned to me during a rehearsal, and said – “every musician has one thing they are obsessed with, and can’t stop talking about, and yours is Emotional Ownership. You need an EO stamp!”. And it is true – to me, it is about knowing where each person has the main voice, and then taking that moment to the extreme, owning every nook and cranny of it – playing it with every ounce of your soul.

There are many obstacles to Emotional Ownership, but in the most fundamental sense, I believe there are two. Anxiety and regret. Regret is the past, emotional ownership is the present, and anxiety is the future. The only way to have pure EO is to have a clean slate – you cannot be infected, even by 1%, with regret or anxiety. But, our detailed education and realities of the near-impossibility of tasks at hand can make regret and anxiety a disease – a hamster wheel we can’t jump off of.

Emotional Ownership demands that we live only in the moment – in the millisecond – nothing else exists or matters – and our whole lives up until this point have made this moment possible. We have to be the best we have ever been – every time, better, more committed, more honest, demanding of ourselves to create the impossible. When something goes not go according to plan, we can click out of that flow – our hearts are put on hold while we get stuck in that moment, reliving our regret. Forward stops, and we stay, even as the music continues forward. Once you allow regret to sneak in, your defenses are down, and it will start to happen more and more often, taking longer each time to escape its clutches and to return to the present, which is, by that point, weakened and injured.

Anxiety is no better – and encompasses everything from thinking about your audience (whether that is a teacher, audition committee, colleagues or concert audience), how this moment will affect your future, or second-guessing your personal preparation. Everyone deals with anxiety in different ways, but relinquishing yourself to these moments of self-doubt are crippling. We have no control over these things – how the audience feels is up to them, not up to us, and our level of preparation is fixed at that moment we step into stage. We cannot change that.

Stepping onto stage last night, I was exhausted. I am still coping with burnout from the US tour, and my arms are on the mend from double tendinitis – oh and I crashed my Segway in Budapest a couple of days ago, landing sideways in a puddle and have huge bruises on my forearms. I haven’t been able to practice this program as much as I would have liked to, but rehearsals have been thorough, supportive, and smart. The program itself is impossibly crazy – starting with the Schoenberg String Trio, then onto the hour-long Rihm Trio, which is a tangle of chaos, power-playing and extreme micro-management. So I have everything tilted against me. Regret and anxiety are a certain. But, I read last week that laughter reduces inflammation, and as I turn to my colleagues, we give ourselves one last chuckle, promising to still be friends after the concert, no matter what craziness happens, and with determination and mutual support, we have the time of our lives. Carpe Diem!

Message from the LA Phil:

 

Kristin Chenoweth (pic) has withdrawn from the previously announced Bernstein 100 Celebration with Dudamel at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday, July 10, at 8pm. Due to ongoing complications from a past neck injury, Kristin Chenoweth is taking some time off from performing so that she can properly heal.We are delighted to announce that American actress, singer, and dancer Sutton Foster will make her Hollywood Bowl debut on this program.

Sutton Foster can currently be seen starring as the lead of Darren Star’s hit TV Land series, “Younger.”

Not quite the same league.

The French sopranos Elsa Dreisig (pic) and the Hungarian Emöke Baráth have inked exclusive contracts with Erato-Warner Classics.

The veteran director is bringing his LA production of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi to La Scala next season. Here’s how it went down first time round in 2008.

Rupert Christiansen, Daily Telegraph: Il trittico was a triumph pretty much all round. Allen’s version of Gianni Schicchi gets off to a ghastly start when some some cod titles worthy of Nigel Molesworth are flashed on to a screen: A Prosicutto e Melone production, starring Oriana Fellatio and Luigi Impetigo, etc.

This initial lapse of taste can be forgiven, however, because once the curtain rises, what follows is pure delight.

One might have guessed that Allen would have plumped to set this tale of a noisy, scheming family in the Jewish Brooklyn he paints in many of his films, but wisely he keeps it Italian – though Santo Loquasto’s breathtaking designs, entirely black and white in homage to the neo-realism of Vittorio de Sica, evoke the backstreets of post-war Naples more than the medieval Florence of the libretto.

I’m not taken by the idea of an enraged relative returning to murder Schicchi at the climax, but Allen otherwise lets the comedy flow without inserting extraneous gags or concepts…

Anthony Tommasini, New York Times: Far from being incompetent, his “Gianni Schicchi” is a cleverly updated and inventive staging of the popular comedy, marred only by a regrettable directorial liberty at the end. In another recent comment to the press, he described “Gianni Schicchi” as “funny compared to ‘Tosca,’ not funny compared to ‘Duck Soup.’ ” True enough, though as the performance began I was briefly worried that Mr. Allen was determined to turn Puccini into the Marx Brothers….

But the only real miscue comes with Mr. Allen’s altered ending. After bamboozling the family of Donati, Puccini’s Schicchi points to the happy Lauretta and Rinuccio, who now have the money to marry, and asks the audience’s indulgence, since his scam has fostered young love. But Mr. Allen has the indomitable Zita (Jill Grove), Donati’s avenging cousin, burst in and stab Schicchi, who poses his question to the audience and then drops dead.

You can understand why Mr. Allen could not resist giving an Italian vendetta twist to Puccini’s happy ending. But isn’t it more comically, cynically, triumphantly right for Schicchi to get away with everything?

image: woodyallenpages

The Berlin Konzerthaus has invited the Viennese to play a ten-day concert series from 14 to 23 December this year, parking its tanks on the Berlin Philharmonic lawn.

The conductors will be Riccardo Muti and Franz Welser-Möst.

Should be interesting.

The time that people remember when the Vienna Phil played the Berlin Konzerthaus, the concert hall was in the German Democratic Republic and the conductor was Leonard Bernstein.

 

Word is out that Diane Zola is to be the Metropolitan Opera’s Assistant General Manager, Artistic, a job formerly occupied by the late Robert Rattray. The position involves finding talent and keeping it happy.

Diane, Ukraine born and raised in Detroit, has been Director of Artistic Administration for Houston Grand Opera. After a singing career, she helped the Bolshoi Opera create its young artist program in Moscow.

She was once an intern at a law firm alongside Renee Fleming.

Sounds good.