Fort Worth Opera, which fired its general director in 2017 and recruited Placido Domingo as artistic advisor, just lost its latest chief.
Tuomas Hiltunen, a Finn, said he quit ‘because of different visions of the direction and goals of the company.’
The company issued this statement: Fort Worth Opera’s Board of Trustees announced today that they have accepted the submitted resignation of General Director Tuomas Hiltunen. Mr. Hiltunen joined Fort Worth Opera in July of 2017. During his tenure, he established security and growth by streamlining expenditures, reducing administrative costs and overhead, and maintaining a balanced operating budget.
‘Fort Worth Opera is grateful for Tuomas’ leadership over the past two seasons and we wish him well in his future endeavors,’ said Nelson E. Claytor, Ph.D., Chair of the Board of Trustees. ‘As we move forward, our top priority is, and always has been, ensuring that the financial health of the company is secure for decades to come.’
The 2020 Elmar Oliveira International Violin Competition has reached its final stage at the Lynn Conservatory in Boca Raton, Florida.
Of the four finalists, two are proteges of jury members. Vikram Sedona is favourite student of Silvia Marcovici and Jung Choi studies with Ilya Kaler.
The other two finalists are Igor Khukhua, 27, and Julian Rhee, 19.
The questions?
Were Marcovici and Kaler in the room when voting took place?
Did they vote for their own students?
Did they discuss the final selection with other jurors?
Chetham’s student Poppy Wald-Harding, 18, left an 1804 Joseph Strauss violin on a train at Manchester Victoria station.
Richard Rodzinski has alerted us to the Horowitz /Rodzinski/ Rachmaninoff # 3 concerto with the New York Philharmonic from 1943, restored recently by Seth Winner.
Pianophiles are aghast at the flurry of notes from 1:03-1:09 at a speed that defies human capacity.
Has anyone done it better?
The Stoneleigh Youth Orchestra, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, ‘is on a mission to break the stigma of being a viola player by giving two young musicians the chance to learn for free’.
Or so they tell us.
Stoneleigh has purchased two violas which it will loan for free for one year with a view to inviting both players to join the orchestra. In addition to loaning the violas, the orchestra is offering six free individual lessons with viola teacher, Jennifer MacCallum, to help the players get started on their new instruments.
piano sonatas 1-3, opus 2 (1795)
Beethoven humbly dedicated the frontispiece of his first piano sonata to Haydn while paying musical homage to Mozart by developing a theme from his 40th symphony. Tributes aside, this is the beginning of the piano sonata as we know it, the foundation of 32 works by Beethoven that push the instrument beyond its known capabilities into sounds and ideas that Haydn and Mozart could never have conceived.
The first sonata launches with what becomes known as the ‘Mannheim Rocket’, a steam engine that is thereatening to run off the rails. It tells us that Beethoven is less interested in amateurs who will buy his music and play it at home than in his own unstated dream of shaking music to its foundations.
Among 68 recordings of this preliminary work, I am drawn irresistibly to the opening of the newest cycle, completed by Igor Levit in 2019. The first sonata has a thoughtfulness that calls to mind the British pianist Solomon and Wilhelm Kempff in the early 1950s, an age of phenomenal pianism.
The earliest recording by Alfred Brendel (1961) opens in a surprisingly deliberate fashion before catching fire. I’m not sure he ever surpassed it by way of hypnotic immersion. Glenn Gould is out there on his own. His tone is brittle, speeds variable, atmosphere compelling and ideas challenging. Apart from John Cage, nobody make the piano sound so different as Gould does in the opening page of opus 2/1 – and that must be what Beethoven had in mind.
Sviatoslav Richter is more prosaic, maybe pacing himself for the summits of the cycle, but beautiful throughout and intriguing. No less indispensable is the Hungarian pianist Annie Fischer, product of a life of hard Communist knocks yet finding compassion in the slow movement and macabre humour in the finale. Not to be missed. A younger Hungarian, Zoltan Kocsis, has some original moves, not all of them attractive.
Moving on to the second sonata, I am drawn once more to Levit and Kempff, but above all to Lev Oborin in Moscow, 1957. A pianist of the highest capabilities, first-ever winner of the Warsaw Chopin Competition, Oborin was 50 by the time he made this recording, his international reputation crushed by Stalinist isolation. Seldom has the loneliness of the solo pianist been so vividly projected. Emil Gilels, a nervous survivor in the Soviet system, keep hinting that there is more he would like to confide, but dares not; he makes you listen very closely, especially in the finale of this sonata. Gilels was contracted by Deutsche Grammophon to record the complete sonatas but, for reasons unknown and possibly political, left two or three frustrating gaps in the set.
Mikhail Pletnev (1994) takes the Glenn Gould role in this sonata – the decisiveness of being different and to hell with the rest. Claudio Arrau, by contrast, has the authority and the freedom to do as he pleases in this 1964 Amsterdam performance, taking the slow movement at the pace of a disabled snail while building up a tension that threatens nuclear fusion. Extraordinary that he can achieve this in a relatively unsophisticated early sonata.
Two Italians take the third sonata by the throat. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920-95) was a man of extreme reserve who was hypersensitive to fresh air and would cancel a concert at the sight of an open window. An airman in the Second World War he wore a pencil moustache and black polo-neck sweaters, though no-one knew his political leanings. As the most pronounced influence on his leftist pupil Maurizio Pollini, it is unlikely he had any politics at all. Michelangeli, in the third sonata, teases, torments and tangles up Beethoven’s themes to a point at the end of the first movement where they feel irresoluble. Then, in the adagio, he quietly unravels the mystery he has made. This is one of the greatest acts of pianism you will ever hear. There are around 10 Michelangeli recordings of the work. Go for the one dated 1965, when he was at his least fragile.
Pollini, the sorcerer’s apprentice, takes a more prosaic approach, avoiding complications, searching – and finding – the perfect expression, sometimes at superhuman speeds in the last two movements. Even those who fault Pollini for over-seriousness will warm to this 2007 recording, his only assault on the third sonata.
Joseph Horowitz has written an extended reflection on the crisis in American culture:
American classical music is today a scholarly minefield. The question “What is America?” is central. So is the topic of race. The American music that most matters, nationally and internationally, is black. But classical music in the United States has mainly rejected this influence, which is one reason it has remained impossibly Eurocentric. As the visiting Czech composer Antonin Dvorak emphasized in 1893, two obvious sources for an “American” concert idiom are the sorrow songs of the slave, and the songs and rituals of Native America. Issues of appropriation are front and center. It is a perfect storm.
