It is no secret that Manfred Honeck is in play, eyed up by both Chicago and New York as their next music director.

So it makes sense for Pittsburgh, his present post, to start running out possible successors.

Conudctors making their Pittburgh debut in the coming season are:  Karina Canellakis, David Afkham, Dima Slobodeniouk and Fabien Gabel.

Also visiting are Vasily Petrenko, Pablo Heras-Casado, Mark Elder and Juraj Valčuha.

That has the makings of a shortlist.

The night before she collects the Polar Prize, Anna Netrebko has smartly set up her Stockholm recital debut.

It’s at the Konserthuset on June 8, with Elena Bashkirova at the piano.

Tickets go on sale this weekend.

From the Berlin Philharmonic website:

Millions listen to his music: Anyone who loves The Simpsons or Desperate Housewives and films like Batman, Spider Man, Mission Impossible or Men in Black knows Danny Elfman’s music. He is one of Hollywood’s most successful film composers and a multiple Oscar winner. 

Elfman has composed a new work for the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet. In this concert, which takes place in cooperation with the Berlinale, the piece will be performed as a German premiere. Danny Elfman himself can be heard before the concert: in conversation with the musicians of the piano quartet, the composer gives insights into his new work and his work and answers questions from the audience.

We couldn’t make this up if we tried.

Andrew Grams is leaving the Elgin Symphony after seven good years. He’s looking for more work abroad.

Carlos Kalmar is stepping down after 20 years at the head of the Oregon Symphony.

Don’t all rush at once.

The Russian soprano has won some small change and a meeting with the Queen of Sweden.

The prize, established in 1989 by Abba’s late manager Stig Anderson, aims to ‘break down musical boundaries by bringing together people from all the different worlds of music.’

Yannick has turned Montreal into a 2-orch town. Can Nagano’s heavyweight OSM compete?

Arthur Kapitainis asseses the odds in a new article, revealing a considerable discrepancy in musicians’ earnings:

The OSM is a salaried orchestra with 92 permanent positions (about a dozen of which are temporarily vacant). The 2019-20 minimum is $1,955 per week for a 46-week season (for a total of $89,930)….

(Yannick’s Orchestre Métropolitain) OM is a per-service orchestra with 58 musicians on its roster (who are joined by extras in larger repertoire). There is a guaranteed minimum amount of work, which Dupré says the orchestra inevitably surpasses by 50 per cent. Musicians are paid at a rate of $173.34 per service for OM presentations and the standard Guilde des musiciens rate for other events, for a typical annual total of about $32,000. 

Read on here.

Canadian Dollar = 0.75 US$

Finalists have been chosen at the 14th international Mozart competition, at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

The three pianists are:

The Hamburg Ballet has cancelled visits to Singapore and Macao as the coronavirus crisis deepens.

The keyboard player Lyle Mays, who died yesterday at 66, was the driving force of the Pat Metheny Group, composing much of its music and winning no fewer than 11 Grammy awardss.

In a 2016 interview, Lyle confessed that he was now working in software. ‘The music business left us’ he said.

Almost any time we write about music schools in Australia, we tend to receive a tiresome letter from lawyers – invariably, at the expense of the taxpayer, parents and students. These institutions are very protective of their dignity, and the protetion increases the more they lurch into crisis.

So, instead of troubling our learned friends again, let us direct your attention to a new article by Professor Peter Tregear, former head of the Australia National University’s School of Music (ANUSm), on what the eucalyptus has been going wrong at Aussie music schools, from the top down.

Peter writes, inter alia:

Changes […] imposed on the School appeared to many to have been motivated by managerial priorities that seemed at best indifferent not only to the particular traditions and needs of music scholarship, but also to this discipline’s capacity to contribute to the public mission of a university more generally….

Could be the lawyers looked at this first. But there’s more.

Read the whole article here.

It’s hard to keep up with who’s managing Yuja Wang in any given week, but if you want to survey the long trail of broken agents, read this.

In her last whirligig in December 2018, Yuja rejoined her first manager Earl Blackburn, now operating a small boutique, called Kanzen.

As of today, she has vanished from the Kanzen roster.

Bye, Earl.

See you again, maybe.

For the avoidance of doubt, let it be stated that Yuja Wang is a much misunderstood person.

We hear that Doris Soffel has dropped out of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites this summer.

Replacing the 71 year-old German mezzo in the role of Madame de Croissy is the Swedish former soprano Katarina Dalayman, 56, who has transitioned (as it’s fashionable to say) since 2017 to mezzo-soprano.

Remarkably, it’s her Glyndebourne debut.