Five years ago we reported that Pittsburgh and Boston were both in pursuit of Oliver Aldort, a student at Curtis.
He havered for a while, then chose the Boston Symphony.
Where he disappeared into the ranks and might never have been heard of again but for a success at the latest audition.
Arise again, Oliver, now 26.
He has been appointed Assistant Principal Cello of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Principal Cello of the Boston Pops.
The opera house in Zurich has decided to stay open, avoiding the government closure order on places of public performance by admitting fewer than 900 audience members to each show.
The government ban is on gatherings of more than 1,000.
Zurich Opera says: ‘In consultation with the cantonal doctor, the canton of Zurich then explicitly permitted events with fewer than 1,000 people in the canton of Zurich. Against this background, the performances planned at the Zurich Opera House will take place with a maximum of 900 spectators until further notice.’
Aktueller Beschluss des Kantons Zürich
Der Kantonsarzt hat Veranstaltungen mit weniger als 1000 Personen im Kanton Zürich explizit erlaubt. Die im Opernhaus Zürich geplanten Vorstellungen werden bis auf Weiteres mit maximal 900 Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauern stattfinden. Wir beobachten laufend die Situation und werden Sie in enger Absprache mit den kantonalen Behörden umgehend über Neuigkeiten informieren.
The death has been announced of the violinist Irina Bochkova, placed second with Shmuel Ashkenasi in the 1962 Tchaikovsky Competition and a member of its jury many times since.
Irina, who was 81, was a concertmaster with the Moscow State Academic Philharmonic and a teacher at the Moscow State Conservatoire.
Her students include Elena Revich and Olga Volkova.
From my monthly essay in The Critic:
The music of Jewish prayer, like that of the Christian church, exists largely thanks to Reformation. Century after Christian century, Pope after Pope banned anything livelier than Gregorian chant in church until Martin Luther nailed up a competitive liturgy and composers decorated it with tunes. Luther, himself a composer, wrote some 30 chorales. His setting of “Ein feste Burg” — a mighty fortress is our Lord — remains a cornerstone of Evangelical worship….
Lost in this mainstream narrative is the role of music in Jewish worship, a history that remains a closed book to the majority of Jews and musicians. The subject has acquired a sudden topicality with the unforeseen involvement of two major record labels. Briefly, it’s a sob story…
Read on here, with heavenly sound examples.
And here’s one he sang earlier:
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has issued a bulletin on its music director:
CBSO Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla has shared the following news with us:
I would like to tell you about some happy news in my family. I am pregnant with our second child, with a due date in August. We will need to make some necessary changes in my schedule but I look forward to working together to realize some of our most exciting plans. My family and I are very grateful for your friendship and support.
Major projects and tours during the CBSO’s 2020-21 season will take place as planned, with some modifications to her schedule.
Everyone at the CBSO would like to congratulate Mirga on this exciting news.
Slipped Disc joins warmly in the felicitations.
Mirga, 33, is unmarried and does not disclose the name of her partner, who often travels with her, as do her own parents.
Picture from her first pregnancy in 2018.
Her first child, a boy, was born in August 2018. Mirga decided soon after to withdraw from all guest conducting in order to spend time with the baby. That withdrawal will presumably be extended now for anther year or two.
The pianist has cancelled the Barbican in late April, ‘due to ill health’.
Perhaia, who is 72, has not been heard in public for around two years.
This picture is from 2016.
The Swiss government this morning banned all large events of over 1,000 people until March 15 at the earliest, due to coronavirus fears.
That will include all opera and concert performances.
We await further details.
Japan has shut down the Ozawa music academy and called off a tour by Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra. The country is shutting down all entertainments over the coronavirus scare, which is compounded by fear of losing the Olympic Games this summer.
Two press statements follow:
We regret to announce that we are cancelling the Seiji Ozawa Music Academy Opera Project XVIII performances of Johann Strauss II: Die Fledermaus, which were scheduled for March 2020, in consideration of the spreading impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) situation.
The Seiji Ozawa Music Academy forms its orchestra with young, talented musicians who are chosen by audition from Japan and other Asian countries. Under the guidance of Academy Director Seiji Ozawa and coaches, they rehearse together with world-class singers and stage director to create an opera and then present those results in performances. Because this is an educational project that places value on the practice process and progress of growth, an environment where the students can focus with a feeling of security is very important.
