The New York Philharmonic has just appointed Ryan Roberts as English Horn player, succeeding Thomas Stacy, who retired in 2010…. That’s a helluva long time without a Dvorak 9.
Roberts, a former fellow of the New World Symphony, has performed with Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco Symphony and the Met.
Other new faces at the NY Phil are Associate Principal Flute Alison Fierst and violinists Dasol Jeong, Kyung Ji Min and Andi Zhang.
English National Opera, which has been under ACE pressure to get its act together, has recruited Louise Jeffreys as deputy chair.
Jeffreys, who has just stepped down as artistic director of the Barbican Centre, will also chair ENO’s artistic committee.
Before spending 20 years at the Barbican, she was Administrative Director at the Nottingham Playhouse, Head of Production at Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, and Technical Director at the English National Opera.
She knows the ropes.
From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
There is a certain messiness to this album. Not everything fits together the way it should. But the playing of Pat Kop and the Camerata Bern captures the ear and suspends disbelief. No living violinist comes close to this scale of adventure. This review can only be five stars or one, and I know which I choose….
Read on here.
The opera administrator Christina Scheppelmann, Domingo’s deputy head at Washington National Opera for nine years, has told a Spanish magazine that neither of them had casting control.
‘Placido never told me “hire this one, not that one”. His suggestions were always argued over by the team. If we liked a singer that person was hired. Placido or I may not have liked it, but I never saw him say anything against a woman because she had rejected him.’
Scheppelmann, former director of the Liceu in Barcelona, is now in charge at Seattle Opera. She is one of few women in the US to speak up for Domingo.
photo: Barcelona Classica
The baritone Felice Schiavi, who made his La Scala debut at 24 in Rigoletto, has died in Lombardy.
He was a trusted member of Claudio Abbado’s corps and a regular in Giorgio Strehler productions.
Geoff Cox’s audience photo shows she does have full-length wear in her closet. It just rarely comes out.
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She played Rach 3 with Dresden and Myung Whun Chung.
Persistent allegations of workplace rages and other anti-social acts have prompted a writer in Der Tagesspiegel to suggest that the Staatsoper music director should, like policemen, wear a body-cam to work.
Ridiculous? Not in the present climate.
(c) slippedisc.com
We’ve been informed of the death in Vienna of the Canadian musicologist Rita Steblin, author of a sheaf of papers on Beethoven and Schubert.
She took up cudgels when Maynard Solomon endorsed the fashionable view that Schubert must have been gay because no-one ever saw him out with a woman. Rita let fly with a fiery paper here and various other body blows – for instance, this in the NY Review of Books:
To the Editors:
I wish to take issue with Charles Rosen’s article “Music à la Mode” in the New York Review of Books of June 23, 1994. After summarizing Maynard Solomon’s theory about Franz Schubert “cruising for boys,” Rosen writes that “this created consternation among Viennese musicologists and their allies, who saw a takeover of Schubert by the Homintern, and have proceeded to invent an Immortal Beloved for Schubert like Beethoven’s and even to suggest that the keys of Schubert’s works are a secret code that identifies the name of the lady.” Since it is my work that Rosen is spoofing here, let me go on record that there is no Viennese plot to manufacture a heterosexual Schubert, just a Canadian seeking the truth.
I find it curious that so much space has been devoted in the press to publicize Solomon’s 1989 article from 19th Century Music about Schubert’s alleged homosexuality, but now that I have challenged this theory, Rosen does not even have the courtesy to mention my name. Is this an attempt on the part of the old boys’ network (or the new ideologues) to keep the public from reading my critique of Solomon’s scholarship? (See my article “The Peacock’s Tale: Schubert’s Sexuality Reconsidered” in the Summer 1993 issue of 19th Century Music.)
The memoirs of Schubert’s friends are full of his devotion to Caroline Esterházy, but perhaps this “fact” is unknown to musicologists and theorists who for so long have preached that music is autonomous from biography. If Solomon cites Eduard Bauernfeld’s diary entry from August 1826 about the ailing Schubert needing “young peacocks” (in German folk medicine eating peacock flesh was thought to cure illness), then he should also cite the same Bauernfeld’s diary entry from February 1828 about Schubert being seriously in love with Caroline Esterházy. Music becomes involved here because Schubert dedicated his Fantasie in F minor, written in early 1828, to Caroline.
F minor was traditionally a key of hopeless love, but the topic of key characteristics has been ignored by the same formalists who have ignored biography. The secret code of keys in Schubert’s works, as mentioned by Rosen, was part of my paper read at the annual American Musicological Society Meeting, Montreal 1993. In the last year of his life Schubert wrote such major works as the Piano Trio in E flat (autograph score owned by Caroline), the Violin Fantasy in C (citing the love song “Sei mir gegrüsst”), the Fantasy in F minor (dedicated to Caroline), the String Quintet in C (with the passionate “autobiographical” F minor section in the slow movement) and the Mass in E flat. The choice of keys here seems deliberate. Considering Schubert’s comment that all of his works were dedicated to Caroline and aware of the romantic era’s penchant for ciphers, I made a tentative connection between these keys and the initials of Schubert’s and Caroline’s names: F S (Franz Schubert) = f Es (F minor, E flat major) and C Es (Caroline Esterházy) = C major, E flat major (the common sound beginning their last names being Es, German for E flat). Rosen seems unaware that I presented this theory as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to bring attention to my 1983 book on the history of key characteristics, published by UMI Research Press. (I leave it to others to prove or disprove this notion about Schubert’s “romantic” use of keys.)
Perhaps we should study what it is about Schubert that makes him so attractive to fashionable political ideologies. Why did the Nazis abuse Schubert to promote their theories of pure Aryan race? This seems ironic now that a new portrait has surfaced (once owned by Parmenia Migel Ekstrom of New York and purchased on my recommendation by the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna)—a portrait rejected as Schubert by several Austrian art historians because of the Jewish-looking features. (See my book on Josef Abel’s (?) oil painting of the young Schubert (?), published in 1992 by Hans Schneider Verlag.) And why, when the evidence is so questionable, is Schubert being promoted now with such passion as a homosexual composer?
Rita Steblin
Vienna, Austria
Edward Gardner, newly appointed chief conductor of the London Philharmonic, has just renewed with the Bergen Philharmonic in Norway to 2023.
So it goes.
When Irina Lungu fell sick moments before the season’s opening Traviata, the Vienna State Opera was lucky to have Ekaterina Siurina in the audience, ready and willing to sing Violetta.
Ekaterina happens to be married to the tenor Charles Castronovo, who was singing Alfredo.
The director, Dominique Meyer, went out in front to explain that the curtain would be delayed by half an hour.
Last season, Castronovo jumped in from the audience to sing Rodolfo at the Royal Opera House in London, opposte Ekaterina’s Mimi.
They are making something of a habit of this.
photo Michael Pöhn/Vienna State Opera
Supporters of Placido Domingo have come up with an interview given by his named accuser to the Kansas City Star in March 2006, seven years after she now alleges she was groped by Domingo during a production of Le Cid in Washington DC.
In the interview, Ms Wilson is asked for a career highlight:
“Big opera moment: Singing “Le Cid” at Washington Opera with Placido Domingo: “It’s like standing next to a force of nature.””
No mention of any unpleasantness.
Message from Dallas Opera:
In light of ongoing developments regarding allegations made against Plácido Domingo, The Dallas Opera has decided to cancel the March 11, 2020 gala, in which he was scheduled to perform.
This, so far, is the only industry response to the latest sheaf of nameless AP accusers.
