A newly discovered radio tape from Argentina.

Be amazed.

 

In June 2008 I was in Paris to replace pianist Murray Perahia. After the concert, my acquaintance took me to Claudio Abbado´s birthday. He introduced me to Abbado and asked if Abbado wanted to listen to a fresh CD from a talented young pianist. Abbado said, ´We may listen to it now for five minutes.´ He, however, listened to the whole track , which was Liszt’s B minor Sonata, until the end (32 minutes). After that, Abbado said, ´I want to invite her to play at the opening ceremony of my Lucerne Music Festival.´ Yuja then played Prokofiev´s 3rd Piano Concerto with Abbado at the Lucerne Music Festival in August 2009.

That’s ten whole years of skimpies.

Have record labels only one marketing thought in mind these days?

 

What on earth is the relevance of male Aphrodite to Mahler songs?

Four of the top six now have foreigners as sovrintendente:

La Scala, Milan – Dominique Meyer (France)
Turin – Sebastian Schwarz (Austria)
Florence – Alexander Pereira (Austria)
San Carlo, Naples – Stephane Lissner (France)

Only Venice (Ortombina) and Rome (Fuortes) have Italians in charge.

All the foreign appointments have been made in the course of the past year.

Why is that?

Our inside source has an interesting theory. The mayors of Italian cities are fed up to the teeth with the media speculation, every time they sign off on an Italian head of an opera house, as to which political party the new sovrintendente owes his job and whose pocket he’s in.

Foreigners, they theory goes, are party-neutral.

 

The Bavarian Radio music director, having missed most of the summer and the start of the season with various health issues, returned to Munich this week to start rehearsals for a fortnight of concerts, followed by a short tour.

Looking good.


photo (c) Astrid Hottie

The custodians of the legacy of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji have informed us of what might be an important discovery of a long-lost work by a most unusual composer.

 

Toccata terza/Symphony for piano and orchestra

After almost sixty years in which the location of the manuscript of Sorabji’s 1955 Toccata terza has remained unknown (and accordingly described in the catalogue as “lost”), it has at last resurfaced in a private collection, along with a previously undocumented copy in the composer’s hand of the solo piano part from his orchestral symphony completed in 1922. Master copies of each are now in preparation and these two items will then be added to the Sorabji Archive catalogue.

This is the most important Sorabji manuscript discovery in many a year.

Toccata terza is cast in ten movements and, at 91 pages, is somewhat shorter than its 1934 predecessor Toccata seconda; Spanish pianist Abel Sánchez-Aguilera, who has performed and recorded Toccata seconda (the recording is due for release early next year), has already undertaken to typeset it and prepare it for performance.

More information is available on www.sorabji-archive.co.uk

Fiona Maddocks, in today’s brisk, devastating Observer review of Orpheus in the Underworld, specifies that the three stars in her rating are ‘awarded to the performers’.

Everything else about the production is awful:

Space is too limited – the gods smile occasionally – to permit too detailed an account of English National Opera’s new staging of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (1858/74)…. Offenbach lampooned, with exquisite precision, any social or political target in his line of vision. The death of a baby was not one. This was the extraneous scene-setter in (Emma) Rice’s new version, complete with “Baby” floral wreath and tiny coffin. The image indelibly imprinted on our mind’s eye, all joy was smothered in the opening minutes. It was the prelude to a night of flat jokes and dramatic miscalculations….

Can it get much worse?

 

In her first weekend as principal conductor of the Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Karina Canellakis keeps getting asked by journalists what it feels like to be a woman conductor (she’s the country’s first, apparently).

When one of them needles her, asking why she wears the same clothes as male conductors, she almost loses it.

Yielding the Google-translate headline: ‘Sex is irrelevant on the goat’. Weird.

Read here.

 

It has been confirmed that Placido Domingo will sing the role of Nabucco at Zurich Opera House tonight.

It’s his first opera appearance since Salzburg in August.

Credit him with grit and courage. Many a lesser artist would have taken time out in the face of intensive mutterings.

Things are looking up for the newly-installed music director of the London Philharmonic.

He has just got called to make a Philadelphia Orchestra debut next February.

‘ He replaces Donald Runnicles, who has withdrawn due to a scheduling conflict,’ says the press release.

Odd.

 

The composer Dave Heath was present at Friday’s conclusion of part one of the independent inquiry into child sex abuse at English music schools.

Dave, a former Purcell parent, reports: ‘Big, unreserved apology from Chethams school for the shocking abuse there, but not word from the Purcell School, despite the ex- head of governors Graham Smallbone finally admitting that the ex-headmaster Peter Crook’s “sex” talk was ‘absolutely unacceptable!’

The school maintains a boarding house named after Graham Smallbone, MBE.

Not that saying sorry amounts to much.

Here’s some more harrowing independent testimony that Ian Pace has collected from Chet’s victims. These witnesses were not called by the independent inquiry:

AL24: I had barely heard of child abuse and certainly didn’t realise the term might apply in my case. To be clear, Ling manipulated, threatened and isolated me. It was never once consenting – he made my skin crawl. But the atmosphere that pervaded the string department; cello teachers ‘dating’ pupils, violin pupils being ‘girlfriends’, teachers generally sleazing over us girls, making crude comments and unwanted advances, had normalised what I had suffered. Horrifyingly I thought I had just been more unlucky than most, and that it was our lot to be treated as sexual game…

It was absolutely common knowledge at Chets during my time there, and subsequently, that there were ‘relationships’ happening between staff members and the children. This included the Head of Music  and many of the string staff. Ling was known for being the most blatant; taking girls out for drinks, keeping them late in practice rooms, taking them off site in his car…

AL21: Generally, they were not supposed to punish girls, but my friend and I were once locked in a cupboard in the 6th form block and incense sticks were lit through the key-hole until we were coughing so much, and screaming, that the head boy at the time [name redacted] let us out. I have always been a severe asthmatic but they thought it hilarious. [Head boy] refused to take part in any abuse.

I also remember being so hungry that one night, myself and 2 other girls crept into the kitchens and stole all the stale bread. (Naughty but desperate!) We developed quite a taste for it!

My personal sadness was that I had a boyfriend in the school. There was no sex education so we were both very naive. I fell pregnant at 15 yrs old, had a termination and we were both promptly expelled. 

AL27L

I will tell just one story of my own. This concerns the teacher in junior school who made a point of singling out everyone else in the class for praise for what they had done, then holding me up alone in front of them all with that poisonous hatred behind her eyes just to ridicule me in comparison with everyone else. Now I also know that this same teacher, at school camp, actually slept with a sixth-form boy.

This school was a cesspit. It is a disgrace that John Vallins was ever let anywhere near a school, and he should feel nothing but shame and guilt for the rest of his days.

More here.

 

The Norrköping Symphony  Orchestra has appointed Karl-Heinz Steffens as Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor from season 2020/21. The orchestra’s Artistic Director Henrik Marmén describes the relationship as ”a match made in heaven”.

Steffens, 58, is music director of the state opera in Prague.

The orchestra has been headless for three years while conducting the search.