Operanostalgia has word of the death of Joshua Hecht, at his last home in Sydney, Australia.

Hecht sang leading roles at City Opera through the 1950s and 1960s. He later taught at Frankfurt Opera and Opera Australia.

Rub your eyes: for the first time, the Israel Philharmonic has elected a woman is selected to its steering committee.

English National Opera will stage four versions of the Orpheus myth next year, plus three more new productions.

– Choreographer Wayne McGregor will direct Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (1762), with Dame Sarah Connolly and Sarah Tynan;
– Emma Rice directs Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (1858), with Sir Willard White as Jupiter and transgender baritone Lucia Lucas as Public Opinion, her first major UK role;

– ENO music director Martyn Brabbins brings back Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus (1986), directed by ENO artistic director Daniel Kramer;
– Netia Jones will direct Philip Glass’s Orphée (1991);
– Barbora Horáková will direct Verdi’s Luisa Miller;
– Joe Hill-Gibbins directs Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
– German director Tatjana Gürbaca undertakes Dvorak’s Rusalka.

Message received:

(Philadelphia, April 3, 2019)––The Philadelphia Orchestra is pleased to announce two new conducting appointments beginning September 2019: Erina Yashima as assistant conductor and Lina Gonzalez-Granados as conducting fellow.

Yashima will succeed Kensho Watanabe, whose term concludes at the end of the 2018-19 season. In her role, she will serve as cover conductor for, and provide assistance to, Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin and guest conductors on artistic matters in preparation for and during rehearsals, in addition to participating in residency, touring, and educational activities.

Gonzalez-Granados also joins the conducting roster to support the Orchestra up to 10 weeks per season, assisting Nézet-Séguin and guest conductors on special projects in addition to leading select community programs…

Born and raised in Germany, Erina Yashima is currently in her third year as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Sir Georg Solti Conducting Apprentice. In her role, she assists Music Director Riccardo Muti and conducts the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the CSO’s training orchestra.

Lina Gonzalez-Granados is the 2017-19 Taki Concordia Fellow, a position created by conductor Marin Alsop to foster the entrepreneurship and talent of female conductors. In addition to her appointment as conducting fellow of The Philadelphia Orchestra, she will become conducting fellow of the Seattle Symphony in fall 2019.

Message from the CSOA:

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association (CSOA) and the Chicago Federation of Musicians (CFM) have mutually agreed to resume negotiations on a new contract for the members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) this Friday, April 5. 

The Association looks forward to reaching consensus on a new agreement.

We kinda told you so.

A memo has gone around Columbia Artists saying that the veteran agent Doug Sheldon has decided to take immediate retirement.

The reason given is ‘personal and family’.

All lips have been zipped tight.

Doug, 77, a part-time conductor, is one of the best known and best liked artist managers in the business.

He joined Columbia (formerly CAMI) in 1966 and his clients include Valery Gergiev, Leonard Slatkin and Anne-Sophie Mutter. He also booked André Rieu for his first US tour.

After Ronald Wilford’s death in 2015, he has been the agency’s engine of renewal.

What next?

To no great surprise, the Russian prosecutor has yet again lengthed the house arrest of Kirill Serebrennikov by three more months, to July.

That will be almost two years that the outstanding artist has been held on what many believe to be politically motivated charges of embezzlement, which he denies.

In the kleptocracy of Vladimir Putin it is almost an honour to be accused falsely of theft, but Kirill’s career is stalled. An international outcry is required.

  In Vienna recently, Vivian Lee of the Montreal Symphony caught the Vienna Philharmonic with its pants up. Not a pretty sight.

