My friend Anne Midgette, in a reasoned and upbeat piece on her sparkling new site, argues that the world will be a better place now that Placido Domingo has been removed from public gaze, at least in North America. I’m not sure I can agree. Here’s Anne’s conclusion:

Domingo is, indeed, irreplaceable — because the world no longer has a place for this particular kind of artist, who has done so much to help the field and so much to harm it. And it may well be that without him, the field loses some of its patrons, and some of its funding. It may be, indeed, that the institution of opera fundamentally changes — which is something we should all aspire to if we want this intoxicating, bizarre, glorious art form to continue to be vital, now and in the future. Will the fall of Domingo bring about the fall of opera? Those who fear that are forgetting another operatic plot: the idea that  Götterdämmerung is necessary in order that a brave new world can be born.  (Read more here).

I don’t dispute a word of Anne’s observation but, looking around, I see no change at the institutions of opera. No-one has resigned from the boards of Washington and LA Opera, where Domingo presided and where his habits were known from the top down. Likewise at the Met, where Jmmy Levine’s predations were no secret at board and executive level. Nor from any other insttution.

Opera houses and orchestras, in their present diminished state, depend on a few box-office bankables. You can count them on one hand: Netrebko, Kaufmann, Lang Lang, DiDonato (in the US), Thielemann (in Germany) and that’s about it. It’s a dependency culture that gives unlimited license to the brightest stars to do as they please while praying on its knees that they don’t cancel their next engagement.

That’s unhealthy and humiliating, economically and psychologically.

Music needs to overcome its star dependancy and create a broad cadre of wholesome, charismatic performers to whom the general public can relate. Hollywood has no problem renewing its stock of stars year after year. Why can’t we?

Meanwhile, the board plays on.

Russian pianists are sharing news of the death of Sergei Dorensky, probably the country’s most influential piano teacher. He was 88.

A student of Grigory Ginsburg, Dorensky won a couple of international prizes in 1955. Two years later he began teaching at the Moscow Conservatoire, where he remained on staff until 1997.

As vice-president of the Chopin and Rachmaninov societies and a regular judge of the Tchaikovsky competition, he served as a threshold to many careers.

The pianist Denis Matsuev writes (rough translation):

Dorensky died.
Words here are impossible. Gone from life is, I think, the last of the great Russian/Soviet executive and educational schools. A man who created a unique system of teaching, which raised a record number of winners of international competitions. Everyone who knew him, because the environment we all lived in and “cooked” was special: apart from teaching he managed to create a warm family inside the class. In 24 years of communication from the moment I came to him in 1996, I realized that I had not only a mentor, but a very close and native person who was always worried about me, always standing there is a mountain for me, as for every absolutely student, of whom he made great artists. This is a huge loss for all the world music culture and of course, for the Moscow conservative and all of us, because the closest person left to us, who, no matter when you finished the conservative, has continued to work with you on a new ritual. If you didn’t bring Dorensky to listen to a new piece in the repertoire, it means you knew that you hadn’t even got into it and it was not ready yet. He always came to your concerts, sat in the 6 row of the Big Hall… I can’t comment on anything else. Emptiness.