The violinist, who has just taken a year off, has redirected her 2014 Glashütte award towards a worthy cause.
The $25k is going to a charity which views ‘music as a stepping stone to teaching high schoolers to actively impact their world on their own terms and practice essential skills for their lives beyond the school system.’
It’s a requirement of the Glashütte award that the money goes to a music-ed project.
A message from the cancelling soloist:
Dear All, I am so sad I had to cancel last week’s concerts with the great Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and to miss playing for the truly loyal and warm audiences in Amsterdam and Dortmund!
Due to injury of my left arm I have also with great regret been forced to withdraw from my first ever South American tour together with Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg and Gustavo Gimeno. I had been so much looking forward to meet new audiences in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay!
Fortunately, a full recovery and return to stage is expected soon.
Janine Jansen
The conductor and composer Erik Oña has died suddenly in Switzerland, where he headed the Electroacoustic Music Laboratory of the Basle music academy.
Born in Cordoba, he taught in Buffalo and Tokyo in the 1990s. In the 2000s, he taught composition at the University of Birmingham while producing a stream of challenging modern works.
He married the Argentine pianist Helena Bugallo; they had two children.
Friends are reporting the death from cancer last night of the concert pianist Dina Ugorskaja.
Raised in Leningrad by the modernist pianist Anatol Ugorski and the musicologist Maja Elik (they met while rehearsing the Soviet premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire), Dina had an intensive music education until the family fled Russia after anti-semitic threats in 1990. They settled with great difficulty in Germany.
Dina, 16 at the time, studied at Detmold and went on to teach there, eventually becoming professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. She had a lively concert career and made her home in Munich.
Dina is survived by her father, her husband and her daughter.
In London, we love an occasion to dress up.
Not sure what extra privileges it entails. He can already ride free on the buses.
The death was announced in Paris yesterday of Daniel Wayenberg, Holland’s most prominent mid-century pianist.
Winner of the MargueriteLong-Jacques Thibaud competition in 1949, he moved to France to study with Long and made his US debut in 1953 with the New York Philharmonic and Dmitri Mitropoulos.
After early success, Wayenberg devoted much of his time to composing orchestral works.
The US opera world is awash with delight this morning at an upcoming Vanity Fair feature proclaiming it to be ‘woke’.
The article is titled ‘The opera is having a woke renaissance’.
But read the opening paragraph and you’ll see it parts company with reality several times in the first 50 words.
Here’s the VF lede by Keziah Weir:
When the virtuosic Arturo Toscanini presided over Milan’s La Scala at the end of the 19th century, the majority of the company’s repertoire comprised music written during the prolific past two decades, from Verdi’s Otello to Puccini’s La Boheme. “It was a living, breathing thing,” says Michael Capasso, general manager of the recently revived New York City Opera.
Let’s sub-edit that for factual accuracy:
When the virtuosic dictatorial Arturo Toscanini presided over became principal conductor at Milan’s La Scala at the end of the 19th century in 1898, the majority of a certain part of the company’s repertoire comprised music written during the prolific past two decades, from Verdi’s Otello to Puccini’s La Boheme. “It was a living, breathing thing,” says Michael Capasso, general manager of the recently revived desperately struggling New York City Opera.
And that’s just the first par.
The Bolshoi Theatre, unrolling its new season, has cast Placido Domingo as Giorgio Germont in La Traviata next April. It will be the singer’s debut in a fully staged Bolshoi production.
On the debit side, Domingo’s name has disappeared from its original inclusion in a European Culture Prize gala night at the Vienna Opera, honouring the likes of Sophia Loren, Vivienne Westwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gordon Getty.
Maybe he’s too busy.
UPDATE: Official statement: ‘Plácido Domingo and the European Cultural Forum have jointly decided to postpone the award to October 3, 2020 in Bonn,’ said the organisers.
The Easter Festival parted company yesterday with Christian Thielemann and his Dresden orchestra after a dispute over who rules. Thielemann had objected to the installation of former Munich Opera boss Nikolaus Bachler as artistic director.
Bachler won.
After Thielemann’s contract ends in 2022, the festival now says, conductors and orchestras will be engaged on an annual basis.
No more Mr Big Guy.
The Easter Festival was founded in 1967 by Herbert von Karajan and is still partly funded by his foundtion.
You couldn’t make it up.
The remarkable Dutch violinist, who missed the start of the season with an unspecified illness, has pulled out of a South America tour with the Luxembourg Philharmonic.
She will be replaced by Simone Lamsma and Julian Rachlin.
We wish Janine a full recovery.
South Korea’s Isang Yun International Composition Award, defunct for several years, has roared back with a $30,000 prize.
It will be shared between Heinz Holliger and Kaija Saariaho.
Will that change anyone’s life?