(WASHINGTON)—The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) tour to Japan with Music Director Gianandrea Noseda has been canceled due to the rapidly changing developments related to COVID-19. The tour, scheduled from March 3–12, 2020, was set to be the NSO’s first international performances under Noseda’s leadership. Out of respect for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent recommendation that major cultural events be cancelled for the next two weeks, and careful consideration of the situation in collaboration with its colleagues at Japan Arts Corporation, the NSO arrived at the unfortunate conclusion that the tour cannot proceed.
The latest Slippedisc review from the CBSO100 season:
Symphony Hall *****
Barely two decades span the three works we heard in this all-English programme, but they are all markedly different in effect. The CBSO and Sakari Oramo led the mini-revival of interest in the neglected composer John Foulds, producing two CDs of his music, and here we began with a return to his April-England. The piece is an example of his Celtic belief in the creative influence of equinoxes, and this tone-poem, originally for piano, gives us what exactly it says on the tin.
It begins with a sense of awakening in the countryside which is obviously English (perky, lively woodwind to the fore here) and embraces some deeply portentous chords reflecting Foulds’ belief in pantheism. The CBSO under Michael Seal gave a willing, generous performance, and there was some particularly interesting timpani-writing.
In the interim between the initial conception of April-England and its orchestration, William Walton was composing his Viola Concerto, his first major orchestral work, and a masterpiece of the genre. Lise Berthaud was the perfect soloist to deliver its outpouring of melancholy amid Mediterranean sunlight, her amazing 1660 Antonio Casini instrument richly dark in tone and never over-emphatic. So attuned to this bittersweet score, her phrasing was limpidly lyrical, but she also had the bowing power to bite acerbically.
Seal’s orchestral collaboration was keenly judged, urgently rhythmic where appropriate, not least in the Portsmouth Point subtext of the central vivo movement, and a nobly chivalrous bassoon led Berthaud into a finale where at last reflectiveness and assertiveness were combined right up to the bluesy, aching final bars.
Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony is not so much a portrait of that city (which Elgar’s Cockaigne certainly is), but more the reaction of someone up from Gloucestershire marvelling at the omnipresence of the Thames. There is so much folky music here, the only cockneyness appearing in the Cries of London quotes (and, of course Big Ben), but it is a well-built score, broadly structured, and the CBSO under Seal’s easy, clear beat rendered it warmly and empathetically.
There was a perfect fusion from every section of the orchestra, instrumental solos emerging as highlights (not least from the viola), and with a finale casting a spell which died away so sensitively.
Christopher Morley
Richard Morrison in the Times asks the tenor about the prospect of working with his second wife, the director Christiane Lutz.
Would Kaufmann want to be directed by his wife? “You mean on stage?” he says with a giggle. “In one way I would love to, but I would never push it. I’m not a big fan of those package deals you see a lot in opera, where if you hire one half of a couple you have to take the other half as well.”
No idea who he means.
Welcome to the 38th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition
Piano sonatas nos 16 to 18, opus 31 (1801-2)
The three sonatas grouped under this catalogue number are often seen as light entertainment. Alfred Brendel writes of opus 31/1 that ‘only the comic intent’ makes it ‘plausible’. Jeremy Denk feels it ‘is not a serious piece with jokes in it, like those annoying ‘gag lines’ that people scatter into their boring speeches. Humor is structural, form-defining, essential; the whole edifice is laughing, laughing at its core.’
Beethoven as stand-up comedian?No way. He’s a young man in a hurry, at the top of his game, possibly in love. What he may be feeling is something akin to happiness and that emotion might bring a smile to his lips. But everything Beethoven writes has serious intent. The new playfulness that Brendel finds in the first of his three recordings of opus 31/1 is not Beethoven playing the joker in either sense of the term. Skip to the third movement and you’ll find him leading you down a contemplative path with no visible end, possibly into an abyss. For the fullness of the fun, Friedrich Gulda has all the best lines. For strait-laced solemnity, you’ll be well suited by Rudolf Buchbinder.
These are just three Austrian takes on the most/least fun anyone can have with a Beethoven piano sonata. As far as opus 31/1 is concerned you haven’t really experienced it until you’ve sat through the wild clatter of Glenn Gould on speed, or the delicate, composer-like reinvention of the Turkish pianist Fazil Say, who makes the middle movement sound like a reconstructed Mozart fragment played on a pub piano: fragile, and so beautiful. It’s my current go-to.
