Johannes Lamotke, principal horn of the Komische Oper Berlin, has won the audition for 3rd horn in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
Lamotke, 34, has come up through the ranks via Kassel and Bremen.
His arrival still leaves gaps in the BP horn section.
We hear that the daring moments of full-frontal male nudity in the forthcoming Philip Glass opera will not be allowed to leave the house intact when Akhnaten gets a live screening on November 23.
Some of the artists are quite cross about the airbrushing of a cast member.
Can’t seem to remember the name of the naked singer.
Must ask his PR.
The British cellist has switched agents in North America, from Lee Prinz at Colbert to Columbia’s Martin Wittenberg.
An unexpected move from a slightly quirky circuit veteran.
Hasn’t he heard that Coumbia no longer rules the waves?
2019 list from College Gazette:
The College Gazette’s ranking of the top 10 places to study Musical Theatre
10 Pace University
9 Penn State University
8 Elon College
7 Oklahoma City University
6 Ithaca College
5 Boston Conservatory at Berklee
4 Cincinnati Conservatory
3 NYU
2 Carnegie Mellon
1 University of Michigan School of Music
Now why is that?
They’ve hired Abhijit Sengupta of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as director of artistic planning at Carnegie Hall.
Liz Mahler is listed as artistic administrator.
No shortage of chiefs, then.
Henle Verlag of Munich, a company specialising in Urtext editions, has taken on the compositions of the pianist Evgeny Kissin.
First off the presses are a string quartet, four piano pieces and a cello sonata.
Some hard-baked New York PR is working all hours to get Anthony Roth Constanzo into every kind of media.
First the splash about naked dangly bits in Bloomberg, a space where no singer has trodden since Manuela Hoelterhoff retired.
Now a blowout in a food magazine – fffs sake – under the headline ‘Inside Anthony Roth Costanzo’s Gold-Dusted, Cake-Filled, High-Energy Kitchen’. Doncha just wanna be there?
It does not take a minute before the kit comes off.
Second paragraph:
Then again, How does he do it? is a cliché question when it comes to the opera singer and producer. People ask: How does he sing so high? (Costanzo is a counter-tenor, singing in the same range as a mezzo-soprano). How does he get naked in front of all those people? (In Akhnaten, the Philip Glass opera that opens at the Met on Friday night, Costanzo spends five long minutes on stage completely nude.) And, the question I asked the morning I visited him this summer: How does he get home at one a.m., bake two cakes for a photo shoot, sleep for just a few hours, then answer the door in the morning with cartoon-level cheeriness—all without a drop of caffeine? (Costanzo avoids caffeine, preferring, he says, “to manufacture my own energy.”)
photo: Joseph De Leo/Epicurious
Anything else you wanted to ask?
Like: who’s the PR?
In today’s issue of the Spectator, I discover an amateur pinaist who plays the most difficult works of the unfathomable Charles-Valentin Alkan – and does so with incredible passion and panache.
… Trust me, there is nothing light about this score. In any halfway decent attempt at a performance, the Allegro opening movement sets a pace way over the speed limit and a noise level that is harmful to health. It is followed by a Marche funèbre that calls to mind Mahler’s in his first symphony, with similar splashes of the macabre. And when Alkan writes presto on the finale, he does not mean subsonic. Wee is not the fastest pair of hands I’ve heard – Hamelin’s personal best will take some beating – but he achieves a filigree accuracy and, velocity aside, a tear-streak of real feeling….
Read on here.
The California Symphony has named Lisa Dell as its new executive director.
Lisa, 36, is assistant vice president of the Silverman PR and marketing group.
In her pitch to California she says she founded Anaphora ‘a driver for cultivating new audience members. Since, I’ve gone on to work with every major classical music institution in Chicago and several new music organizations as well. I’ve also had the pleasure to work with Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, and Montreal Symphony.’
The Times today carries a full-page obituary for Herbert Chappell, the Decca producer who conceived the original Three Tenors concert in July 1990. What the obit fails to mention is that Chappell nailed the tenors and their conductor Zubin Mehta to a one-off buyout fee. It was not cheap – $500,000 was the sum I was given – but no-one apart from Chappell thought the disc would do as well as the TV relay.
When it became the highest selling classical disc in history – see my book When the Music Stops, page 319 – the aggrieved tenors claimed they had been ripped off by underhand Brits.
For the second Three Tenors concert Decca offered £10 million but Domingo refused to work with them again. Warner bought the gig for £11 million that it probably never earned back.
Chappell was a persuasive chap.
Sic transit.
Hundreds – possibly thousands – of Australians owe their vocation to the conductor John Curro, founder of the Queensland Youth Orchestra.
John died last night, aged 86.
Among his proteges are the violinists Richard Tognetti and Ray Chen.
The hotly-fancied Mariusz Kwiecień has cancelled three February 2020 performances of Marriage of Figaro at the Met.
The Met says he is still down to sing the second three performances, but no-one’s holding their breath.
Kwiecień has been dropping out since May 2018.
This month, he is judging a competition in Bydgoszcz, Poland.
