Carlos Ferreira of the Orchestre National de Lille has won the audition for principal clarinet of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London.

Carlos, who’s from Porto, is a former Academy player at the Concertgebouw.

 

 

 

Mariss Jansons has withdrawn from the Bavarian Radio Symphony’s tour to Antwerp, Luxembourg and Essen this week, on health grounds.

Daniel Harding jumps in.

UPDATE: Website statement: Mariss Jansons is confident of a recovery in time for the concerts at Carnegie Hall on 8 and 9 November and expects to conduct the programs as originally planned.

The CBSO Youth Orchestra has stepped up to play in the CBSO100 season (full coverage only on www.slippedisc.com).

Review by Christopher Morley

Symphony Hall *****

There could have been no better programme for the bright-eyed, bristling young musicians of the CBSO Youth Orchestra: two iconoclastic works from daring Russian composers, and both premiered in the same year, 1913.

Coached by expert CBSO tutors during an intensive week of preparation, and assiduously rehearsed under the baton of CBSOYO guru Michael Seal, everything came to fruition this exhilarating Sunday afternoon – Andrew Gourlay now on the podium, and the youngsters presenting a gratifyingly professional platform-manner.

Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto was the work with which Birmingham-based Lauren Zhang won the 2018 BBC Young Musician competition. Here, accompanied by her contemporaries who collaborated under Gourlay with immense empathy, she dazzled us not just with her brilliant, impressive technique, but also with the sheer musicality of her response to the many textural layers of this music.

Written for the composer’s own steely fingers, the piece is certainly a maelstrom of activity, but it also has immense tenderness at its heart (I always think of Prokofiev as the 20th-century Mozart), and Zhang found so much amid its busyness. Her Chopin encore was equally busy, Zhang remaining composed as she always appears on the platform.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring used to be a test for any orchestra (I have some ancient recordings of ensembles all at sea, even one under the composer’s flailing direction — he did improve later as a conductor). This performance from the remarkable CBSOYO was confident in every department (though I must single out the crucial percussion and often deliciously coarse heavy brass), and, thanks to the thorough preparation and Gourlay’s judicious, often sinuous balancing, the score emerged with crystal clarity, despite the massiveness of the orchestra. There were times I felt they could have unleashed even more energy.

But the ending of the Sacrificial Dance was cataclysmic. To us in the audience it was a moving example of how inspirational the dedication of our musical youngsters can be.

 

The opera conductor Friedemann Layer died today in Berlin.

He was best known in France, where he was chief conductor of the orchestre national and the opéra of Montpellier for 13 years, 1994-2007.

Having started out as an assistant to Herbert von Karajan, Layer was exceptionally considerate to singers and staff members.

 

 

 

The Salzburger Nachrichten has informed us of the death of Johannes Schaaf, one of the go-to directors of the second half of the 20th century. A fixture at Salzburg, Munich and Covent Garden, his Mozart productions with Georg Solti were broadly traditional and extremely musical with a few modern quirks.

He opened the new Israel Opera in Tel Aviv with an outstandingly Russian Boris Godunov.

 

Do we need to remind you of the infamous United Broke My Guitar video? Seemes like everyone’s doing it. How do we let these negligent airlines get away with it?

Message from Chris Montague.

Do share.

 

The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra has silently dropped its music director and its concertmaster.

Conductor Peter Valentovič, hired only last year, has been replaced by predecessor, Ondrej Lenárd.

Concertmaster Marián Svetlík was given no reason for his dismissal.

The eminent Slovak singer Edita Gruberova has called the sackings ‘a shame and a disgrace.’

The young violinist Filip Pogády was a reluctant convert to social media.

But trial and error over the past six years has won him 100,000 followers.

Is that for his violin playing, or his modelling work?

‘The classical audience resents anything that steps outside the stereotypical image,’ he says.

Watch Filip on Zsolt Bognar’s Living the Classical Life. ‘Haters are gonna hate,’ says Filip.

 

From my launch piece in an important new magazine, The Critic:

Arriving as assistant editor of the London Evening Standard in March 2002, I dismissed nine critics and hired 12. This caused a bit of a stir since critics were held to be sacrosanct, but I felt the field was in need of a shakeout with far too many old-timers recycling idées fixes and few signs of renewal.

Not to mention the vested indulgences. One dear man informed me that it was his right to have an after-show dinner with a glass of wine on my budget, the better to digest a performance (as it were) before he reviewed it. Another confessed he could hardly bear to hang around for the second half of a concert. A third had to be regularly rewritten by the night desk….

Ever since its 18th-century origins in the London coffeehouses of Swift, Addison and Defoe, criticism has been a fragile organism. An opinion is no more than a bubble in the air and we would all be much the poorer if some spoilsport went round pricking it. Aware of my responsibilities to preserve the bubble, I increased review rates and allowed the rumbling tummy to carry on charging his dinners. Picking, training, editing and sustaining a critic is one of the toughest challenges in journalism and I am proud to have helped quite a few of them to spice up the public conversation. Which is why my heart sank twice this past summer at a pair of onslaughts on the genre….

Read on here.