Eager to impress the Arts Council with its outreach credentials (and burdened with rows of empty seats), ENO has announced a free-ticket offer for under-18s at eleven Saturday-night performances, from now until Spring 2019.
Under-16s must be accompanied by a responsible adult.
Any paying adult will be allowed to bring four under-18s for free. Teachers ca bring ten.
More here.
This is first performance of a new concerto for double bass and orchestra, The Heart Has No Borders, commissioned by the incomparable Gary Karr. The composer, Andres Martin, conducts the Baja Chamber Orchestra.
The 47 bassists who make up the wall at the end came from all over Mexico.
Just in from Intermusica’s Stephen Lumsden, who bravely goes where others have gone before:
Intermusica Founder and Managing Director Stephen Lumsden has announced that one of the world’s most celebrated pianists, YUJA WANG, is joining the company for worldwide general management, effective immediately.
Yuja Wang, speaking from her home in New York, said: ‘It is with great pleasure that I join Stephen and his team at Intermusica. I value their long-term vision, dedicated work and personalised support of each artist. Finding the right team to help realise artistic goals and dreams is so important. I am very close to a number of Intermusica artists, and I know that the agency’s passion for music and international network are the right fit for the next stage of my career. I am excited about this fresh start and look forward to starting the new year with lots of interesting projects with the personalised support of my Intermusica family.’
The death is reported of Sylvia Geszty, a Hungarian soprano who was East Berlin’s go-to Queen of the Night in the late 1960s.
She went west in 1970, joining Stuttgart Opera and guesting frequently in Munich.
Internationally, she was seen and heard in Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Amsterdam and Glyndebourne.
Sylvia was 84.
The Minister of Culture of the Perm Region, Vyacheslav Torchinsky, has forbidden the Perm Opera and Ballet from using public funds to perform Alban Berg’s opera Lulu in the coming year.
He says it’s ‘too complicated’ for the public.
The conductor, Teodor Currentzis, is not best pleased.
More here.
Adam Cavagnaro’s Promethean Artists Agency, which launched today, is offering clients the services of a specialist fitness trainer and a styling consultant.
So everyone turns up at the Met looking like this.
Here’s the pitch:
Glyndebourn need a chorusmaster.
The last one departed abruptly and without a word of explanation. Apply here.
The Singapore Symphony is looking for a concertmaster. They want to hear from you before mid-Feb 2019 here.
The Royal Albert Hall is after a Head of Programming. You have two weeks to apply.
The Boston Symphony needs someone to run its Tanglewood Learning Institute. Try here.
Only the best jobs appear on Slipped Disc.
Contact matt@koo-boo.com for advertising opportunities.
The NDR Radiophilharmonie has confirmed Catherine Myerscough‘s tenure after an eight-month trial.
Catherine went to Germany with a Cambridge degree to study violin. Her first teacher in Lübeck was Heime Müller, former violinist of the Artemis Quartet.
These opportunities may vanish after Brexit.
The NDR music director is Andrew Manze, an English violinist who read classics at Cambridge.
A documentary on Alondra de la Parra premieres next month in Berlin.
She’s going places.
Der Dokumentarfilm “La Maestra” begleitet Alondra de la Parra auf drei Kontinenten zu ihren wichtigsten Lebensstationen in der Saison 2017/18. Es sind Einblicke in das Leben einer Musikerin entstanden, die einen neuen Dirigenten-Typus verkörpert, zwischen den Kulturen und musikalischen Genres.
© 2018, a BFMI production in co-production with ZDF/Arte und Deutsche Welle.
Regie: Christian Berger
The social activist Vijay Gupta, 31, has decided to leave the front desk of the Los Angeles Philharmonic violins to concentrate on his external causes.
Gupta won a $625,000 Macarthur award this year for founding a Street Symphony of homeless musicians.
He said: ‘I feel like the L.A. Phil saved my life when I was a 19-year-old kid. It was the way that I was able to continue being a musician and to continue growing as an artist… I’m really excited to take that artistry beyond Los Angeles and beyond the work of being in an orchestra.’
The veteran, widely-read critic Conrad L Osborne is convinced he heard electronic boosting in Il trittico last week, and in Marnie before that:
For my second Met excursion in a row, comment has been heard from the peanut gallery, where I’m usually to be found. At Marnie, it took the form of falsetto mockery, and came after the curtain calls. This time (Dec. 5), it came midperformance, as poor Sister Angelica, having just learned of the death of the little son of whom she’d heard nothing in her seven years at the convent, stretched out a supplicating arm toward her implacable aunt, and sang “È morto? Ah . . .” Now, I could almost swear I did hear something there, albeit it did nothing to disrupt the unnatural calm of the proceedings. But from three or four rows back came the comment: “What?” The voice was firm and clear, neither youthful nor elderly. The tone was not of ill-intentioned disruption, but of genuine inquiry, as in “Is anything going on down there? If so, would you care to share?” Later, the same voice registered another reaction, but I didn’t quite catch it, which put it in the same category as many of the remarks being entered by the evening’s performers.
After my Marnie post, in which I yet again had occasion to note the low level of vocal energy coming off the stage, I heard from the highly regarded coach and co-Artistic Director of The New York Festival of Song, Steven Blier. Emphasizing that “I’m just reporting—others heard it, too,” he wrote as follows:
“The night I went to Marnie I was in the standing room section, and it seemed to me that not much sound was coming off the stage. If you can’t hear the singers and chorus under that overhang, something is wrong. It’s a very voice-friendly, orchestra-muffling spot. Ten minutes into the first act a strange thing happened. A guy came storming up the aisle and confronted the usher, loudly. ‘I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING! I’M IN ROW T AND I CAN’T HEAR ANYTHING!’
“‘Sir, there is nothing I can do about it . . .’
Aural enhancement has become very subtle. Even since I wrote the chapter of Opera as Opera entitled “The Enhancements” (which dealt mostly with the openly avowed practices of the New York City Opera for several seasons), it has taken long, surreptitious strides. With the best of it, a low general level can be established that boosts the voices just a bit, and/or an individual performer can be selected for assistance of an almost subliminal sort, all without telltale artifacts—unless someone makes a mistake. At a recent Broadway performance (of a play, not a musical, and let’s not get started on the latter), I had no suspicion of amplification beyond the now-necessary all-points alert until well along in the evening, when one actor’s voice suddenly popped out at triple or quadruple volume, and from a displaced location, for just a second—a syllable or two—and one realized he’d passed by another performer and picked up her amplification before anyone could jump on it….
Read on here.
It has been a quiet year at IMG Artists, no major fallouts, no massive signings.
Right up to the end of the year when vice-president Adam Cavagnaro today called time on the company.
Adam is launching a boutique singers agency today. It’s called Promethan Artists and it has the likes of Ryan Speedo Green (pictured), Sydney Mancasola and Brenton Ryan on its books.
The website is now live.
image: Dario Acosta
Useful fact: IMG has the highest dropout rate of senior managers of any large agency.
Any idea why?
