From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

Such a relief at this time of year to receive a choral record that is not about Christmas. The Purcell Singers have selected ‘English and American Choral Masterpieces of the 20th Century’ and it’s hard to fault their choices, or not to thrill at the unfamiliar….

Read on here.

And here.

Listen up.

The mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine has cancelled tomorrow night’s Verdi Requiem at the Berlin Philharmonic.

She’s replaced by Annalisa Stroppa.

It’s the Berlin Phil debut of Teodor Currentzis.

Watch rehearsal trailer here.

In the 1930s, Finland’s hub of modernism was the eastern town Viipuri, also known as Vyborg. It had cutting-edge architecture and heard contemporary music that would never get played in Helsinki.

Its conductor and conservatoire chief was Boris Wolfson, born Boris Osipovich Kaufman on April 3, 1893, in Vladikavkaz. He sometimes called himself Sirob, his first name backwards. On emigrating to the US he came Sirpo, founder of the Portland Chamber Orchestra. He died in 1967.

Many of Wolfson’s pupils and players in Viipuri were also Jewish, among them Naum Levin, future concertmaster of the Helsinki Philharmonic. Viipuri was surrendered to the Russians in 1945 and its musical history is only now being exhumed.

Here’s Sirob with his friend Jean Sibelius, and lots of young musicians, many of the Jews who perished in the coming wars.

Read more on Boris, here.

Danny Elfman, who composed the theme music for The Simpsons, has let slip that this series is its last.

That’s series #32. Did anyone know it was still alive?

Nevill Holt Opera in Leicestershire has replaced its magaing director.

Rosenna East is leaving. Annie Lydford replaces her in January.

East is going to work for the conductor John Wilson. Lydford had a spell in PR at troubled ENO.

The Orchestre national de France has joined a walkout at Radio France in protest against 300 job cuts and other austerities.

Last night’s concert was called off.

The singer was cheered to the rafters last night at the Elbphilpharmonie in Hamburg. In Europe and Asia he remains an epic hero, despite the tacit ban in the US following a spate of nameless allegations published by the Associated Press.

I have been among his more outspoken defenders, despite many personal reservations about him.

In a new essay for The Critic, I try to explain why.

… the facts don’t fit the (AP) story. There is no sign Domingo ever bothered to give a bad report to a soprano who turned him down. Plácido’s propositions were, anyway, something of a backstage joke. Like many a Latin male singer, he was a compulsive importuner of women, capable in dim light of whispering sweet nothings to a curvaceous lamppost.

Women may have found him a bit of a nuisance but he was shadowed pretty much everywhere by his possessive wife, Marta, and his schedule was never less than punishing. Opportunity was scarce and swift. Some ribald jokes did the rounds.

The other side of Domingo, which I have observed from my first encounter with him in 1985 on the set of Zeffirelli’s film Otello…

Read on here.