The veteran maestro, out all year with medical issues, conducts a concert today for the first time in 2018.

He’s giving Beethoven’s 9th symphony at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples.

UPDATE: Watch here.

Most media struggle to find stories in August and most websites go on sleepytime.

Not Slipped Disc.

We’ve just broken our August record with 1,525,447 readers.

Of these, 53 percent were in the US, 19.9% in the UK, and 3.4% in Germany.

Some 27.5% were aged 18-24 and 33.5% were between 25 and 34.

Only 5.5% of our readers were over 65.

Men outnumbered women readers by 54 to 46.

Our readers’ highest secondary activity was taking part in sports.

Soure: Google Analytics

The top stories were:

1 Proposed sale of Steinway to China

2 Principal horn leaves the Berlin Philharmonic

3 Daniele Gatti is fired by the Concertgebouw

 

 

The composer and conductor John Williams and his wife, Samantha, have made ‘a significant pledge’ to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Centennial Campaign, the orchestra has announced.

It won’t say how much, but significant would not be less than six figures in a campaign that is chasing $500 million.

The gift, says the LA Phil, ‘provides for the naming of the John and Samantha Williams Creative Chair, which endows the position currently held by John Adams.’

The composer said: ‘Support of the orchestra presents us all with an opportunity to strengthen and maintain the cultural life that is indispensable to our community.’

The Welsh tenor Kenneth Bowen, bearer of the above accolade, died yesterday in Cheltenham at the age of 86.

A busy oratorio singer in the 1960s and 1970, ranging from Handel to Schoenberg to Tippett, he became Professor of Singing at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where his students included the broadcaster Aled Jones and the bass-baritone Neal Davies. He recorded extensively. His son Geraint is co-artistic director of the Three Choirs Festival. His son Meurig is former director at Cheltenham. Our condolences to the family.

The American electronic musician Henry Laufer, known as Shlohmo, has pulled out of an Israeli music festival.

 

We are hearing that the BDS movement has upped the pressure in recent weeks on musicians going to Israel with a range of tactics that include online trolling and bullying phone calls.

Not many will be deterred but those who are can expect to make headlines.

In the past four days I have listened to lost chamber music by Artur Schnabel, a once-successful 20th century harpsichord concerto that has gone unplayed for 60 years, arias by the Armenian mystic Komitas, a piece by an English composer Mary Donington (so obscure there are no dates available) and Uri Caine’s reimagination of music by the murderer Gesualdo.

Needless to say I was not ending my summer at Lucerne, Verbier, Salzburg, Aix, or any of the familiar watering holes of the music crowd. These places simply play the same central repertoire year after year ad infinitum.

My hangout was a French Alpine festival at Megève, two ski slopes up from Geneva and flexing its muscles for the first time with a range of music I was really curious to hear.

The unplayed harpsichord concerto was by Wolfgang Jacobi (1897-1972), an inner exile in Hitler’s Germany, and the arias by Komitas were stunningly sung a capella by Juliette Galstian, head of voice at the Geneva Conservatoire. There was even a programme of English chamber music for clarinet – lovely stuff, played by a Russian soloist Dimitri Rasul-Kareyev.

Not one concert that I attended failed to grip my attention. Not since Gidon Kremer’s ealy days at Lockenhaus half a lifetime ago has a festival tried to buck the trend by presenting music that is fiercely unfamiliar.

Megève has been founded by Guido Houben, a former Verbier executive who saw a gap in the clouds, and its mission extends beyond filling empty beds in an end-of-season ski resort. It seeks actively to engage audiences not just with concerts but with films, lectures, debates, daylong themes and more. I’ve bookmarked it for next summer. You should, too.

Simon Milliken, former principal double bass of the Kwazulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra, was stabbed to death on Friday while out birdwatching with a guest conductor.

The pair were 500 yards inside Durban’s Burman Bush Nature Reserve when they were attacked by marauders. Simon fled in one director, conductor Peri So in the other. He got away unscathed.

Simon was left bleeding from his wounds. He died before trackers arrived hours later.

Simon, who was 60, retired last year from the orchestra. He leaves a wife, Maria, and – in England – his mother and a brother.

Tributes here.

Singing Danny Boy at Senator John McCain’s funeral was not just a national moment.

It might even be a national turning point.