Günter Piesk died this week at the age of 97.

A member of the Berlin Philharmonic for more than 40 years, he became principal bassoon in 1962 and was a member of the five-player committee who giverned the orchestra from 1971 to his retirement in 1987.

His loyalty to Karajan was unquestioned.

The British summer opera festival has chosen Stephen Langridge to be its next artistic director.

Son of the tenor Philip Langridge and a versatile director of opera productions, Stephen has been Director for Opera and Drama at Gothenburg Opera, Sweden, for the past five years.

He joins Gly next spring.

He succeeds Sebastian Schwarz, who departed for unspecified reasons.

Ever wonder where our Berlin-based string quartet diarist Anthea Kreston gets her resilience? Read this:

This week, I began my fourth season as the second violinist of the Artemis String Quartet. I arrived back in Berlin on Wednesday evening, after a month in the States – visiting our old small town in rural Oregon, seeing family and friends, teaching at Curtis and a final stop in Washington, D.C. By Thursday I was in full Quartet rehearsal mode, and on Friday, on the road for a three-concert tour as a part of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, in beautiful Northern Germany.

I am alone for three weeks – Jason and the girls are squeezing every last minute from our once-a-year US visit. I have big plans for my remaining alone time – I run every day, am doing a full top-to-bottom house cleaning, studying German two hours per day (my tutor comes to work with me every day I am in Berlin), and hands-on practice minimum 3 hours a day. I have a lot of variety this season – in addition to a full Quartet schedule, this month I am playing in the Musethica Festival (a Marlboro-style festival with a different International location each session), and sitting concertmaster for Deutsche Oper. I have a lot of notes to get my fingers around (Quartet tour this week is Beethoven, Bartok, Schumann and the Schumann Quintet with Leonskaja), and we start new Quartet rep next week (Haydn Rider, Bartok 4, and Brahms 51/2).

One of the things that has always grounded me is growing vegetables. I am the granddaughter of an Appalachian farmer, and I grew up with dirt between my green fingers. EB Boston lived with us until he passed (when I was 6 years old), and for as long as I can remember, he helped me plan, plant and care for my own garden in the back, growing flowers and vegetables from seed inside during the cold Chicago winters. He had fallen, as a teenager, into the tractor at the homestead in Sulphur Wells, Kentucky. His leg nearly severed, the local veterinarian (there wasn’t a doctor) sewed it back on, with a sawed-off shotgun held to his head by my great-grandfather.

You see – he refused to do it – he didn’t know the first thing about re-attaching a human limb. But, it became abundantly clear, great-grandad wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. By the end of the year, using two canes, his family sent him on his way, with his 7th grade education – there were too many mouths to feed, and he was no use around the farm. And so, with his quick wit, effusive optimism, and natural opportunism, he set forth for the Windy City. He always walked with a cane – his right leg jutting out at kind-of a right angle (“that horse-doctor managed to connect enough of the right tubes to get me up and about”, he would say, rubbing the feeling back into his semi-cooperative leg). He was a killer on the poker table, could drink any man under the table, and would pack his pipe without looking down. He liked plaid (often wearing one plaid for pants, and another for a sports-coat, and made his fortune somehow between the card table and various inventions (rumor had it that he had something to do with the bandaid, Formica, and window air conditioners). At heart, he was always a farmer.

He bought a beautiful 80 acre farm in rural Wisconsin, an easy drive up from Chicago for us on weekends and long vacations. He set one of his friends up there to be the full caretaker, with the agreement that we/he could come to “work” the farm whenever he wanted – caring for the large vegetable plot, orchard and the full range of animals.

I am at my happiest when elbow deep in a vegetable garden – this year is our best garden yet in Germany. I have used an old ladder to trellis my tomatoes, and the zucchini are stretched almost to our front door. The apples are ripe, and I have plans to make cider and apple butter with the girls when they get back. Nothing brings me to my happy place like the smell of tomatoes on my hands after a good spell in the garden.

Deutsche Grammophon has signed a longterm deal with Apple Music to have classical playlists curated by major artists.

