The Met has called in Sophie Joyce, former head of casting at English National Opera, to head its Lindemann Young Artists Program.
Sophie left ENO in the last round of swing doors in November 2016. Since then, she has worked as an opera consultant.
Aside from an initial two-year stint at IMG Artists, her entire career has been with ENO.
Barcelona’s Liceu Opera has a vacancy for principal flute.
Some 190 professionals applied from all over the world. Fifty were invited to audition this week.
None got hired.
Or their expenses paid.
That’s how rough it is out there.
Early in 1945, a starving survivor of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra saw a sign in Krakow reading ‘Polish Musicians Union’.
Helena Dunicz-Niwińska went inside to ask if anyone knew anything about her brother, who was also in the camps. A second sign led her into the office of the newly-founded Polish Music Publishers, PWM. She was hired on the spot and, for the next 30 years, she looked after producing scores by a new generation of Polish composers.
Helena died on June 12, aged 103.
Obituary here.
A statement from the Mayor of Bucharest:
On 15 September 2017, when celebrating the Bucharest’s Days, the soprano Angela Gheorghiu sang in Constitution Square of our capital city. The fee paid by the Bucharest City Hall was 144.906 EUR, VAT included
The statement is politically motivated. Read here.
The Verbier Festival held its annual launch in Moscow last night in the press center of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
The main news line was that Valery Gergiev will be chief conductor of the Verbier Festival Orchestra.
His distinguished predecessors in that role are James Levine and Charles Dutoit.
Enough said.
From Seattle Opera:
SEATTLE—Everyone is welcome to join the conversation at Breaking Glass: Hyperlinking Opera & Issues. This free public forum opens a door to frank discussion about race and diversity in opera. Topics will include how art is produced in an increasingly diversified America, and who has the right to tell whose story; the role of art in stimulating public discussion about racism and discrimination; and what roles social justice plays within the artistic mission of an opera company. All are welcome; and People of Color are encouraged to attend.
“At Seattle Opera, we have spent a lot of time thinking about who we want to be as a company,” said Barbara Lynne Jamison Director of Programs and Partnerships. “We love this art form; it can be powerful, transcendent, and life-affirming. As a historically White organization, Seattle Opera is committed to taking ownership of opera’s Eurocentric, and at times, racist past. We will continue to learn from marginalized voices and bring them into the center of discussions in order to build a more equitable future.”
A collaboration between Seattle Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival (a nonprofit opera festival based in Cooperstown, New York), this forum happens at a time when Seattle Opera has been highly visible for its work to increase equity, which has included nuanced, and at times, charged conversations with communities of color who have helped to hold the company accountable. Since summer 2017, Seattle Opera has used several forums and events to engage in dialogue with members of the Asian Pacific Islander community during Madame Butterfly, and the Black community during Aida.
As an equity change-leader in the opera industry, Seattle Opera was excited to be able to partner with Glimmerglass, a company that has been innovative with its storytelling and dismantling of the Eurocentric status quo. Breaking Glass originated with the desire to examine how music and art can respond to societal inequities, and as a means to provoke thoughtful discourse. Other tour sites of this forum include: Atlanta, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Cooperstown, Washington DC, and New York City.
The forum will include excerpts from new operas written for Glimmerglass, as well as opportunity for audience questions and input. LibrettistsTazewell Thompson and Paige Hernandez will talk about the substantive social content in their new operas Blue, which depicts an African American family after their son is shot by a police officer, and Stomping Grounds, a “hip-hopera.” Matthew Morrison from the Clive Davis Institute of New York University, Tisch School of the Arts will moderate the discussion.
The development of Stomping Grounds, Blue, and Breaking Glass: Hyper-linking Opera & Issues has been funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Opera America Innovation Grant and Repertoire Development Grant.
This event will be livestreamed. For more information, and to RSVP for this free event, go to: seattleopera.org/breakingglass.
Press release:
The Salzburg Mozarteum Foundation is delighted to be able to report on one of its most valuable acquisitions in the last ten years. Thanks to the generosity of Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler-Thumann, a letter that Wolfgang Amadé Mozart wrote to his friend Anton Stoll in 1791 is now a part of the Mozarteum Foundation’s Biblioteca Mozartiana, a library that houses its collection of original Mozart autographs. The last time the Foundation was able to acquire one of Mozart’s original letters was in 2001. As the Foundation’s president, Johannes Honsig-Erlenburg, explains, “This is a very special moment for the Foundation and a stroke of the greatest good fortune that the family that owns this particular Mozart letter approached the Mozarteum Foundation directly. We are grateful to the family for saving us from having to compete in the sort of bidding war that a charitable institution like the Mozarteum Foundation
has long been unable to afford. And what a gift Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler-Thumann has made us by financing the acquisition of this letter! As a result we are able to make Mozart’s frivolous joke accessible to a worldwide audience.”
