The BBC Proms will open in Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama next week, ‘presented and sponsored by Daiwa Securities Group and supported by the Scottish Government’.

The orchestra is the BBC Scottish.

There is more confusion in this project than cultural fusion. The venture is being managed by a London agency.

Something does not sound right.

10 Jim Carr, Canadian Cabinet minister, formerly played oboe in the Winnipeg Symphony.

9 Arvo Pärt, Estonian composer, played oboe in the army

8 Marcel Tabueteau, taught US oboists to sound French

7 William Herschel, royal astronomer

6 John de Lancie, got a concerto out of Richard Strauss

5 Mitch Miller, bandmaster and record supremo

4 Jennifer Lawrence, actor, played oboe in her school band

3 Georg Philipp Telemann, baroquepop composer

2 Karl Jenkins, classipop composer

1 George Martin, Beatles producer

 

We’ve received a long, rambling complaint from Mannes students on restrictions as to what they can play in recitals and when.

Aside from the usual whinges, the peculiar bit is this: “As part of the Centennial celebration, ‘over the course of the 2019/2020 academic school year, all chamber groups and chamber performance classes will carry a centennial theme” (email from Mannes Deans on April, 24). Therefore, Mannes students this academic year are not allowed to perform or work on chamber music from the canon, but instead will have to find pieces written by composers associated with the New School, such as John Cage and Henry Cowell.  With all due respect, everyone understands the limitations such a repertoire imposes on students, potentially stifling students’ creativity and musical growth. Furthermore, great experimental composers such as Cage and Cowell, wrote very little of what can be called “chamber music.” 

Can anyone explain?

 

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

 

… My feeling is that Daniil Trifonov and Yannick Nézet-Séguin have set the benchmark for the next quarter-century. Outstanding in their previous release of the 2nd and 4th concertos, they deliver a performance of the first concerto that makes light of its difficulties and hesitations, lightening also its endemic morbidity with little touches of finger-wit and some gorgeous phrases from the Philadelphia winds…

Read on here.

 

And here.

In her first appointment as artistic director, Rosetta Cucchi has appointed Francesco Cilluffo as principal guest conductor for the next 3 years. Francesco is also a summer fixture at Holland Park Opera in London.

Colleagues are reporting the death of Hansheinz Schneeberger, a Swiss violnist who gave the world premieres of Béla Bartók’s long-buried first concerto in 1958, as well as works by his compatriots Frank Martin and Klaus Huber.

Schneeberger served for several years as concertmaster of the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg.

Distressing campus news.

The Eastman Philharmonia is due to tour eight cities in China over 12 days in December. But not the whole orchestra. Three students from South Korea have been denied visas.

‘”We were suddenly caught right in the middle of this. It was really a challenging decision to make,’ said Jamal Rossi, Dean of the Eastman School of Music. ‘Do we discontinue the tour without the valued colleagues or do we still go forward?’

He decided to go ahead.

 

Was that the right decision?

Does it not show a lack of solidarity and a willingness to buckle to political pressure? Are China ties more valuable than Korean students? This opens a huge can of worms for US universities.

UPDATE: Eastman Dean explains

… not to mention a Hindemith encore.

Christopher Morley’s reviews last night in CBSO100:

 CBSO AND RBC SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

                        Symphony Hall *****

Close your eyes during this performance of Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra and you could easily imagine this was an extra item offered by the CBSO in tonight’s already generous programme.

In fact it was a pre-concert taster given by the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra, expertly rehearsed and conducted by Michael Seal. Seal’s own history is a shining example of the links between the RBC (from which he graduated) and the CBSO (in which he became a second violin principal, and of which he is now Associate Conductor).

Seal secured from his young charges sure-footed rhythmic impetus, a richness of sound allied with clear individual instrumental detail, and an astute sense of balance and sonority. The future of orchestral playing seems assured.

Then came the CBSO, many of whose players teach at the RBC, their programme beginning with a Mastersingers Overture silkily flowing rather than massively portentous (Wagner doesn’t automatically imply “heavy”), almost gloriously Hollywood at times under the fluent conducting of Fabien Gabel. The cheeky woodwind deserved a Hans Sachs clip round the ear.

Simone Lamsma was soloist in Bruch’s Violin Concerto no.1, bringing to this well-loved (never let it be said “hackneyed”) work a sense of spontaneous, improvisatory freedom and a deliciously throaty tone in her lower registers.