That same middle movement exists in a 1909 player-piano roll by the elderly French composer Camille Saint-Saens. I never thought of Saint-Saens as a Beethoven man. After hearing this, I still don’t.
For opus 31/2, also known as The Tempest, go to Heinrich Neuhaus, the most influential piano teacher in Russia, numbering both Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels among his pupils. Neuhaus cited Arthur Rubinstein as the pianist he would die for (he left a suicide note after hearing a Rubi recital in 1912), but nothing in his performance reflects his idol’s caprice and wit, nor the insouciant certainty of Richter or the stressful empiricism of Gilels. Neuhaus gives a rather tentative reading, delicate to the point of fissure and far from stormy. It’s a teacher’s interpretation, from the greatest of teachers. You want to know how to play Beethoven? Start here, then grow your own.
The storm breaks in the third movement and it is terrifyingly realised by Maria Yudina, reputedly Stalin’s favourite pianist and (like Neuhaus) a friend of the persecuted poets Pasternak and Mandelstam. Yudina’s account of the sonata as a whole, and the finale in particular, is wanton and wilful to a degree no living pianist would dare emulate. I listened to Helene Grimaud straight after and regretted it – not because there’s anything pallid about the French pianist but for its lack of blood and tears. Yudina lays her life on a line of black-and-white keys, and that’s more than one could reasonably expect from a musician who does not face the same existential threat as she did.
Richter, live at Carnegie Hall in December 1960, is like wrong weather forecast, utterly self-convinced there is going to be a storm even though the sun is shining outside and there’s a gentle breeze from the west. There’s no arguing with Richter when he’s in this mood. Gilels offers confident shelter in his storm, a mountain guide who knows his way home. For reasons I cannot fully understand, the Russian seem to own this sonata. There’s one more I’d like you to hear. It’s by Käbi Laretei, Estonian-Soviet fourth wife of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman and the inspiration for his film Autumn Sonata. Fluent in six languages and a formidable intellectual, Laretei plays with a wisdom and tranquility that belie her turbulent family history and her wary approach to life and art. Undoubtedly a magnificent talent.
The first pianist I listened to with full attention in opus 31/3 was Arthur Rubinstein, and he was not my first choice. Polish and Jewish, Rubinstein started out playing Chopin and seducing ballet dancers, opera singers and wives of the British aristocracy. He was happiest performing the composers he hung out with – Debussy, Ravel, De Falla, Szymanowski, Stravinsky, Prokofiev. He allowed himself to seem too frivolous for Beethoven, but in this sonata he sounded like no one else. Endowed with far more technique than he needed for so classical a work, Rubinstein takes an introspective tempo, pondering the spaces in-between as mch as the notes itself. ‘Miarculous’ was the response of one of our panel members, the violinist and conductor Nikolaj Znaider. ‘We think of him as a virtuosic and charismatic performer, which he certainly was,’ says Nikolaj, ‘but his Beethoven was (similar to how we both think about Milstein) pure and timeless.’ In four recordings, made over 30 years, the tempo hardly varies. Rubinstein had one idea for this concerto and brought it off with matchless panache.
The counterweight to Rubinstein is the Russian pianist Maria Israelevna Grinberg, whose tough life left no room for levity. Taught primarily by her mother in Odessa, she came to the fore in her late 20s, only to see her father and husband murdered by Stalin in 1937 and herself reduced to accompanying provincial ballet troupes. She was not seen on stage again until after Stalin’s death and was only allowed out to one western country, the Netherlands. As her eyesight failed, she recorded the 32 Beethoven sonatas for the state record company Melodiya in 1970, only to suffer the indignity of negligible distribution. Maria Grinberg died, aged 69, in 1978.
Her no-nonsense opening to opus 31/3 belies an interpretation of the most colourful and intriguing character. Check in at three minutes into the second movement and you will hear Grinberg decnstruct a Beethoven phrase into nothingness, like sand slipping through fingers. So much about her approach is inimitable that it ought to carry a health warning: do not try this at home. But every origial effect that Grinburg brings to ear has an inherent logic in the structure of the sonata. When you finish listening, you know why she played this way. Beyond that, you know the 18th sonata will never sound this way again.