For today’s launch at Salzburg, the pianist Daniil Trifonov, tenor Rolando Villazón and cellist Peter Gregson curated Apple Music’s three main composer stations: Mozart, Bach and Beethoven.

The DG Playlist will be regularly updated to include videos by DG stars. Check it out here.

Further plans include the first full visual opera on Apple Music – Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette from Salzburg 2008 with Rolando Villazón, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin – along with a Salzburg video playlist, including the Mozart Gala in the composer’s 250th-anniversary year, featuring Anna Netrebko, Magdalena Kožená, Thomas Hampson, Daniel Harding and the Vienna Philharmonic.

In its season-opening performances of Bruckner’s third symphony, the Concertgebouw Orchestra has replaced Daniele Gatti with the Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck. He will conduct five concerts starting at the Berlin Festival on September 4.

Gatti was peremptorily dismissed last week after allegations of sexual misconduct.

We hear that Bernard Haitink is being asked to step in at a subsequent concert. UPDATE: Haitink will conduct Mahler 7.

Thomas Hengelbrock will lead the opening night black-tie gala concert. The young British conductor Kerem Hasan has also been roped in.

Several C’bouw concerts carry this notice:

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has terminated the cooperation with chief conductor Daniele Gatti as of 2 August 2018. As soon as we have clarity on who will conduct the concert we will share it on this page.

The orchestra is nowhere near deciding on a fulltime replacement music director. Honeck, who is music director in Pittsburgh, must now be added to the shortlist.

Following a flood of engaged responses on Slipped Disc, Joseph Horowitz has expanded his original perceptions on the Berlin Philharmonic conductors and the Nazis.

Here’s a taster:

Thanks so much for this engrossing feedback. Maybe we could summarize that the truth about Furtwangler falls within these two polarities:

1.He stressed the communal experience of music, felt he couldnt access that outside Germanic lands (I find this credible), so he accommodated the Third Reich insofar as he had to, so long as he didnt have to join the Party and otherwise publicly endorse Nazi ideology, ethnic cleansing, book-burning. At the same time, his conservative cultural/political mindset created some degree of common ground with the Nazis. Think of Mann’s superiority posture in Reflections of a Non-Political Man (worth reading if you don’t know it). I cannot envision WF feeling personally kindred to a Hitler or Gobbels; his breeding was aristocratic.

2.All of the above – but add to that some degree of actual enthusiasm for what the Third Reich stood for – eg concerts that were patriotic occasions, flaunting German exceptionalism/Kunst. Especially given the passions/exigencies of wartime. In other words: crossing the line Mann refused to cross, and doing so with some degree of fervor….

Meanwhile, thanks to Norman Lebrecht, a second thread of responses on slippedisc.com tackled another aspect of the Furtwangler phenomenon: his rejection of non-tonal music and its implications for musical interpretation.

I now feel impelled to revisit Topic A – not Furtwangler the man (B), but Furtwangler the conductor – and see what A and B put together look like today. …

Read on here.

Jeanne Boulez-Chevalier, who has died on August 3 at the age of 96, was her brother’s closest confidante.

He would spend summers at her home in the Loire and it was there (I remember him telling me) that he received the call from President Pompidou, asking him what it would take for him to return permanently to France (Boulez’s answer, dreamed up on the spot, was the Paris institute, IRCAM).

Jeanne was responsible after her brother’s death in January 2016 for placing his manuscripts at the Sacher Foundation and the Bib Nat.

She is survived by her son Pierre Chevalier, a TV producer at Arte.

Boulez, Jeanne and the Stockhausens, father and son

Corks popped in December 2016 when David Cooper, principal horn of the Dallas Symphony, won the equivalent seat in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Sadly, it hasn’t worked out.

David is returning to the US for what the orchestra describes as ‘private reasons’.

Auditions will be held in the next couple of months for both 1st and 3rd horn in the Berlin Phil.

A woman in the Slovakian town of Sturovo, irritated by her neighbour’s barking dog, took to playing Verdi, morning to night. Full blast. The same Traviata aria, over and over again.

After 16 years, she has finally been stopped.

Read here.