 Lamsma was always totally at one with the music and indeed with the orchestra, the orchestra collaborating attentively and then blossoming in their own tutti passages.

Her undoubted virtuosity was unleashed in her encore, the athletically-bowed finale of Hindemith’s Solo Sonata, a torrent of notes disguising perhaps any absence of genuine musical content.

 

Genuine musical content there is a-plenty in Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, perhaps too much in the prolix finale, where the composer not only looks back at previous movements but tries to juggle the wonderful new thematic material he introduces.

Brass rose nobly to their organ-like solemnity, and Elspeth Dutch’s horn was romantically evocative, frequently answered by the subtle commentary of Marie-Christine Zupancic’s flute.

All woodwind were similarly vocal, and the strings were delicate and versatile in the huge demands Bruckner makes of them, Gabel’s reading all of a sweep until defeated by the pitfall hiatuses of the finale.

Gabel’s body-language is unaffected and genuinely communicative, and he made much sense of this pivotal work, built upon baroque procedures, Romantic gestures, and presaging the methods of Schoenberg and his Second Viennese School.

 

The international opera critic Larry L. Lash has been troubled by the lack of investigation into widespread child abuse by leading opera personalities. He has personal experience of this crime, as he relates below in this Slipped Disc exposé: 

 

Dredging up memories has not been a happy experience for me but, motivated by the #MeToo movement, I need to talk about male predators in the classical music world who attack little boys.

After my father’s suicide three days after my fifth birthday in 1962, my mother dove into a violent, abusive second marriage.  I did everything possible to stay away from home and walked every day after school to the main library in Reading, Pennsylvania.

I read every issue of Opera News since its inception and every book on music, theatre, and dance I could get my hands on.  My big treat was a long table fitted with turntables and headsets and shelves of classical music LPs. There began my lifelong obsession with opera.

My mother engaged the son of a distant friend to give me piano lessons, and act as a role model.  I was often handed off to my teacher for full weekends at his apartments in Philadelphia, where he taught at the Curtis Institute, and later in a Washington, D.C. suburb, where he was an organist at the National Cathedral.  I was eight or nine the first time at his place in Philly when we went swimming and then, at his suggestion, we took a “nap,” during which he raped me. I even remember the words exchanged when I asked what he was doing. The abuse continued for several years.  And there was the opera factor: he drove me to New York several times to attend Metropolitan Opera matinees. Attending Met performances became my raison d’être.

A New York City Opera leading tenor once performed selections from La bohème with a soprano at Reading’s Northeast Junior High weekly assembly.  During the Q&A it became apparent that my knowledge of opera was far and above that of any other student.  A teacher arranged for me to skip classes and sit with the tenor in empty schoolroom to talk opera. He invited me to attend my first La bohème at the Met on 6 March 1971, less than a month after my 14th birthday.  I arrived at his West 73rd Street flat mid-morning. He answered the door in a bathrobe and suggested that we take a “nap,” as it was still several hours before the 2:00 p.m. curtain.  He became the second man to transport me across state lines and rape me.

Now 81, he enjoyed a major international career which included 26 seasons with the Met in major roles.

I skipped school to extend my weekends in New York, paid for by saving my lunch money and doing whatever odd jobs I could pick up.  I was a stage door regular, and my face became known and friendships developed. I slept on the sofas and floors of sweet, generous people who, like me, were on the standing room ticket line every Saturday morning.  Singers began to recognize me and often offered me their company standing room tickets at the back of the Grand Tier. An usher once allowed me to sit in the unused Board of Directors’ box, but first forced me to fellate him in the anteroom.

Among the Met comprimarios who were kind to me, letting me sit in on rehearsals and giving me a tour of the building from top to bottom, was a bass who would sing over 500 performances with the company.  He once invited me to his Upper West Side apartment between shows at a Met Saturday double-header, and it was only a matter of minutes before his clothes were off and he was on me.

I missed more classes at Reading High than I attended but hung out with the young, “cool” couple at the school in the early 1970s.  I wasn’t required to take his history class, but she taught me Russian. Considered “eccentric,” they often hosted parties for precocious students at their home.  All it took was one ride home in Jim’s notorious “urine-yellow Mustang” for him to force me to fellate him. Under threat of death, he would pick me up when his wife was teaching night school, drive somewhere deep into the forest, and force himself on me for two years.  And the next day I would sit in Russian class, wondering if his wife had any inkling. Opera was again a factor: on several occasions the three of us drove to the Met for two Saturday performances… in the car in which he regularly molested me.

