The German violinist will put out Save the Children collecting boxes at two concerts in Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie next week.

She and the orchestra will donate their fees from one concert to child relief in Yemen.

Anne-Sophie said today: ‘More than 85,000 children have starved to death in Yemen since the beginning of the war, more have died from the effects of malnutrition than from bombs and bullets.’

The Symphony Orchestra of India has just named Mikel Toms as its new Resident Conductor, starting next month.

Mikel will be based in Mumbai.

He has made many fine recordings with Czech orchestras.

 

 

 

The family has announced the death today of Friedrich Hänssler, founder of an eponymous classical label which was part of his family’s wider empire of Christian publishing.

Among the label’s triumphs was a 172-CD Johann Sebastian Bach edition.

Friedrich’s memoirs were titled ‘A Life for the Gospel’.

 

From the Minnesota maestro’s first interview with Young-Jin Hur on becoming chief of the Seoul Philharmonic:

‘I already spent two weeks this season with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. I read a book some months ago [about Korea]… it was fiction, but based on events before and during the Second World War. I learned so many things about the Koreans, the Japanese, and the Chinese, and I thought exactly the same thing, that Korea and Finland have some similarities. Let’s say, Sweden is like Finland’s big brother, and we don’t like big brothers, because big brothers always tell us what to do (both laugh). And when you are a little brother, you want to show that you are as good as the big brother, or even better. I felt the same thing about Korea when I read that book, and I have been since thinking about [Korea’s] history. There are similarities between the two countries…’

 

Read on here.

Korean sauna

Finnish sauna

The promising young Dutchman Hannes Minnaar signed today to Emma-Jane Wyatt’s boutique agency, EJ-Arts.

Hannes has been with a mid-sized Dutch agency for nine years and needs to crack on. Emma-Jane, with only two other artists on her books, is able to give strategic attention.

 

Manchester’s Halle Orchestra has announced its new season with mezzo-soprano Alice Coote as artist in residence.

That’s cool.

 

The richest classical festival on the planet has just announced huge cutbacks.

The Easter Festival has been cancelled, as of now.

The Piano Festival will also be held for the last time later this year.

These events have been declared to be ‘strategically of less importance for the goal of further strengthening the Lucerne Festival brand.’

The deletions have been buried low down in a Bible-length press release which talks of reinvesting in the summer festival, the festival orchestra and the festival academy, as well as reinforcing ‘the Festival’s ties with its hometown and with the Canton of Lucerne.’

We read these things so you don’t have to.

 

We hear that Riccardo Muti yesterday joined Joyce DiDonato and two Chicago Symphony players, clarinet John Yeh and principal percussion Cynthia Yeh, for a concert at a juvenile correctional facility.

Muti played piano for DiDonato in some Mozart arias. “Mozart did not have an easy life,’ he told the inmates, ‘he was always losing jobs to people of inferior talent. Remember that. Just because someone gets a position and you don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that person is the best or better than you.’

photo and quotes: Dennis Polkow

Berlin has just seen its most celebrated evocation on film reconfigured as a one-act opera by the composer Moritz Eggert and the Komische Oper chief Barrie Kosky. The US baritone Scott Hendricks is the only adult on stage.

First reviews – Manuel Brug in welt.de, under the headline, ‘Better Go to the Cinema’:

Um M herum wimmelt das Nichts – in Gestalt von Kindern mit erwachsenen Pappschwellköpfen in allen übrigen, nicht definierten, seltsam zwergenhaften Kollektivrollen. Die spielen das menschenwuselnde, verängstigte, dennoch feierwütige Berlin. Noch so ein zwar origineller, aber wenig bringender V-Effekt.

(There is a nothingness around M…)

Frederik Hanssen in Tagesspiegel:

Alles Mögliche kann man aus der Partitur heraushören, die zur klassischen Orchesterbesetzung einen wortlosen Chor sowie zwei unsichtbare Solisten (Alma Sadé und Tansel Akzeybek) hinzufügt, außerdem E-Gitarre, Saxofon, Akkordeon und vier Keyboards: Was Generalmusikdirektor Ainars Rubikis da mit fliegenden Händen im Graben koordiniert, klingt mal nach Kurt Weill, mal nach 80er-Jahre-Disco, mal nach Filmmusik mit Bläserbombast, dann wieder nach Atmo- Klangteppich. Das hält die Geschichte zwar in der Schwebe zwischen Einst und Jetzt, ist künstlerisch aber letztlich so unentschieden wie die Dramaturgie.

Und weil zumindest im 2. Rang auch von dem Surround-Sound, den Moritz Eggert versprochen hatte, nichts zu merken ist, blickt man 100 Minuten lang auf ein Geschehen, das zwar nahtlos abschnurrt, dem Betrachter emotional aber enttäuschend fern bleibt.

(rough translation):

You can hear all sorts of things in the score, which adds a wordless chorus and two invisible soloists (Alma Sadé and Tansel Akzeybek) to a classical orchestra, as well as electric guitar, saxophone, accordion and four keyboards: What general music director Ainars Rubikis (untranslated) sounds like Kurt Weill, sometimes 80s disco, sometimes film music with brass bombast, then again to atmos-wallpaper. Although there is history in the balance between then and now, it is ultimately as indeterminate as the dramaturgy.

… the surround sound, which Moritz Eggert had promised, is unremable, one has 100 minutes of an event, which, although seamlessly purring, leaves the viewer emotionally but disappointingly remote.

The US violinist Anastasia Khitruk has reported the death of her father, the distinguished pianist and prolific writer Andrey Khitruk, himself the son of a leading film animator, Fyodor Khitruk, sometimes known as the Soviet Walt Disney.

Eternal rest.

The composer Dominique Lawalrée was a pioneer in the field of ambient music, in the tradition of Erik Satie. He found a niche in post-minima New Simplicity.

Lawalrée, who spent his whole life in Belgium, had global admirers in Brian Eno and Gavin Bryars.

Hs last album, titled First Meeting, was released three months ago.

 

After all the previews, no major media descended on Tulsa, Oklahoma, to review Lucia Lucas, a transgender baritone, sing the first Don Giovanni of her kind, curated by the composer Tobias Picker.

For the time being, there is just the one rave review in Tulsa World. It is not readable outside the US, due to EU restrictions.

In the title role, Lucia Lucas is nothing short of a revelation. She possesses a voice that can rattle the rafters with its power, without ever sacrificing subtlety of expression. It is a voice filled with character in every sense of the word, as flexible in expression as Lucas is in taking on
the myriad personae Don Giovanni adopts as he goes about his lecherous business.

photo: Tulsa Opera

UPDATE: From MusicalAmerica’s review by Clive Paget:
Oklahoma–If ever proof was needed that opera can still surprise, provoke and even have something to say, the Act One Finale of Opera Tulsa’s Don Giovanni is it. Updated to America (ish) and sometime in the 1950s (ish)—neither are entirely clear, or indeed that relevant—this Don is all of a sudden revealed as the life and soul of his own party, strutting his considerable stuff in full drag—or is he? For a moment, our gender compass goes haywire, for this production stars the impressive trans baritone Lucia Lucas. What we are watching is a woman who has been playing a man, now playing a man who is dressed as a woman—and loving it. Confusing? For a second, perhaps. But’s a glorious moment in Denni Sayers’s occasionally uneven production that received its premiere by the 71-year-old Tulsa Opera at Tulsa Performing Arts Center on May 3.