Hungary has pulled out of the Eurovision Song Contest,

The official reason? ‘Instead of taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2020, we will support the valuable productions created by the talents of Hungarian pop music directly.’

They’re probably right.

Wish we’d do the same. That would be a worthwhile Brexit.

 

Dominique Meyer has spoken to an Associated Press reporter about the fractured response to nameless allegations against Placido Doming – banned in America, extolled in Europe.

Meyer, who is leaving Vienna to take over at La Scala, said: ‘Domingo ‘behaves very correctly, more than correctly… You will not find any people I think at the Vienna State Opera to criticize his behaviour.’

He aded: ‘I do not admire really what is happening in America. When one takes decisions under pressure of the press … part of the press, under pressure of the social media…’ In Europe, by contrast, ‘I have the impression that we are living in countries where there are laws, rules, police, judges, processes.’

Read on here.

The Paderewski Competition has issued what looks like a lawyers’ statement in an attempt to justify its demotion of one contestant from joint first to – mysteriously – also ran. The pianist refused to play a final recital and went public with his sense of injustice, attracting support from many of his peers. 

Here are a couple of baffling clips from the official statement:

The 11th Paderewski International Piano Competition has become the target of attacks by one of the finalists, Sergey Belyavsky, who found the assessment of his performance and the awarding of an honorable mention unjust and has accused the jury of acting against competition regulations. With regard to the above, the Music Association, the Organizer of the Competition states:

The 11th Paderewski International Piano Competition is regulated in accordance with the Rules and Regulations drafted by the Competition’s Artistic Director, prof. Piotr Paleczny, a juror with experience of over 100 international competitions. The Rules and Regulations are clear, and they rule out any possibility of manipulation or misunderstanding. They give rise to no doubts, although the situation at hand may have its sources in insufficient knowledge or understanding thereof.

It gets more obtuse:

A requirement of the Final Stage is that only pianists designated by a majority of the Jurors can become Laureates. In the case of the Paderewski International Piano Competition, this means a unanimous vote by at least five jurors. It must be explicitly stated that in none of the Final votes did Mr. Belyavsky amass such a support of Jury members, and therefore his protest is unsubstantiated and tarnishes the good name of the Competition.

You can read the way the jurors voted here.

But we still don’t know why so many jurors dropped Belyavsky on second vote like a hot blini.

Perhaps one of the judges could tell us what really went on behind the scenes.

 

In the December issue of The Critic, out today, I find that a new biography of the composer has laid to rest a long-running international conflict:

Survivors of the Shostakovich wars — we wear chestfuls of medals on the composer’s birthday — suffer savage bouts of PTSD at the sight of a new biography of the composer. The wars, for those of you who have not read newspapers for the past 40 years, were triggered by the appearance of Testimony, a book claiming to be the composer’s memoirs as dictated to a journalist, Solomon Volkov, who in the late 1970s took them to New York and found a publisher….

After a predictable onslaught of Kremlin denunciation, some Soviet-educated US academics led by the ebullient Richard Taruskin and the biographer Laurel Fay, demanded proof of the composer’s authorship. Volkov produced a number of signed manuscript pages. This failed to satisfy the scholars who, among other cavils, demanded to see a note in Shostakovich’s hand criticising communism. The war went ballistic…

Read on here.

 

The latest to clear out before the descent of Bogdan Roscic is the exceptionally capable and well liked press chief André Comploi.

He’s joining his outgoing boss Dominique Meyer at La Scala, where André will be Coordinatore Artistico, which sounds like keeping singers happy. He will do a good job.

The Vienna State Opera is also looking for a chief financial officer, among other key executives.

Plenty of vacancies. Don’t all rush to apply.

 

Hamburg State Opera is putting on Verdi’s Falstaff.

It is seeking ‘extremely corpulent’ cast members of both sexes for December-January rehearsals.

The director is Calixto Bieito.

Nuff said.

Applications to: monika.wilken@staatsoper-hamburg.de

 

Jürgen Flimm, former intendant of the Berlin Staatsoper, has let it be known that he’s lucky to be alive, albeit walking with a stick.