She writes:

We arrived a few minutes early, but the hall was almost full and we ended up at the back. It didn’t matter, because the acoustics turned out to be lovely and we could hear everything. I craned my neck to watch the musicians troop on stage and, without consciously realizing that I was expecting anything else, I noticed that one after the other, they were all men. Thirteen people on stage and not one woman. Now, I recently participated in the CWBC in Toronto , and we did an all-woman concert, but that was the point. We had to do it on purpose to make it happen. In the case of the Vienna winds, the same holds true. Whether the decision was made a hundred years ago or last week, somewhere along the line it was decided that only men would hold those seats. The Vienna Phil has argued that they don’t have a policy of hiring only men, anymore, but they also don’t use screens in the final round of the audition process, so their objectivity is questionable. They were one of the final holdouts among European orchestras to finally accept women, a harpist in 1997. I checked the personnel page of the Vienna Philharmonic and found 14 women out of 130 musicians, but it took until 2007 before they hired a non-harpist woman. By contrast the OSM has 33 women out of 85 total; not quite half but a lot closer.

I found myself distracted as I listened to the beautiful sounds of Dvorak and Mozart, because of the distinct contrast between what I’m used to in my orchestra and what I was watching. There were not only older men, there were also younger men, who were obviously the new generation of the same old men’s club of musicians. Also, as I looked around the room, the audience was divided roughly in half by gender, so where’s the justification for the misogynistic policy so long in place?…

Read on here.

The American conductor takes over in September as chief of the Austrian Radio Orchestra.

Here’s her opening concert at Wien Modern:

We have been informed of the death, on February 27, of Anthony Frisell, New York voice teacher and theorist whose books are widely known. They include The Tenor Voice, The Soprano Voice, The Baritone Voice, A Singers Notebook and Flow of Breath.

Born in New Orleans of Italian parents, he worked as an opera director with Dorothy Kirsten, Zinka Milanov, Mario Del Monaco, Leonard Warren, Victoria de los Angeles and Richard Tucker.

There will be a memorial service on April 14 at 7 PM at YEORYIA STUDIOS (The Otello Studio) Floor 5, Epic Security Building,2067 Broadway, Between West 71st & West 72nd Street.

Dominique Meyer has just rolled out the 2019-20 season:

Ø Benjamin Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2. October 2019 – D: Simone Young; R: Irina Brook; with: Lawrence Zazzo, Erin Morley, Théo Touvet, Peter Kellner, Szilvia Vörös, Josh Lovell, Rafael Fingerlos, Rachel Frenkel, Olga Bezsmertna, Peter Rose, Benjamin Hulett);

Ø Olga Neuwirths, Orlando (world premiere; 8. December 2019 – D: Matthias Pintscher; R: Karoline Gruber; with: Kate Lindsey, Fiona Shaw, Eric Jurenas, Constance Hauman, Leigh Melrose, Vivian Bond, Agneta Eichenholz);

Ø Albin Fries, Persinette (children’s opera; 21. December 2019 – D: Guillermo García Calvo, R: Matthias von Stegmann; with: Olga Bezsmertna, Jinxu Xiahou, Monika Bohinec, Regine Hangler, Samuel Hasselhorn, Sorin Coliban);

Ø Ludwig van Beethovens, Fidelio (1 Februar 2020 – D: Tomáš Netopil; R: Amélie Niermeyer; with: Jennifer Davis, Benjamin Bruns, Tobias Kehrer, Thomas Johannes Mayer, Jörg Schneider, Chen Reiss);

Ø Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts, Così fan tutte (22. May 2020 – D: Riccardo Muti; R: Chiara Muti; with: Genia Kühmeier, Marianne Crebassa, Alessio Arduini, Julie Fuchs, Marco Filippo Romano)

Ø Giuseppe Verdi, Un ballo in maschera (15. Juni 2020 – D: Michele Mariotti; R: Josef Ernst Köpplinger; with: Francesco Meli, Ludovic Tézier, Krassimira Stoyanova, Monika Bohinec, Maria Nazarova).

After half a century of variable acoustics, the hall has augmented the mushrooms suspended from its ceiling with 465 speakers installed around the auditorium. Total cost: just two million pounds.

We’ll let you know shortly if it’s much of an improvement for non-amplified orchestral concerts.

Report on the upgrade here