Franziska Grimm has asked to be relieved of her post as commercial director of Leipzig’s Bach Archive. She had been there for little over a year and wants to pursue other challenges.

That’s all they’re saying.

 

press release:

… The Philadelphia Orchestra, the China Conservatory of Music, and the Global Music Education League today signed a five-year agreement in Beijing formalizing the Orchestra’s role in the China International Music Competition. Each year, starting in 2021, that the Orchestra travels to Beijing with Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, they will participate in the final concert of the China International Music Competition. The Orchestra will also be involved in coaching, master classes, and joint music-making opportunities with the students and faculty of the China Conservatory of Music…

 

She has a recital album out on Warner with Gautier Capucon, by special permission of Deutsche Grammophon.

The dress is the longest ever.

Review coming up here.

 

Message from agent:

David Cohen played a concert last night in St. Petersburg with Bashmet, and now on his way back home. Authorities in Russia at the airport are not happy with documentation on cello although he has with him all official paperwork and photos.

They have confiscated cello, phone, luggage and want to do a strip search.

UPDATE: Happily all sorted out now, but this could be any one of us.

The Vienna Symphony has named Dalibor Karvay as first concertmaster, replacing Jan Pospichal who went into retirement last month.

Karvay, 34, is a Slovak who studied with Boris Kuschnir, winning various competitions, and played with Slava Rostropovich for Prince Charles. He’s a professor at Vienna’s private music university and lives with his wife in Bratislava.

 

 

Latest shocking pictures posted by the opera house.

All events this weekend are cancelled.

More devastation here from Artnet.

Inside, meanwhile:

It’s on all her husband’s social media.

Released today by Universal China.

And they are back on circus, er, circuit:

Superstar pianist Lang Lang performed with his wife, Gina Alice, at the ‘Singles Day’ show in Shanghai. The show celebrates China’s largest online shopping day of the year, on 11 November, and was created by Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.

Lang Lang and Gina Alice began their performance at the ‘Singles Day’ show with a duet arrangement of the Chinese traditional ‘Jasmine Flower’ before accompanying Chinese singer, songwriter Chris Lee, who rose to fame after winning Super Girl, China’s version of The X Factor, in 2005. Other artists on the show, which was viewed by over 300 million people, included Taylor Swift.

Rehearsal shot from Munich’s Die Tote Stadt, opening on Monday.

One more?

Andrew Amdur, a London singer who persuaded widow Elizabeth Shaheen to part with £100,000, was jailed yesterday for three years and ordered to sell his house in order to repay the victim.

Amdur, 48, contested the charges but his house is now on the market.

 

DSO chairman Mark Davidoff has announced plans to buy instruments for Detroit’s kids.

The scheme is called Detroit Harmony and it’s open to ‘to any K-12 student in public, private and charter schools throughout the city’.

It is not yet fully funded.

 

The pianist Natalia Domskaya, who spent all her working life as accompanist to singers at the Mariinsky, has died of an unknown cause.

She covered not just Russian opera but Italian, German, French and even English.

She joined the Mariinsky in 1980 after graduation from the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory.

The Lucerne Festival is charging visitors 100 Swiss francs* for the opportunity of watching the exotic Teodor Currentzis rehearse his group Musica Aeterna.

They are working very hard at creating a cult of Currentzis but this goes way off piste:

“Teodor Currentzis rehearses Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony”

If you would like to become better acquainted with Teodor Currentzis and see how he works with musicAeterna, you will not want to miss this workshop. In the course of a public rehearsal, he will refine his interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Afterward, Currentzis will offer insights into his understanding of Beethoven and explain how he arrives at his interpretation of this composer.

The festival, by the way, is no longer called the Lucerne Easter Festival but, noisily, TEODOR.

People are getting seriously piste off.

* 1SFr = US$1.01