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The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) announced the retirement of Concertmaster Emeritus Timothy Lees, who had stepped down as Concertmaster, at the conclusion of the 2017-18 season in August. Mr. Lees, who began his tenure with the CSO in June of 1998, became Concertmaster Emeritus in September 2018 and remained a member of the CSO’s first violin section, but a persistent injury prevented him from performing with the Orchestra.
The Germany-based transgender baritone Lucia Lucas has been cast in the title role in Mozart’s opera, to be staged in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May.
Tulsa Opera Artistic Director Tobias Picker said: ‘Making history, Tulsa Opera presents baritone Lucia Lucas in her American operatic debut as a transgender woman. Lucia Lucas’s appearance here will mark the first time a trans woman has performed a principal role on the operatic stage in the United States.’
The funeral has taken place of Itzhak Sadai, professor at the Buchman-Mehta Academy in Tel Aviv and a respected composer who sought to fuse Alban Berg’s 12-note style with Arab-Jewish maqamat.
A Bulgarian who landed in Israel in 1949, Sadai studied with Josef Tal and Uriah Uri Boscovitz. He later fostered an electronic studio at the Academy.
His 16th and final season will open with Shostakovich Babi Yar symphony and end on Mahler’s Resurrection.
His comment, as so often, is a platitude: ‘Nearly twenty years after my very first collaboration with the OSM as a guest conductor, the 2019–2020 season provides the Orchestra with a new opportunity to offer themes that engage with a variety of perspectives and experiences: we hope they will be a source of wonder and vitality for our audience members while remaining at the forefront of our modern lives.’
The composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi has given Decca Records worldwide distribution rights to his music.
Einaudi is said to clock up 1 million streams a day, 2 billion streams altogether.
That’s where the future of the music biz is located.
The British chamber orchestra Aurora has been invited to appear at Brussels’ BOZAR concert hall on the night of March 29, with the support of the British Council.
The programme includes works by Haydn, Britten and Tavener, with appearances by tenor Ian Bostridge, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt and novelists Ali Smith and Jonathan Coe.
Last one turns out the lights.
A sampling of 60 studio years.
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Following the death of Jerry Horner, we hear that Abram Loft, second violinist of the Fine Arts Quartet from 1954 to 1979, died on February 1 at the age of 97.
He was professor of chamber music at Eastman from 1979 until his retirement in 1986.
The town of Augsburg in Bavaria is planning to rename the Werner Egk primary school.
Egk, who died in 1983, was one of the useful idiots who served the Nazi regime by writing music for propaganda purposes. He was not the worst. To his credit, Egk refused a demand to write music that would replace Mendelssohn’s for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Goebbels wrote in his diary that Hitler was enthusiastic about Egk’s opera, Peer Gynt.
But Egk never joined the party or entertained its leaders.
After the War, he enjoyed success in Germany, but nowhere else.
As Andre Previn memorably declared of one of his celebrated German contemporaries, ‘Fidelio Finke, where are you now?’
Maybe it’s time to stop erasing the already forgotten?
