America’s busiest manager – formative chief in St Louis and Minnesota, now fireman to burned-out bands – has just joined the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra as interim chief executive.
David just loves running orchestras. He has been doing it for 53 years.
The German violinist Thomas Reif has been chosen as concertmaster of Mariss Jansons’ Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. He will start in November.
Thomas, 27, is brother of Christian Reif, resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony.
The Italian conductor was appointed music director of the Concertgebouw in 2014 and started work two years later.
By normal procedures, his contract would have been up for renegotiation in 2018. According to inside sources, it may have been renewed as recently as a few weeks ago. We have been unable to confirm these reports, but talks will certainly have started.
Gatti will not go quietly. He was fired unilaterally and seemingly without warning. That means lawyers can claim the full value of his unexpired contract. The new contract.
Mitsuko Uchida has agreed to share her artistic directorship directorship of Marlboro Music with the US pianist Jonathan Biss, it was announced today.
Christopher Serkin, Chair and President of Marlboro Music and grandson of Marlboro’s founder said, ‘Jonathan’s appointment as co-artistic director marks the next important evolution at Marlboro. He has the musical integrity that is the hallmark of our community, a 20-year history of participation at Marlboro to maintain a sense of continuity, and the vision to help guide the next generations of great musicians.’
Neil Argo, house composer and orchestrator for Aaron Spelling productions Dynasty; Beverly Hills, 90210 and Wild America, has died of heart disease. He was 71.
From a Wall Street Journal book review by Joe Horowitz:
A much more compelling section of Mr. Allen’s narrative comes at the end, when he observes that Furtwängler blithely maintained his musical ideology after World War II, with no evident pause for reflection. One can agree that this says something unpleasant about the Furtwängler persona, suggesting a nearly atavistic truculence. But it is reductionist to analogize Furtwängler’s unrelenting postwar hostility to nontonal music to “the non-rational censure of ‘degenerate’ art by the Nazis.” Far more interesting is Furtwängler’s own argument that the nontonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers lacks an “overview.” A calibrated long-range trajectory of musical thought was an essential ingredient of Furtwängler’s interpretive art. Absent the tension-and-release dynamic of tonal harmony, he had little to work with.
This is an intriguing line of thought: did modernism make maestro interpretation redundant?
Discuss.
Full review here.
Hannah Rankin, the British bassoonist fighting for a WBA boxing title, lost in 10 rounds on Saturday night to the reigning champion Alicia Napoleon.
More pics here.
