Leonard Slatkin has responded to our recent posts about disparities in pay between principal wood and woodwind players in major US orchestras. We had suggested that the music director has something to do with it. Slatkin confirms that this is indeed the case.

He writes:

Most of the people writing about the situation have failed to point out how raises are doled out. At least with my three music directorships, the process was the same. At some point in the season, the artistic administrator and sometimes the executive director would meet with me. We would go over the entire orchestra list, budget in hand, and would try to figure out who deserved an increase and who did not. It was a laborious procedure but seemed to be the only one that everybody could agree on.

I have no idea how it works in Boston. It will be important to understand this going forward, if indeed, discrimination is determined to be a factor.

If the suit actually goes to court, which I doubt, the result could have an overwhelming impact on the orchestral world.

Let’s say that Elizabeth wins what she is asking for, which is parity with her counterpart in the oboe section, plus damages. It is very easy to see the other principals, regardless of gender, asking for the same thing. This puts the cost to the orchestra at a premium, possibly one that cannot be afforded. And other orchestras will literally follow suit, causing potential labor disputes or even bankruptcies. A strange outcome could be that the oboist’s salary is cut back to bring the two closer together.

But what if she loses?…

Read on here.

 

Helsinki, March 2018. A programme of Busoni, Brahms and Knussen.

There may be a sound problem in some territories. If so, click here.

The soloist in the Knussen horn concerto is  Jukka Harju.

A selection of tributes:

Mathias Pintscher: We lost one of the greatest musicians today
one of the finest musicians I had the honor to know and spend time with 
Your wit and inspiration will be deeply missed
I have no words”

Alan Johnson, choreographer of the uber-camp ‘Springtime for Hitler’ sequence in Mel Brook’s film of The Producers, has died at a very great age.

It can’t have been easy to bring this off.

Alan also wrote dance sequences for the movie of West Side Story.

He probably had the best job in Hollywood.

In a 60th birthday interview with Fiona Maddocks, the late Oliver Knussen looked back at his early exposure to the London Symphony Orchestra, where his father, Stuart, was  chairman and principal double-bass.

If I never made the decision to be a musician, I did make the active choice of being a composer. Once I was reading music, I began to imitate it. I was a terrible piano student but it was clear I was more keen on making up my own stuff. Dad probably thought it would eventually go away at first. He always wanted me to become a conductor. After a while he asked a couple of people what to do, and they said I’d better have some lessons, so off I went to the Watford School of Music where, luckily, my teacher was John Lambert, who had been a student of Nadia Boulanger. I continued with him privately until I was 16 or 17.

Two things happened in your early-mid teens: you met Britten and your First Symphony [now withdrawn] was performed by the LSO, conducted by you. Were these privileges? Traumas?

Dad was working at Aldeburgh at the time. In fact the bass part of Curlew River was written for him. Of the various people he asked for advice about me, Britten was one. He invited me to tea – of course I was terribly shy – and treated me seriously: was I doing counterpoint? Did I plan my pieces carefully? That kind of thing. He was very good at making you feel what you were doing was important, and as if you might be having the same sort of problems he had. I didn’t have lessons, just one or two meetings of this sort. But he kept a watchful eye from afar. When I arrived at the Festival Hall for the infamous premiere of my symphony he had sent a telegram, and afterwards he was the first person who offered me a commission, for the 1969 Aldeburgh festival.

Why infamous?

It’s a sort of wound that has never really healed, an occurrence I wish would be calmly forgotten and put away. I never seem to be able to get rid of the bloody thing! I do think it’s pretty remarkable that a kid of 14 actually wrote such a thing – though it’s VERY withdrawn now. It was very good for me that I heard it – these days one would have sent it off to be done in a workshop, quietly, and that would have been the end of it. But with the LSO it became a nine-day wonder – press photographers on the doorstep next morning and all that. My inclination at such times is to flee…

Read on here.

 

This was Oliver Knussen on Friday, happy as can be after receiving an honorary doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music in London. Olly died suddenly last night.

Some of his most affecting music was written in memory of his wife Sue, from whom he was separated. Sue, a livewire in contemporary music, died suddenly of meningitis 15 years ago.

Oliver Knussen died yesterday.

No living British composer was untouched by his personality, his kindness and his work.

The son of a London orchestral player, Olly conducted his first symphony with the LSO at age 15. His second symphony was premiered at Tanglewood by Gunther Schuller. The third, and most successful, just 15 minutes long, was taken on diplomatic tours to Moscow and elsewhere.

Two children’s operas – Where the Wild Things Are and Higgledy Piggledy Pop – occupied his middle years.

A combination of persistent ill health and composer’s block caused him to fade from the front ranks of contemporary music. But his conducting ability and an unquenched interest in all new music made him a vital mentor to young composers in his own country and many abroad. He worked often with the Cleveland Orchestra and made recordings for Deutsche Grammophon.

Convivial, curious, charming, Olly will be very widely mourned.

UPDATE: Olly’s last accolade.

UPDATE: Dad wanted me to be a conductor.

WATCH: One of Olly’s last concerts.

In light of the discrimination suit against the Boston Symphony Orchestra, we thought it might be useful to check the pay grades of principal flutes and oboes in the other four so-called Big Five US orchestras.

These salaries are negotiable. They depend on experience, on personality, on status, on maestro opinion and on what the player might earn elsewhere is he or she got the urge to take a walk. When two principal flutes walked out on the Met, that orchestra took a serious hit in the breadbasket and has not yet fully recovered.

So here’s what we found.

In Philadelphia and Cleveland, the principal flute earns more – quite a bit more – than the principal oboe.

In the New York Phil and Boston, the oboe is much better paid.

In Chicago, the figures are not available from public tax records.

So it’s a draw.

The top pay for these players ranges from $265,000 in Cleveland to, in New York, $410,327.

More will doubtless emerge should the Elizabeth Rowe case come to court.

 

Bogdan Roscic, incoming director of the Vienna State Opera and a man of no prior opera experience, has inserted another high-paid job into the stressed-out budget.

Bog, presently head of Sony Classical, has hired Robert Körner from Lyon Opera to be his casting director.

He previously appointed Sergio Morabito of Oper Stuttgart as chief dramaturg.

Neither of these positions existed before.

What will be left for the director to do?

Play goalkeeper, maybe.