The sinking Lincoln Center has clutched Henry Timms from the 92nd Street Y as its next president.

Timms is founder of the #GivingTuesday social movement, a day of philanthropy which has raised $1 billion in online donations.

At the Y, we read, ‘Timms was also responsible for eliminating an historic deficit, delivering a balanced budget and healthy operating surpluses, and developing new relationships with major corporations and foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Templeton Foundation.’

No word of his artistic preferences.

 

 

 

Karl-Heinz Steffens was named today music director of the State Opera in Prague.

He starts work in August 2019.

Steffens, 57, has been music director of the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz. Before that, he was principal clarinet of the Berlin Philharmonic.

 

The latest iconoclastic investigation by VAN magazine contains much that is discussed openly among musicians but has never before found its way into print.

For instance:

In musical circles, Barenboim’s temper is legendary. He has thrown fits because a violist rolled his eyes, because a singer bowed in the wrong place, because a favored principal player was on vacation. He once berated a musician who lacked concentration because someone in their immediate family had died. He has insulted a doctor who said that a performer with a stomach flu was too sick to play. On at least two occasions, he has allegedly grabbed and shaken members of his staff in anger. 

Or:

“I always say it’s a climate of fear,” said a current employee at the Staatsoper. Barenboim was raised at a time when being authoritarian was practically in the job description for a conductor. At the beginning of his tenure, the concentration of power in his hands was productive, allowing him to effectively reshape the large institution. Now, Barenboim is always on the minds of his staff, whether he’s actually in the house or not. “You can always feel when he’s here, because everyone is tense all of a sudden,” said a player in the Staatskapelle orchestra academy. When he’s away, the orchestra is less on edge, “as if it needed to take a few deep breaths and relax.” As several sources told VAN independently, Barenboim expects staff to visit his green room and praise him after performances. Those who don’t risk falling out of favor. 

In at least one instance, current artistic director Matthias Schulz met with Barenboim and an employee to discuss an instance of physical aggression, and declined to take concrete action, a source claimed. (The source was able to describe the situation in detail.)

The article is by Jeffrey Arlo Brown and Hartmut Welscher.

Read the full article here.

Opera Australia has a new scheme to tempt singles of all ages not to be ashamed to come alone.

Opera for One is not “Tinder for opera lovers” or a singles’ programme, says Opera Australia. It responds to a survey of 1100 first-time opera-goers and those who’d like to go but hadn’t that found more than one in five people surveyed didn’t attend because they had nobody to go with.

“It is not romantic in the slightest,” said John Quertermous, OA’s head of marketing and tourism. “It is more the idea that they’ll find an opera buddy. As a classical art company, we are always trying to get new people and a new audience.”

Read on here.

We hear that Larry Thorstenberg, the Boston Symphony’s solo English Horn from 1964 to 1993, died last week in a California hospice.

Aged 93, he served in the Second World War before studying with Tabuteau at Curtis. Larry played successively in the symphony orchestras of Utah, Baltimore, Dallas and Chicago. He moved to California in 1998.

 

Marcel Tabuteau with Curtis students, 1949. L-R: Louis Rosenblatt, Laurence Thorstenberg, Laila Storch, John Mack, and Walter Bianchi. Photo by Daniel Sagarman.

 

 

The novelist Marina Lewycka in the Times today:

In 1960, much to my mother’s disgust, my father went out and bought a new Dansette record player. She was disgusted because, ever the thrifty one, she thought the money could be much better spent on household essentials, but I was delighted because I guessed I would have access to it, to play my own and my schoolfriends’ music. At the time we were living in Witney, a few miles up the road from Oxford, and I had a Saturday job in WH Smith, for which I earned 50p a day, so I was rich.

The next week my dad went to the HMV store in Oxford and started to build his classical record collection. Among the first vinyl LPs he brought home was one from Decca with a strange cover depicting bare, twisted, tormented-looking winter trees and a moody-looking Frenchman on the back, whom I mistook for Berlioz, but who was in fact the Dutch conductor Eduard van Beinum. I still have it….

Read on here.

Marina is the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and The Lubetkin Legacy.

So what was your first?

David Law, co-founder of the Stafford Law agency which launched Placido Domingo’s career, has died after many years of illness.

He suffered near-complete paralysis after a brain stem bleed in 2002 and was cared for ever since by his son, Dominic Stafford Uglow. Margherita Stafford died in 2008.

Dominic writes: ‘He was a remarkable man: a linguist, a traveller, a musician who appeared with performers as varied as Bobbie Gentry and Igor Stravinsky. He was instrumental in building the careers of Domingo, Arroyo, Ricciarelli, Scotto and many more. His lifelong love of the art form that became his profession began as a Westminster schoolboy attending one of the first performances of the new Royal Opera. He believed himself to have been the first baritone to sing Publio in London since 1792, when he sang in a production at Morley College (under Michael Tippet) in the 1950s.

‘He went to work for his father, a Director of Chubb, after leaving the Guildhall and combined a career as a session musician with travelling throughout the Middle East, India and Africa. He claimed to be the man who locked Howard Hughes into his penthouse suite at the Park Lane Hilton.

‘I’m very proud of my father. He lived a full, vigorous and varied life. But I’m most proud of how he fought throughout his illness; how he still maintained a zest for life, love and learning right to the bitter end.’