The orchestra academies of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich will be participating in an exchange for the benefit of a number of young musicians in May and June 2019…. From 21 May to 2 June, violinist Coraline Groen (pictured) and cellist Victoria Constien of the RCO Academy in Amsterdam will visit the Academy of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. They will play in the orchestra for a week, rehearse and perform in concerts under the direction of conductor Herbert Blomstedt, as well as giving a chamber music concert with Academy students from Munich.
Two Academy students from Munich will arrive in Amsterdam on 11 June. Here they will have lessons with members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, participate in chamber music, and rehearse and perform works by Glanert, Tchaikovsky and Smetana with the orchestra under Semyon Bychkov.
The English conductor Jeremy Walker will tomorrow lead the premiere of a new Russian opera based on Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir, The Periodic Table.
The composer is Alina Podzorova, the librettist and director is Asya Chaschinskaya and the premiere takes place in Perm, as part of a Diaghilev festival.
UPDATE: Jeremy tells us:
Last June, a soprano with whom I worked put me in touch with a producer, Elena Frolova, who was taking part in a Diaghilev festival. She was competing in their competition ‘Women in Art’, and won it with the concept of putting together an opera based on Primo Levi’s ’The Periodic Table’ (which I recommended to her). The prize was to put on the opera at this year’s festival. Elena invited me to conduct the opera along with musicians from the orchestra ‘Leggiero’ (of which I’m musical director). I then invited my good friend Asya Chaschinskaya to work on the project – we recently put on Piazzolla’s opera ‘Maria de Buenos Aires’, and discovered that we make a good team. We decided that Asya should not only direct the opera, but also write the libretto. We then invited Alina Podzorova to join the team as composer. From the very outset, the three of us worked in close collaboration, everyone open to ideas and suggestions. In the end, we were presented with an interesting, thought-provoking libretto and a musically rich score. There are four roles: Primo (Bass – Igor Vitkovsky), Doktor Muller (Tenor – Konstantin Samoilov), Irit (Mezzo-Soprano – Svetlana Zlobina) and The Voice of the Mother (soprano – Olga Reutova). The instrumental ensemble is comprised of six musicians – violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano and percussion. Furthermore, Alina will also improvise on the new instrument Duofluctus.
We have been informed of the death of Samuel Bastos, principal cor anglais and assistant principal oboe of the Zurich Opera orchestra.
The cause of death has not yet been disclosed.
Samuel, from Barcelos, North Portugal, joined European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO) at age 17, moving on to the Gustav Mahler Jugend Orchester.
He had an international solo career and was a a founding member of Da Capo, the Portuguese music magazine.
Our sympathies to his loved ones.
In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, I review the newly issued US edition of Stephen Johnson’s extraordinary account of music and mental illness, How Shostakovich Changed My Mind.
Extract: Mr. Johnson, we learn from his book, suffers from a bipolar condition. He grew up in a dysfunctional family with a depressive father and a violent mother with a severe personality disorder. As a boy, he recalls, “I had to lock myself away to avoid destabilising Mother. . . . If I could have voiced the commandment I unconsciously repeated to myself during that period, it would have been: ‘I must not feel, I must not feel.’ ” Music, he says, was the only space where he could indulge feeling. In his early teens, Mr. Johnson discovered Shostakovich’s fourth symphony… Memorising the symphony—and reveling in its “terrifying mood-swings” and explicit existential threats—Mr. Johnson ran it through his head as a kind of soundtrack as he cycled home from school. “Living with your mother,” his therapist-wife would volunteer, “must have been like that Symphony.”
Read on here.
Karlsruhe has announced a new GMD for 2020, succeeding Justin Brown.
