The death of Brian Kellow, a cornerstone of Opera News for three decades, has been reported by the magazine.
Dismissed two years ago after an assault on the magazine by the Met’s Peter Gelb, Brian had been stirring up a storm of coverage for Florida Grand Opera as its public relations manager.
At Opera News he had been successively assistant editor, managing editor and executive editor.
He knew opera inside out.
Martha Argerich pulled out of this year’s Verbier Festival yesterday. No reason.
Marcelo Puente cancelled on July 11 on health grounds.
Janine Jansens pulled out the same day, saying she is ‘slowly recovering’.
Gautier Capuçon withdrew with a shoulder injury.
And today Amanda Forsyth says she’s out ‘for medical reasons’.
This is a tale of our times, brilliantly told by Basil Considine in the Twin Cities Arts Reader. It begins:
One night in July, wigmaster Jolie O’Dell turned out the lights and went to bed. She awoke, she says, to find herself being groped by her house guest, a bass-baritone opera singer named Matthew Stump. Stump masturbated as he fondled her; amidst the angry yelling that followed, he refused to leave the building. Finally, O’Dell grabbed his phone and threw it out the front door. Stump ran outside to retrieve the phone and O’Dell locked the door behind him….
Matthew Stump, after making a public apology, has now deleted that apology and is messaging anyone in the opera world to deny this apology. Here’s the police report. I agreed to drop charges in exchange for the public apology. I can post text exchanges with him where he admits to all the things in the apology and police report, as well.
Matt and I went back and forth for days trying to come to an acceptable solution that would give me a sense of justice without putting me through court proceedings or interfering with his career. After arguing over wording, this statement made us both feel pretty OK. He only deleted it when he realized that people were reading it. He wanted to make a public apology that wouldn’t be seen by anyone he knew. He is not being extorted. This was an agreement we both reached after he committed a crime and I was left hurting and depressed.
The accomplished opera house manager Carlo Majer died yesterday after a long illness. He was 62.
Born into a wealthy Milanese inustrial family, Carlo became the youngest artistic director of any opera house in Italy at the age of 35, presiding at the Teatro Regio in Torino from 1991 to 1998. He went on to head the Teatro San Carlo in Naples for three years, returning to full-time involvement in his family business.
Among his best-remembered achievements are a centennial Bohème with Pavarotti and Freni, watched by a hige television audience, and a Ronconi production of Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust.
The conductor has written an op-ed for Haaretz today, attacking the new Israeli nationality law. He writes:
The founding fathers of the State of Israel who signed the Declaration considered the principle of equality as the bedrock of the society they were building. They also committed themselves, and us, “to pursue peace and good relations with all neighbouring states and people.” 70 years later, the Israeli government has just passed a new law that replaces the principle of equality and universal values with nationalism and racism….
We now have a law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid.
I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, on order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that.
That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today.