At 15 I was taken in by a gay couple who I met at the opera.  From Bill and Lloyd, who I regard as my true parents, I learned that being gay could be a legitimate, safe, and happy lifestyle.  They gave me a home, fed me well, gave me household chores, and enabled me to enrol at CUNY and American Ballet Theater School. At 17 I was able to take a studio apartment in their building with money which came to me from my father’s veterans’ benefits.

And I finally understood the disgust and perversity of the abuse I endured since that first post-swim “nap” with my piano teacher.

Larry L. Lash danced with the Metropolitan Opera, produced and annotated dozens of albums for PolyGram Records over 12 years, was artistic director of New Dances for the 21st Century, and turned to a fulltime career in arts journalism in 2001.  A resident of Vienna, he has written for The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Variety, Opera News, Ballet Review, Musical America, and Andante.

 

If you’ve had similar experiences as a child or adolescent, please let us know. The abuse of children remains an elephant in the room for the opera industry.

 

The Bertelemann-backed Neue Stimmen Competition, which aims to discover the next generation of opera stars, succeeds mainly in demonstrating that the traditional wellsprings of opera voices have run dry.

Tomorrow’s televised finals will be fought out among the following:

Carpentier Hélène Soprano France 1995
El-Khashem Anna Soprano Russia 1996
Kamani Enkeleda Soprano Albania 1991
Križaj Domen Baritone Slovenia 1989
Kubheka Bongani Baritone South Africa 1991
Long Long Tenor China 1991
McCorkle Jamez Tenor USA 1989
Tanasii Natalia Soprano Moldova 1991
Yende Nombulelo Soprano South Africa 1991
Zámečníková Slávka Soprano Slovakia 1991

 


The jury is chaired by outgoing Vienna Opera boss Dominique Meyer. Past winners include Christiane Karg, Nathalie Stutzmann, Marina Rebeka, Michael Volle, René Pape, Franco Fagioli and Elsa Dreisig.

It was George Crumb’s 90th birthday yesterday. Twenty years ago, I wrote a column on his 70th, pointing out that George was possibly the most undervalued living composer and contrasting the modesty of his birthday with the fireworks the music biz was putting on for the 75th of Pierre Boulez.

This is part of what I wrote.

HERE is a wad of ammunition for those who maintain that musical reputations are manipulated by a metropolitan clique of critics, broadcasters and publishers.

Next month, Pierre Boulez will preside over celebrations of his 75th birthday. The bash begins with an LSO series at the Barbican, followed by an extended tribute at the Festival Hall, every note reverentially aired by the BBC. A gush of records will hit the stores. Interviews will appear in most serious dailies. Until winter’s end, it will be hard to avoid the sight and sound of the amiable French ringleader of post-war avant-gardism. It seems only yesterday that we went through a similar carnival for his 70th.

Last weekend, the American composer George Crumb flew in to play percussion at a 70th-birthday concert in the Wigmore Hall. The gig was put on by a guitar magazine and attended by cognoscenti. No broadcast, not a word in the press – this was as private a party as an MI5 reunion.

The next day I got a call from an orchestra PR saying that my meeting with Boulez in Paris the following week had been cancelled. When I asked why, she said he had taken against being compared to an American composer, especially one as obscure as Monsieur Crumb.

Dis-donc!

Well, maybe it was the next two pars that made him see red.

Without stretching the contrast, Boulez is a relic of an empirically discredited movement. He has not composed a work of substance for 18 years. His pseudo-scientific theories of musical progress are laughed off by today’s composers. Not one of his works is standard repertoire. Boulez is starting to resemble Arthur Scargill and Egon Krenz, true believers whose creed collapsed.

Crumb, on the other hand, is one of the few composers to change the perception and function of new music in the last third of the 20th century. His electronic string quartet, Black Angels, was an ear-opener to America’s Vietnam generation, suggesting that Haydn’s art form could grapple with post-nuclear conflict. Hearing Angels inspired the formation of Kronos and other front-line ensembles; it has been recorded four times and performed, I suspect, more than any modern string quartet.

Whatever (which is English for quand-meme)…. at 75 and still vituperative about any composer who did not follow his route, Boulez might have been expected to be able to take a little rough with the supersmooth. Mais, non. With skin as thin as a newborn’s cranium, he banished me from his presence for a few years, after which I may have lost interest in renewing our acquaintance. Tant-pis. I don’t think we ever met again.


Thanks to Abbie Conant for reminding me of the Crumb column.