The former head of the Munich Academy for Music Siegfried Mauser was sentenced in 2018 to two and a half years in prison for crimes against women colleagues. The sentence was upheld on appeal last October. Mauser, once a pianist of international repute, was ordered to begin his sentence on January 13.

He ought to be inside.

Instead, he’s at his second home in Salzburg, waving an Austrian passport for immunity.

He has no intention of serving a single day if he can help it.

Still, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung is on his case. Read here.

 

Just in:

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s four-city tour to East Asia (Seoul, Taipei, Shanghai, and Hong Kong) with Andris Nelsons, February 6–16, has been canceled due to increasing concerns over widely documented official news and government agency reports assessing the spread of the new coronavirus. These concerns, along with discussions with the Shanghai Oriental Art Center—whose leadership informed the BSO about the official cancellations of their upcoming performances—followed by consultations with the tour’s presenters in Seoul, Taipei, and Hong Kong, combined to play an influential role in the cancellation of the BSO’s East Asia tour.

“On behalf of Andris Nelsons and the musicians of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, we are all deeply disappointed that we will not be able to perform for the wonderful audiences in Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai,” said BSO President and CEO Mark Volpe.

 

The conductor Othmar Mága died on Tuesday.

He was chief conductor at Göttingen (1962-1967), Nuremberg (1968-1970), the Odense Symphony in Denmark and the Korean Radio Symphony Orchestra in Seoul (1992-1996).

 

Tomorrow will see the last performance at the Sydney Opera House concert hall until 2022 at the earliest.

On Saturday the builders move in for a $150 million renovation.

Better acoustics are promised.

Oh, yeah?

The Guardian has a good piece on all the botches.

UPDATE from the SOH:

 While the Concert Hall is closed, the Opera House will remain open with a range of performances across our six other venues and two outdoor performance spaces. Tours will continue and all on-site restaurants and bars will be operating as normal, ensuring a vibrant and welcoming precinct for the millions of visitors who come to the Opera House each year.

Audiences will still be able to enjoy unmissable performances and experiences across the Opera House and we will continue to host flagship festivals and events such as Vivid LIVE, All About Women and Dance Rites as well as a packed program from our resident companies and other presenting companies. For more info about what’s on, see here.

Unnoticed by politicians and almost the entire British public, the BBC will be broadcasting Beethoven’s Ode to Joy tonight, on the eve of Brexit.

Not political? Of course not.

Details here.

They’ve just had a last-minute change of soprano.

A South Korean team created a computer model to examine 900 piano works by 19 composers, written between 1700 and 1900.

Rachmaninov came out tops with the ‘highest combined novelty score’ – the extent to which each work differed from its predecessors.

Juyong Park of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, said: ‘Our model allows us to calculate the degree of shared melodies and harmonies between past and future works and to observe the evolution of western musical styles by demonstrating how prominent composers may have influenced each other.’

Beethoven didn’t even make the top ten.

Read here.

It is clear from yesterday’s vote that the Concertgebouw musicians were given a limited choice of conductors by their previous management, and came up with the worst possible outcome – one maestro who’s unavailabe, a second who’s unsuitable and a third whom they know all too well to bring any great leap of renewal.

So what now?

Picking a music director is not that hard, especially for an institution with the Concertgebouw’s pedigree. The pay may be below par, but the prestige is high.

So, they either look for an established maestro who’s doing brilliant things somewhere else, or for blazing young talent.

Category A yields:

Antonio Pappano

Osmo Vänskä

Manfred Honeck

Fabio Luisi

Franz Welser-Möst

Gustav Dudamel


Category B would include:

Omer Meir Wellber

Joana Mallwitz

Speranza Scapucci

Robin Ticciati

Jakub Hrůša

Not that difficult, really.

 

It must be so galling for Amsterdam that Rotterdam has got it right every time for the past 20 years, and they keep getting it wrong.

UPDATE: Not to mention Birmingham.

The Times reports: The Royal Ballet’s star choreographer has been suspended amid claims of sexual misconduct with students … Liam Scarlett, 33, who was made the Royal Ballet’s artist-in-residence after a meteoric rise, is understood to have been banned from Covent Garden pending an inquiry.

More here.

It is alleged that complaints about Scarlett had been ignored for the past ten years.

 

Australia’s Queensland Ballet has instantly dropped Scarlett from its roster.

The Welsh baritone has cancelled his return to Chicago. Here’s the Lyric’s statement:

While in Bilbao, Spain, for a production of The Flying Dutchman, the acclaimed Welsh singer, Sir Bryn Terfel, suffered a severe injury from a fall that will not allow him to perform in Chicago this weekend. According to Sir Bryn’s physician, he has fractured the three prominences of his ankle, causing the ankle to partly dislocate and requiring a surgery scheduled for later this week. There is no current plan for a rescheduled recital and all patrons for this performance will be contacted with their options. Terfel is recovering at home in Wales under medical supervision, and all of us at Lyric send good wishes for his full recovery.

In a statement, Sir Bryn said this: “Returning to Chicago after nearly 15 years was an absolute dream come true. This terrible fall in Bilbao has dealt me a cruel blow. A performer always dreads the days where cancelations are imminent. I was despondent not to finish the last performance in Bilbao, but am happy I came to that conclusion having learnt today of a triple fracture and dislocation.”

Sir Bryn, 54, has also cancelled a Carnegie Hall recital in February and the Met’s Flying Dutchman in March.

We wish him a speedy recovery.