Operawire has announced the death of Metropolitan Opera mezzo Nedda Casei.

First picked by Leopold Stokowski to sing a Stravinsky role, she appeared at the Met for 21 years as Carmen, Rosina, Amneris and Adalgisa, and made recordings with Leonard Bernstein.

 

The Association of British Oerchestra has produced a positive set of statistics showing that UK orchs have increased their income from ticket sales and tours by almost a quarter since the last survey in 2016. The total amount earned is £68.9 million.

(This does not include the BBC orchestras, who operate in a false economy.)

There is a downside to this upturn, however, and it can be found by breaking down the touring revenues.

Income from all overseas tours was £14.4 million. Of this £8.4 million was earned in EU countries.

That market will dry up from next month as the UK leaves the EU.

You can read the report here.

 

The players have nominated three men for chief conductor.

One is unavailable, one is unsuitable and the third won’t want the job.

The three are:

Andris Nelsons – deeply embedded in Boston and Leipzig

Valery Gergiev – politically compromised; and

Ivan Fischer, probably not interested.

 

The vote was held on Saturday and the results have been leaked to a Dutch newspaper. A substantial number of players put Daniele Gatti on the list. Gatti was fired after #Metoo allegations.

The orchestra, which has no chief exec or board chairman, is now both split and thoroughly stuck.

UPDATE: What Amsterdam must do next

MDR reports that Ariane Matiakh, the rising French conductor, is negotiating her departure as General Music Director in Halle, Saxony.

Matiakh, 39, has only been there four months.

It appears that her guest conducting schedule has got too busy and there have been complaints about her absence in Halle.

She also holds posts in Aalborg (Denmark) and Berlin.

Dallas Symphony notice:

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra mourns the loss of long-time bassist Dwight Shambley. He passed away on January 27, 2020, and is survived by his wife of 40 years, Dallas Symphony violinist Sho-Mei Pelletier, and their two children, Aaron Joshua and Alexis Jessica.

In 1992, Shambley co-founded the Dallas Symphony’s Young Strings program. Young Strings develops the talents of exceptional and underrepresented string players in the City of Dallas by providing its students with the skills, lessons, opportunities and resources essential for success both in college and careers in music. For 28 years, the program has worked to increase the diversity of American orchestras. In June 2019, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra presented Shambley with the title Young Strings Founder and Artistic Director Emeritus.

“We will miss Dwight terribly at the DSO and in Dallas” said Kim Noltemy, Ross Perot President & CEO. “He was a change agent, looking beyond himself to the future of orchestral music. He leveled the playing field for hundreds of students, and his legacy is beyond compare.”

From Mark Nuccio, principal clarinet of the Houston Symphony:

 

I have the ultimate violation today when my Clarinets were stolen out of my car. It was a 20 year pursuit to find the sound that I had been seeking including two Charles Chedeville Mouthpieces, two gold Momotake ligatures, an actual Jacobi Bb barrel, a fantastic Moennig A barrel made great by none other than Mark Jacobi, the best Buffet R13 A clarinet (ser #583110) I have ever played, and my brand new R13 Prestige Bb (ser #716528) all wrapped up in a Buffet Legende double pouchette case and in a Tumi backpack. I hope they don’t end up in a trash can. If pawned, I feel quite comfortable that I will get them back one day.

I guess the main lesson to be learned is to not leave your clarinets unattended even for 5 minutes. Obviously if you are approached to purchase these, I plead with you to pay what you need to pay and I’ll buy them from you. I have attached photos of the type of backpack, case and color scheme.

Thanks to all of my friends for keeping their eyes and ears open on my behalf!

With Sincere Appreciation,

Mark Nuccio

 

I think the reason must be he’s so bad at it.

Here’s a respectful conversation the Berlin Phil has just posted with cellist Martin Menking.

Petrenko is slow, ruminative, repetitive, uninteresting – and the interviewer does nothing to hurry him along and extract something worthy of the public attention. The only question is whether he will fall asleep before we do.

 

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is to have its first US tour of the 21st century this October – the first, in fact, since 1998.

Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla will conduct concertos with Sheku Kanneh-Mason (Elgar) and Gidon Kremer (Weinberg). The tour will also roll out Thomas Adès’ Angel Symphony, to be premiered in Birmingham this May, alongside music by Debussy, Ravel and Bartok.

Two Carnegie Hall dates were announced last night.

The former Columbia boss Doug Sheldon is being seen a lot once more around New York’s high and holy places – here at at Geffen Hall’s Lunar Year celebration with Juilliard pianist-pusher Veda Kaplinsky.

Sheldon quit Columbia in a bust-up last April, no reason given, no comment since.

We understand that the deal stitched up by lawyers puts him on gardening leave until summer 2020.

Which is soon.

He has just put up a new website and we hear he has five artists in mind.

Doug Sheldon used to be Anne-Sophie Mutter’s sole representative on American earth.

Watch this space.

We hear that that late-February concerts by the China National Symphony in Beijing have been called off due to the virus emergency.

The reaction is a bt late, but sweeping.

 

The successor to Riccardo Muti needs to emerge from next season’s guest conductors. But the list rolled out last night is hardly rich in promise. We’ve starred the current front-runner:

Guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas returns to conduct the CSO’s first performances of his Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind on December subscription concerts. British conductor and composer Thomas Adès makes his CSO podium debut and conducts the first CSO performances of his Concerto for Piano featuring Kirill Gerstein.

Debut appearances for conductors Jane Glover, music director of Music of the Baroque; Lahav Shani, chief conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and music director designate of the Israel Philharmonic; Constantine Kitsopoulos, who directs the Festival of the Arts Boca, Chatham Opera and New York Grand Opera; and Fabien Gabel, music director of the Orchestr Symphonique de Québec.

Return appearances by renowned guest conductors Marin Alsop, Herbert Blomstedt, Adam Fischer, Edward Gardner, *Manfred Honeck, Marek Janowski, Philippe Jordan, Simone Young and Xian Zhang, as well as Edo de Waart in a program with three young prize-winning violinists.

 

In the new issue of The Critic magazine, out today, I write about my recent conversion from hard disc to no disc in the rapid advance of classical streaming subscriptions.

Here’s how it all began:

One summer’s evening in the early 1990s, I met a student called Till at a festival in Schleswig-Holstein where major soloists were making music in cleaned-up cowsheds amid the lowing of displaced Friesians in nearby fields. Among the cowpats, I found some serious blue-sky dreamers. Till, for instance, had a vision that one day the whole of recorded music — from Caruso’s first aria to Decca’s latest release — would be available at the touch of a button. These were the heady days between the end of history and the internet dawn when anything seemed possible. Still, knowing the vexatious nature of the record industry, I could not imagine it might ever pool its closely-guarded treasures in a single virtual pot.

Fast forward 25 years. The classical record industry is now almost defunct and Till Janczukowicz is sitting in Berlin as chief executive of a streaming service that has raised ten million dollars from willing banks to bring the whole of classical music instantly to your smartphone. Till’s empire is called Idagio.com and, once you enter, you can kiss your working day goodbye.

Tap in the most obscure name you remember from your teenage LP collection – Sebastian Peschko, say…..

Read on here.