Anna Firstova visited the grave yesterday in Moscow.

She was shocked to find that the musical stave with the letters of the composers name had been prised or hacked off the tombstone at Novodevichy Cemetery.

Here’s the original gravestone:

Anna sent the following pictures of the vandalised tomb to DSCH journal:

Anna at grave.

The Swiss pianist Julien Francois Zbinden, a former head of the country’s creative rights society, never misses a day at his piano.

Julien will be 102 in November.

From the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra:

There are two versions of An American in Paris on this release: the new critical edition of this iconic work, and an unabridged version which includes four passages totaling 104 that Gershwin eventually crossed out. Neither has ever been recorded. The CSO received special permission from the Gershwin estate to record the unabridged edition.

Another notable difference in this new critical edition lies in the taxi horn pitches. The Ira and Leonore Gershwin Archive uncovered a photo of Gershwin in Cincinnati from March of 1929 with CSO percussionist James Rosenberg. They are holding the four taxi horns Gershwin brought back from Paris.

The recording, titled Transatlantic, is out in a fortnight.

This 1950s clip of Herbert von Karajan rehearsing Schumann’s 4th symphony with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra – where Nikolaus Harnoncourt was principal cello – shows the perfectionism, the precision and the pedantry that went into obtaining the Karajan Sound.

It’s very instructive – not just just for what Karajan does but for everything that Harnoncourt rejected.

The unstoppable Christian Li talks to the SMH. Watch:

At the dawn of modernism, two great personalities had a moderately civilised exchange.

Here’s Joseph Horowitz‘s take:

Busoni and Schoenberg also corresponded: an even more amazing written exchange. The moment I discovered it I knew it had to be animated in performance. The opportunity materialized two weeks ago in the form of a PostClassical Ensemble Concert at The Phillips Collection in DC: “The Re-Invention of Arnold Schoenberg.”

The Busoni/Schoenberg correspondence is not only acute; it is hilarious – and at our concert William Sharp, enacting both parts, had the audience in stitches. Schoenberg’s impassioned self-exhortations to “express myself directly,” to renounce acquired knowledge in favor of “that which is inborn, instinctive” can sound like a tangled Monty Python script:

“This is my vision which I am unable to force upon myself: to wait until a piece comes out of itsown accord in the way I have envisaged. My only intention is to have no intentions!”

Busoni is the adult in this exchange. But he is also a serene provocateur. When Schoenberg sends him a pair of non-tonal piano pieces (Op. 11 – composed in 1909), he is full of admiration. He then imperturbably adds:

“My impression as a pianist, which I cannot overlook, is otherwise. My first qualification of your music ‘as a piano piece’ is the limited range of the textures. As I fear I might be misunderstood, I am taking the liberty, in my own defense, of appending a small illustration.”

Busoni here takes a measure of Schoenbeg’s piano writing, and “enhances” it….

Read on here.