The finalists are:

Piotr Buszewski, 26, tenor (Warsaw, Poland)
· Dashuai Chen, 28, tenor (Shanghai, China)
· Alaysha Fox, 27, soprano (Queens, New York)
· Thomas Glass, 28, baritone (Edina, Minnesota)
· Meghan Kasanders, 27, soprano (Darien, Illinois)
· Miles Mykkanen, 27, tenor (Bessemer, Michigan)
· William Guanbo Su, 24, bass (Beijing, China)
· Elena Villalón, 21, soprano (Austin, Texas)
· Michaela Wolz, 23, mezzo-soprano (Eureka, Missouri)

Message from the Chicago musicians:

While we are very sorry San Francisco Symphony’s concert tonight at Symphony Center has been cancelled, we are very grateful to have San Francisco Symphony Musicians joining us at the picket line. Tonight at 5pm, there will be a press conference as well as a collaborative performance by both of our brass sections! We hope you can come out and join us in giving them a warm welcome.

The age rnge in the violin section of the Carl Nielsen competition was 16 to 28.

Unexpectedly, the two 16 year-olds have made it through.

Johan Dalene (18, Sweden)
Anna Agafia Egholm (22, Denmark)
Michael Germer (16, Denmark)
Marie-Astrid Hulot (21, France)
Hina Maeda (16, Japan)
Belle Ting (18, Canada)

The death has been announced of Luis Biava, a principal second violin of the Philadelphia Orchestra who was promoted to assistant conductor and in 1994 to conductor-in-residence.

He joined the National Symphony in Washington DC in 1963 and the Philadelphia five years later, remaining until his retirement in 2004.

In May 2009, he conducted three concerts with the Symphony Orchestra of Castilla & Leon in Valladolid, Spain, and inaugurated a new Concert Hall in the city of Avila.

From an editorial by Jessica Langlois in the Tallahassee Democrat:

The last words of unarmed black men who were unnecessarily killed by police or authority figures isn’t the typical subject matter for classical music….

Thompson wrote “Seven Last Words” as a way to process his personal feelings about being a young black man in a country that doesn’t seem to care about his existence. He chose seven sets of last words as the text for his piece, arranging it into seven movements that purposefully parallel the text structure of Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ.”

The effect is radical empathy.

When humanity depends on piercing the armor of those who cannot or refuse to feel, artists are the guerrilla revolutionaries able to sneak past our emotional borders. This is especially true in classical music. Working in abstractions of beauty and fury, classical music has the unique power to translate the human condition into a common language.

Orchestra subscribers remain predominantly like me: white, of moderate income and largely disassociated with violent acts. With “Seven Last Words,” the composer wields his art and takes the opportunity to fracture the barriers of our cultural silo.

The music insists we cannot answer the question, “What if it were your child?” until we actually inhabit another parent’s grief. It draws listeners into an uncomfortable space where we feel a mother’s knees falling to the ground, the venom of injustice and the infinity of death. 

Read on here.

The symphony will be premiered this weekend.

Dickon Stainer, head of Universal Classics and Jazz, has consolidated the Verve label into his portfolio.

Verve President & CEO Danny Bennett will depart to attend to his artist management business.

HarrisonParrott have signed Nil Venditti in the hottest undeclared race in the music business.

Stand by for an AskonasHolt sprint to the finish.

From HP:
Nil Venditti was awarded First Prize at the national Premio Claudio Abbado for Young Musicians in 2015 at the age of twenty. She also was awarded one of the top prizes and the orchestra-prize at the Jeunesses Musicales Competition in Bucharest with the Orchestra Filarmonica George Enescu in 2017.

Former principal cello of the Santa Cecilia Youth Orchestra in Rome, Nil has been taught and mentored by conductors including Paavo Järvi, Neeme Järvi, Leonid Grin, Bernard Haitink, Donato Renzetti and Jonathan Stockhammer. She has been selected to participate in the Gstaad Conducting Academy under the guidance of Manfred Honeck in Summer 2019.

The Symphonieorchester Vorarlberg has chosen Leo McFall, 36, as its next chief.

A finalist in the 204 Salzburg/Nestlé Young Conductors Award, Leo is a protege of Bernard Haitink’s with an Oxford music degree.

An orchestral venture by the rock experimentalist, who died yesterday.

Very DSCH.

And this?

The old adage of ‘those who can do…’ is pretty relevant to musicians at the peak of their careers. When the high gigs and fees are rolling in all over the world, who has time to teach?

This morning, Sony poster boy Igor Levit, 32, let it be known that, from October, he will be professor at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hanover, northern Germany.

In the course of polishing up our colloquial French we came across this:

Le groupe du matin est très bien, mais alors l’après-midi, c’est comme pisser dans un violon (the morning group was fine, but in the afternoon it was…)

The phrase has various meanings:

It’s like…
– trying to get blood from a stone
– handing out my own farts
– talking to an empty cupboard
– banging my head against the wall
– discussing Brexit.

Stephen Chaundy, a soloist at the Vienna State Opera, has lived in Austria for 22 years.

So long as Britain was a member of the EU he had no problem entering and leaving Austria. Now, facing all sorts of barriers, he has applied to become and Austrian citizen.

But Austria, for some reason, does not allow dual nationality.

In order to continue to live  with his family and work in Vienna, Stephen will have to give up his British birthright. He will cease to be British. And he is not alone.

‘Freedom of movement matters to me,’ he stells the BBC. ‘I know from colleagues and friends how difficult third-country [non-EU] nationals can have it, in terms of complications of sorting out visas and work permits… and I have already had the situation where a theatre in one European country has said they’re unwilling to hear me.’

Teresa May’s government has created a new category of UK refugee.