Holly Mulcahy, who sued the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra for breach of contract after it cancelled her concerto performance, lost her case this week before Judge McVeagh in the Hamilton County General Sessions Court.

Holly has just issued this statement via Slipped Disc:

I am grateful for the opportunity to stand up for employee’s rights. I respect the judge’s decision and, given the heavy reliance on a technicality to secure a dismissal, I am even more confident about my decision to pursue this course. Combined with the outpouring of support from colleagues and patrons, this confirms it was the right choice to make.

While the venue of small claims court doesn’t allow the time needed to fully examine the unique nature of solo agreements, the process afforded the opportunity to introduce the conversation to a broader audience.

Based on an agreement of an engagement this season with the CSO, I declined another performance opportunity because my intention is always to honor my original agreements. Sadly, the CSO executive leadership informed me barely three months before the performance date that they no longer intended to honor that agreement because my individual contract was set to expire and we had yet to reach an extension. This is contrary to the long-established performance of contract activity where all parties work to prepare and execute events a season in advance.

Because the CSO did not abide by the agreement, I made the distressing decision to file a lawsuit for breach of contract.

Unfortunately, I’m not the first musician to be put in this position. A board of directors customarily provides guidance and oversight in order to protect ticket buyers and will correct any executive decision that inflicts financial harm and/or puts the institution at risk. While I am unsure of why that did not transpire here, it broke my heart that the situation reached this point.

As concertmaster of The Chattanooga Symphony & Opera (CSO), I have been proud and excited to share so in many remarkable experiences since 2013. Connecting with listeners and community, growing audiences and contributing to making an inclusive place for someone’s first or 100th concert experience continues to be a career highlight.

My commitment to the CSO’s mission and our patrons is unwavering and, now that this matter is concluded, I am optimistic we can move forward by reopening communications toward reaching an extension for my individual agreement.

 

The trial lasted six hours. We have no determination yet on costs.

But it has set a precedent for musicians to sue their employer for breach. The next plaintif may get luckier.

The poster for a new German production of Madam Butterfly would not normally occasion much attention.

But the one in Braunschweig has proved so offensive that all Korean and Cinese musicians in the Braunschweig orchestra have signed and sent an official protest letter to the management, demanding its removal.

Can you see what’s so appalling?

The design incorporates the rising sun, symbolic of Japan’s brutal occupation of China and Korea in the 1940s.

Sara Kim, principal viola of Gewandhaus Orchestra, has written independently to Braunschweig Opera, asking for the poster to be taken down. They replied that the image is not meant to be triumphalist, and will be destroyed during the performance.

None of this has satisfied the Chinese and Koreans in the company.

They regard it as insensitive at best, at worst a racial insult.

The production team look very pleased with the poster. Braunschweig have promised to issue a statement ‘some time this week.’

That’s German for crisis management.

Not to mention the stage flooring.

It has been intimated to us that the Governor-General of Canada, Julie Payette  – effectively the head of state beneath the Queen – rehearsed and performed among the sopranos in Mozart’s C-minor Mass with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Choeur Métropolitain.

The performances were in Ottawa in Wednesday and Montreal the following night.

Yannick annoucned her participation after the first performance, to tumultuous applause.

The Madison Symphony Orchestra is in mourning for Barbara DeMain, wife of music director John De Main, who was taken ill Wednesday night and died in hospital the following morning.

The inseparable couple married in 1991 and had a daughter, Jenny DeMain.

John DeMain was formerly music director of Houston Grand Opera, which is where they met.

This is ever so slightly beyond pathetic.

Sony Classical UK have tried to take down this embarrassing tweet, exposing ignorance, arrogance and other unseemly parts.

 

Not the birthday boy

UPDATE: Why Sony’s howler is a sign of our times

The appalling prevalence of child abuse in music schools has gone mainstream on Netflix.

We’re a bit late to clock on to this horror film, but watch it anyway.