Rolando Villazón, who is the Mozarteum Foundation’s official ambassador and the intendant of the Mozart Week Festival, has the following to say about the significance of this priceless acquisition: “Every letter that Mozart wrote opens up a new door that grants us access to the soul of the greatest musical genius of all time. To discover a new letter from Mozart is like finding a new flower in a wonderfully beautiful garden.” …
Mozart wrote to his colleague and good friend Anton Stoll (1747–1805) on 12 July 1791, less than six months before his death. Stoll was then based in Baden near Vienna. Mozart often sent his wife Constanze to take the waters at Baden, and Stoll helped him to find suitable lodgings for her. In June and July Constanze again took the waters at the Antonienbad in Baden. These baths were particularly expensive and as a result they were “visited only by sick people from the upper classes”, to quote a contemporary account.
Mozart visited his wife on several occasions during this time and used the opportunity to perform several of his works in the town’s parish church, where Stoll was choirmaster and, as such, responsible for performances of sacred music. It was for Stoll that Mozart wrote one of his best-known sacred works, the Ave verum K 618. Composed on 17/18 June 1791, it was performed on the Feast of Corpus Christi (23 June) that same year in the Baden parish church.
The contents of Mozart’s letter are briefly and easily summarized. In it he asks his friend, the choirmaster Anton Stoll, to send him the scores of two works that they had previously performed together in the church in Baden. But Mozart went to great lengths to embed this simple request in a typical web of jokes. Mozart had performed one of his Masses – probably K 275 – with Stoll in Baden on 10 July 1791. The composer had left his autograph score with Stoll but asked him in his letter to send him the parts that had been prepared for the performance so that he could also perform the work in Vienna. The fact that Mozart also performed a Mass by Michael Haydn (1737–1806) in the final year of his life attests to the high regard in which he continued to hold his former colleague from Salzburg.
Mozart introduces his letter with a brief “poem”, apostrophizing his friend as “liebster Stoll! / bester knoll! / grösster Schroll!” At first sight these appear to be merely random rhymes, but Mozart is in fact using terms that were current in his own day to describe fat and extremely coarse individuals. This was not meant to be taken seriously, of course. Indeed, all of Mozart’s friends had to be able to deal with jokes of this kind.
The second page contains a letter written by Mozart’s pupil and assistant Franz Xaver Süßmayr (1766–1803). He to o asks for the return of the aforementioned scores. But this letter is in fact a kind of forgery, for this page, too, was written by Mozart attempting to mimic Süßmayr’s handwriting. “Süßmayr” repeats Mozart’s request and at the same time threatens Stoll by saying that he will learn no more about the“opera” on which he, Mozart, is currently working. He is referring here to Die Zauberflöte, which received its first performance in Vienna two and a half months later, on 30 September 1791. We may assume that Stoll did all he could to satisfy Mozart’s demands because the composer later invited him to Vienna for a performance of Die Zauberflöte. This small example of Mozart’s inimitable way with words culminates in the letter’s date: “In the little shit-house on 12 July.”
Only two of Mozart’s letters to Stoll have survived. Both of them attest to a close relationship between two friends. Until now both letters have been in private ownership. Thanks to a generous donation from Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler-Thumann, the Mozarteum Foundation has now been able to acquire this second letter for its Biblioteca Mozartiana. The Foundation’s library houses most of the Mozart family’s correspondence, notably almost two hundred autograph letters in the hand of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart. The collection also includes numerous music manuscripts and derives in essence from gifts and legacies on the part of Mozart’s widow Constanze and their two sons Carl Thomas and, above all, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart.
It makes come as a surprise that the highest paid conertmaster in America sits in Cleveland, but then William Preucil has been doing the job since before most of us were born.
What’s really surprising is that New York Philharmonic’s Frank Huang doesn’t make the top ten.
Here’s Drew McManus’s due diligence of concermasters for the accounting year 2015/16:
Cleveland Orchestra $621,510
San Francisco Symphony $583,990
Chicago Symphony $539,900
Los Angeles Philharmonic $529,722
Boston Symphony $449,527
Philadelphia Orchestra $428,372
National Symphony $409,148
Baltimore Symphony $322,328
Dallas Symphony $293,027
Cincinnati Symphony $292,797
See also:
Two maestros now earn $3 million
Who’s America’s top-paid orchestral exec
Covent Garden’s Pappano is seriously underpaid
and
