Our correspondent at the Concertgebouw says the audience gave Jaap Van Zweden a standing ovation before his concert last night.

‘His name is being sung around as the next chief conductor in Amsterdam. The audience clapped their hands raw. And that was before the concert even started’ says one report.

‘Van Zweden is for many Gatti’s dream successor,’ said another.

It was practically a coronation.

 

 

The Estonian ballerina Maria Seletskaja has been named conductor in residence of the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra.

Seletskaja has been principal dancer with Royal Ballet of Flanders, Staatsballett Berlin, Zurich Ballet and Estonian National Ballet.

Members of the Orchestre de Paris refused to wear concert gear last night ‘in solidarity with striking members of the company’.

Their stance was announced by microphone to the audience ahead of the concert, cnducted by Herbert Blomstedt.

Mr Blomstedt, 92, was appropriately attired, as ever.

The OdP performed Mozart K488 with Bertrand Chamayou as soloist, followed by Bruckner’s 4th symphony.

Message to spectators of the performance of Il Barbiere di Siviglia on Saturday 11 January 2020 at the Opéra Bastille:

As a result of a national strike notice, the performance of Il Barbiere di Siviglia on Saturday 11 January might be affected.

So, at this late hour, do we go, or not?

 

The composer Du Yun, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for music, has been signed by Schirmer

From the press release:

G. Schirmer, Inc. is pleased to announce a worldwide publishing administration agreement with composer, performer, activist, curator, and educator Du Yun. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for her bold, harrowing opera Angel’s Bone, Du Yun’s catalog of staged and concert works reflect her omnivorous creativity and wide-ranging artistic interests.

In 2020, Du Yun will have several high-profile world premieres. Sweet Land, premiering February 29-March 15 in Los Angeles, is a collaboration with pioneering opera company The Industry. The creative team, led by MacArthur Fellow Yuval Sharon, describes the immersive production as “a grotesque historical pageant that disrupts the dominant narrative of American identity.”…
Du Yun has also become a sought-after curator and programmer, via her own FutureTradition initiative and relationships with existing festivals and presenters. In 2019, she worked with the Southbank Centre and Ultima Festival to create programming involving her own work and that of various collaborators. Future curatorial engagements include the LA Phil Green Umbrella Series (March 2020), the Göteborg Art Sounds Festival (Sweden, October 2020), the centennial Donaueschingen Festival in 2021, and a FutureTradition Festival with China’s new media partners. This summer Du Yun will be a mentor for Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, and in 2020-2022, for Forecast, an interdisciplinary mentorship program in Berlin, as well as “Sounds Now,” a Creative Europe Cooperation Project by leading European Contemporary Music Festivals.

Piotr Beczala called in sick for his Vienna role debut as Lohengrin. There was a luxury sub for the suffering Pole, but not everyone was laughing.

Our man on the spot, Larry L. Lash reports: ‘Piotr Beczala skipped tonight’s “Lohengrin” at Wiener Staatsoper, so the audience is being treated to Klaus Florian Vogt in Andreas Homoki’s hideous production which I stormed out of at its premiere and caught a late-night screening of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” as a palate cleanser.

Vogt as Lohengrin. Photo: Vienna State Opera / Michael Pöhn

The latest review in our CBSO100 series comes from the orchestra’s fire-eating independent historian, Richard Bratby:

CBSO / Espinós: Youth Takeover

Symphony Hall

9.1.20

4 stars (4****)

The CBSO has been targeting young concertgoers since at least 1921. But still, it was a nice statement of intent to hand the very first evening concert of the orchestra’s 100th birthday year to a team of “Youth Ambassadors”, who chose an entire programme – duly performed by Jaume Santonja Espinós and an expensive-looking CBSO. The idea – and in Symphony Hall, you go big or you go home – was to offer a “vision of the future”.

Not everything worked. We were encouraged to use our mobile phones throughout: I did, and can confirm that it’s an excellent way to ignore the music entirely. And it would have been good to learn more about the “Ambassadors” themselves: aged between 16 and 21, but mysteriously un-named and largely invisible until the final bow, though two of them came on to recite the whole of Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune. Full marks for sheer courage.

What’s clear, though, is that they love the sound of an orchestra, and have a knack for choosing the kind of pieces that leave you smiling. How refreshing to hear an audience (and it was a sizeable crowd, drawn from all age-groups) laughing out loud at the vocal explosives of soloist MaJiKer in Anna Meredith’s Concerto for Beatboxer, or sighing with pleasure at the end of Debussy’s Prélude. Espinós seemed to be enjoying it as much as anyone, drawing zesty, energised performances of Shostakovich’s second Jazz Suite and Mason Bates’s Adams-on-uppers orchestral showpiece Mothership.

After a fabulously louche opening glissando from clarinettist Oliver Janes, Louis Schwizgebel was a stylish soloist in Rhapsody in Blue, while guest-leader Vesselin Gellev duetted smokily with Eduardo Vassallo’s cello in Piazzolla’s Winter. Huge fun, then, and the list of pieces that the youngsters were obliged to leave out – which featured Kurt Weill, Granville Bantock and Robert Farnon’s Portrait of a Flirt – suggests a musical future that I, for one, could happily get behind. The kids are all right: come on, CBSO, let them have a go every year. I dare you.

 

Richard Bratby

Welcome to the seventh work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition

7 Variations on ‘Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu’, opus 121a (1824)

Only Beethoven could have created more than a quarter of an hour of variations for piano, violin and cello from a flimsy ditty taken from a forgotten stage play. The late opus number and 1824 publication date are misleading. The variations may have been sketched as early as 1803 and were finished no later than 1816, but Beethoven waited much longer to release them.

In concentrated listening we find him sketching around theme fragments that will crop up in the finale of the ninth symphony, and in the Diabelli Variations. For this reason, and this being his last attempt at a piano trio, the supposedly lightweight Kakadu Variations warrant serious attention. They have been recorded often and outstandingly well by some of the greatest musicians.

Thibaud, Cortot and Casals (1926) are somewhat unsmiling, albeit very beautiful. The Beaux Arts Trio (1965), two minutes faster, have more fun. Isaac Stern, Eugene Istomin and Leonard Rose add a delicious languor while Barenboim, DuPre and Zukerman may be too reverential for some tastes. Perlman, Harrell and Ashkenazy (2015) get it just right.

I am also drawn to the Trio Wanderer (2012), a French group who seem to have all the time in the world on their hands yet deliver one of the fastest and loveliest sets. Beside them, the classic Kempff-Szeryng-Fournier combo (1966) sound self-consciously starry.

In the Beethoven catalogue, the Kakadu variations share the same opus number with 121b, a six-minute Opferlied for voice, chorus and orchestra, a six-minute work that is hardly ever performed or recorded. Why not? It’s like a sketchbook for Fidelio. Try this 2019 session from Berlin Radio.

It is followed by opus 122, the Bundeslied, four minutes long and even more obscure, deservedly I’d suggest.


But his next work in the Missa Solemnis and, two scores later, the 9th symphony. This is how LvB scatters his diamonds.