 

Welcome to the 30th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition

Cello sonatas 1&2, opus 5/Judas Maccabaeus variations WoO 45 (1790s)

For an instrument that he never played, Beethoven wrote a lot for the cello – five sonatas for cello and piano and two of his most popular sets of variations. The earliest sonatas were written in Berlin in 1796 before he was fully settled in Vienna. The cellist was Jean-Pierre Duport, the Prussian King’s teacher, and Beethoven played the piano part.

The opening is uncharacteristically reticent, presumably to allow Beethoven three minutes or so to get the measure of his partner and the temperature of the room before he lets fly with a fast allegro. The moment you hear the big tune, you know that it is susceptible to infinite variations, that it will take your where mind wherever it wants to go.

Every cellist I have asked recommends Pablo Casals in the sonatas – but which Casals? There’s his earliest recording in 1939 with Mieczyslaw Horzowski, brimful of vigour and almost unrecognisable as the avuncular Casals of living memory. Both of the cellists I have consulted – the soloist Steven Isserlis and the Houston Symphony principal Brinton Smith – listen to this recording above all others.

In 1951, with Rudolf Serkin at the piano, Casals is more the smiling cellist we recognise, indulgung us with little grunts of satisfaction at the composer’s genius. Ten years later, with Wilhelm Kempff, he’s monumental, indefatigable, and still exploring new lines.

Pierre Fournier and Friedrich Gulda set out on a journey that is full of fantasy, each encouraging the other to pause and admire the pterodactyls and unicorns. I find this pairing captivating and far preferable to Fournier’s subsequent cycle with Kempff.

Pieter Wispelwey and Paul Komen (1991) in a Protestant church err to my taste on the side of austerity; others, however, find their restraint refreshing.

There is a new generation, led by Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynyuk (2019), that knows no speed limits and no fear. Really fast at times, but exhilarating.

The second sonata is more eloquent than the first, and the freedoms greater. Piatigorsky with Schnabel could be in different cities for all that they acknowledge one another.

Richter and Rostropovich can barely agree who goes first.
Jacqueline Du Pre and Daniel Barenboim sound edgy, start to finish, both interpretation and studio sound leaving an uneasy feeling. Anner Bylsma and Jos van Immerseel take it gently, low volume and emotion, a fine contrast with all the rest

And then there is this 1990 Brussels recording which sounds like a breakfast conversation between old pals Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich. It’s too early in the morning to interrupt so each allows the other their full mellifluous say over coffee and croissants. One of the most human recordings you will ever come across.

While working on these sonatas, Beethoven attended a performance of Handel’s oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus, the first work of western music to feature a Jewish hero. The young comoser was so taken with its catchy ‘See the conqu’ring hero comes’ that he knocked off a set of a dozen  variations for himself and the king’s cellist, Duport, to take on tour. The very slow eleventh variation is by far the longest, as if Beethoven could not bring himself to end a work that he clearly loved so much.

There are about 100 recordings out there, starting with Gregor Piatigorsky and Lukas Foss in full storytelling mode in 1955, making it all sound like child’s play. The Augustan Zara Nelsova (born Katznelson in Manitoba) is more declamatory, accompanied by Arthur Balsam at Decca’s West Hampstead studios – lovely sound, but a little schoolmarmish for me. Fournier and Kempff really turn me off, playing as if the piece is sui generis, without reference to its origin. It improves around the 11th variation.

Anner Bylsma, a master of baroque style, is delicately decorous in the variations, nicely partnered by Stanley Hoagland. Peter Wispelwey strives a little too hard, I feel, for period correctness, albeit with affecting beauty in the slowness of the 11th. I am very much taken by the sprightly 2015 speeds of François-Frédéric Guy (piano) and Xavier Phillips (cello). There is also much to enjoy in Adrian Brendel‘s gentle saunter with his father, Alfred, and from two young women, Maria Kliegel and Nina Tichman, in the Clara-Wieck-Auditorium, somewhere in unified Germany. But the recording I revert to more than any other in this cherished piece is a 1993 album filler for Deutsche Grammophon by Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich, both s much at ease with the music and each other.