Flimm, 78, fell off his horse while out riding on his farm in July. He suffered a double femoral neck fracture, underwent five operations and spent almost two months in five different hospitals.

The horse is called Pavarotti. No word on its condition.

 

The grave of Felix Mendelssohn and his family in the evangelical cemetery on Mehringdamm, Berlin, was vandalised last weekend, police have announced.

His sister, the composer Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, lies beside him. The vandals appear to have targeted a Mendelssohn exhibition in the cemetery chapel.

No photographs have yet been released. No arrests have been made.

The Mendelssohns, born Jewish, were converted by their parents in childhood.

Report here.

 

We’re hearing from former Royal Academy of Music students who are frustrated at the blank wall they encountered when reporting sexual impropriety by their teachers.

This week the head of Royal Academy Opera, Gareth Hancock, was suspended from his post after a singer at Glyndebourne (where he is on the music staff) complained of receiving inappropriate texts.

Our informants say that more than 15 complaints were made by students, male and female, to their RAM tutor Dr Sarah Callis. As far as the students are concerned no action was taken, though the matter was said to have been brought to the principal’s attention and the subject of the complaints was believed to have given an undertaking to behave better in future.

The complaints include:

– one student was told at Royal Academy Opera to ‘get used to the casting couch’;
– another was advised to take ‘a year out and go and work in a brothel’;
– a third, asking a teacher how she could please him, was told: ‘a blow job would be a good start’.
These students were in their early 20s or late teens, some fresh out of school. The complaints should be lodged in the Academy’s files.
The Academy has said it has no further comment at present.

Latest review from Birmingham in our CBSO100 series, by Christopher Morley:

CBSO

Symphony Hall ****

This was a delightfully domestic programme from the CBSO; It’s just a pity more people weren’t at home to hear it. Do they only turn out for blockbusters? Aren’t Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven attractive enough?

And Richard Strauss? It was a treat to hear his rarely-performed Duett-Concertino for clarinet and bassoon, strings and harp, a very late work, autumnal in the manner of the contemporaneous Oboe Concerto, and a work which somehow also combines the worlds of the early tone-poems and the composer’s operatic ensembles.

CBSO principals Oliver Janes and Nikolaj Henriques were the soloists, and what a joy this collaboration was. Janes’ clarinet tones were gloriously limpid, harking back to late Brahms (and why not?), Henriques’ bassoon was eloquently characterised, both noble and agile.

Under conductor Riccardo Minasi the CBSO accompanied their colleagues generously and enthusiastically, and along with us on the other side of the footlights relished the delightful encore, a pasticcio on arias from Rossini’s Barber of Seville.

The rest of the programme brought works from the greats of the first Viennese School of composers, coloured by classically-placed strings, natural trumpets, rattling shallow timpani and blazing horns.

Haydn’s Symphony no.88 was fizzy, bouncy, neat, and given with an engaging contrast between delicacy and extroversion. Beethoven’s magnificent Coriolan Overture was dramatically driven, the death of its hero muttering into oblivion in much the way that Don Juan, Petrushka and Falstaff were to do nearly a century later.

And Mozart’s Symphony no.39 was warmly-coloured, alertly-phrased, and the gurgling clarinets in the Minuet’s Trio were an absolute joy. But there were some unconvincing ritardandi in transitions, and it would have been more elegant to open out the grace-notes.

Now here’s a question to ponder over the Festive Season. Isn’t it about time the CBSO had a new concertmaster? We haven’t had one since the departure to Australia of the much-loved Laurence Jackson, prior to the appointment of Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla in 2016. Perhaps it is time that our music director should be insisting upon someone permanent sitting at her left-hand side — and speaking for the players.

Christopher Morley

I have written a few more memories of Jonathan Miller in today’s JC. Among them…

“You’re being very Jewish,” he’d chide when I taxed him about God, adding: “I never withdrew from identification with Jews because it mattered so much to antisemites that they committed the Holocaust. But I feel Jewish only in the presence of antisemitism. In addition to being Jew-ish, I suppose I’m chimpanzee-ish in terms of ancestry.”

With young singers he was gentle as can be, teasing out what they might bring to a role, waiting in silence as a therapist might until they found a suppressed memory….

Read on here.