From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

Busoni cast such a giant shadow in his time that it practically eclipsed his music. With a head that resembled Beethoven’s and the best-stocked mind of any peripatetic pianist — he was the only soloist whose visits delighted Gustav Mahler — Busoni’s own compositions were largely overlooked, whether on grounds of difficulty, or because he could invariably play them better himself.

Busoni could do anything….

 

Read on here.

And here

 

She has cancelled a Barcelona recital.

‘Indisposed’, it says.

 

A schools performance in the Klasse Klassik series at the Gasteig, planned for Sunday morning, has been called off after concerns were expressed by the Ministry of Education and various health institutes.

More than 400 schoolchildren had been rehearsing for the event with conductor Ivan Repusic and the concert was to have been broadcast across Bavaria.

 

 

The orchestra of King Edward’s School in Birmingham is a pretty impressive ensemble.

Past alumni include the early-music pioneer David Munrow, the critic and librettist Paul Griffiths, the Wagner scholar John Deathridge and the middle-England novelist Jonathan Coe.

There will be some distinguished faces in attendance when the orch marks its 60th anniversary – with present student and BBC laureate Lauren Zhang playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concert.

 

None, surely, will be more alert to the proceedings than Sir Robert Whalley, former Director of Counter-Terrorism and Intelligence at the Home Office and, we hear, a fine oboe in his day.

Exclusive pics from last night’s BSO concert:

Conductor Hannu Lintu fistbumping soloist Seong-Jin Cho at the end of the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto

Lintu fistbumps Associate Concertmaster Alexander Velinzon

photos: Hilary Scott

Royal Opera House Don Carlo Casting Announcement

 

The Royal Opera House and Maestro ‪Plácido Domingo have mutually decided that he will withdraw from the Royal Opera House’s upcoming performances of Don Carlo in July 2020. We would like to confirm that we have received no claims of misconduct against Maestro Domingo during his time at the Royal Opera House and are sympathetic of his reasons for stepping down. Plácido is an outstanding singer and artist and we are hugely grateful for his support and commitment over many decades.  We will announce the casting for his role in Don Carlo in due course.

PD as Nabucco at the ROH

The orchestra has chosen Marlene Ito to be principal of the second violins, taking the seat of Christian Stadelmann, who died last July.

Ito, Japanese born, grew up in Australia and graduated from the orchestra’s Karajan Academie in 2008.

She immediately became second concertmaster at Berlin’s Komische Oper, entering the second violins of the Berlin Phil in 2011.

Ito teaches at the Royal College of Music in London.

Photo: Sebastian Hänel

 

 

As a result of Israeli travel restrictions, the Berlin Philharmonie has called off half of its Tel-Aviv-Berlin weekend of contemporary Israeli music.

The event cancelled involves an ensemble with Ilan Volkov. UPDATE: The other event will go ahead, but without the featured Israeli trio.

Details here.

photo: James Mollison

press release:

Due to tightened travel restrictions for Israel as a result of the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus), the Weekend Tel Aviv – Berlin will not take place as planned. The concert on 13 March conducted by Ilan Volkov must unfortunately be cancelled without replacement. Tickets already purchased may be returned for reimbursement.
The concert on 14 March will feature Avi Avital (mandolin), Ksenija Sidorova (accordion) and Itamar Doari (percussion) as well as the Omer Klein Trio. The trio SHALOSH must unfortunately cancel its appearance.

The percissionist Martin Grubinger was supposed to perform Kalevi Aho’s concerto with the IsraelPhilharmonic until the Ministry of Hedalth stepped in and barred all entrants from several Asian and European countries from entering the country.

Panic?

No panic, said guest conductor Osmo Vänskä, getting out his clarinet and playing the Mozart concerto instead.

Those Finns can do anyfinn.

UPDATE: Lufthansa and its partners have suspended flights to Israel.

 

The Hochschule für Musik und Theater München (HMTM) is opening a research centre into Jewish culture and music at the end of the month.

The centre, in a building that was once Nazi Party headquarters, will be named after the Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim, who left Munich as an exile for Palestine in 1933, changing his name from Frankenburger.

 

So far, there is one musicologist at work, Tobias Reichard.

 

Welcome to the 41st work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition

Leonore overtures 1,2 and 3, opus 138, 72a and 72b

A composer of Beethoven’s unshakeable self-assurance does not let anyone see what goes on behind the making of a new work. He may leave messy sketches for abandoned pieces and a few doodles for works in progress, but Beethoven does not on the whole reveal to outside eyes the struggles that he endures in the act of creation, let alone his occasional ambivalence about the material he is moulding.

The great exception is his opera Fidelio, a work that he revised twice after its 1805 premiere and which he furnished with four different overtures, each of which reveals hesitations, second thoughts, uncertainties and insecurities that are quite untypical to this most confident of composers. Two of these overtures are in general use, the other two esoteric. Sorting out which is what is not the easiest of tasks. At the risk of over-simplification, I shall try to keep the process as clear as I can. Bear in mind, though, that this was the overture that awoke Richard Wagner, aged 13, to the possibilities of opera. ‘The direct result of this (1826) performance,’ he wrote, ‘was my intense longing to compose something that would give me a similar feeling of satisfaction.’

Beethoven was persuaded to write an opera in 1803 by Emanuel Schikaneder, librettist of Mozart’s Magic Flute and co-owner of the Theater an der Wien. Schikaneder, looking for a second hit with his name on it, tempted Beethoven with promises of a respectable fee and a free apartment in the theatre complex. Beethoven, often nervous at the approach of rent day, accepted with delight and started work.

Schikaneder’s libretto turned out to be unsuitable. Titled Vesta’s Fire, its central character was a Roman woman with several lovers who became a vestal virgin (don’t ask). Beethoven, after sketching three or four scenes, gave up. ‘I have finally broken with Schikaneder,’ he told a colleague. ‘He held me back for six months, and I let myself be deceived because… I hoped he would produce something cleverer than the usual. How wrong I was… Imagine a Roman subject (of which I had been told nothing) with language and verses such as could come out of the mouths of women apple-sellers in the Vienna markets…’

Staying on rent-free at the theatre, Beethoven began an opera under the title Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (the triumph of married love), adapted from a French play by Joseph Sonnleithner. Never one to waste good music, he used a page from Vesta in the climactic “O namenlose Freude” duet. The 3-act opera was staged in November 1805 under the name ‘Fidelio’ to avoid confusion with several other plays and operas called ‘Leonore’. The score that Beethoven published, however, was titled ‘Leonore’.

Vienna was under French occupation and the premiere, before a mostly military audience, went down badly. Its overture is now numbered Leonore 2.

Before the opera was restaged in April 1806, Beethoven shortened it to two acts and stuck on a fresh overture, Leonore 3. At the next revision in 1814 the opera was callled Fidelio and furnished with a fourth overture, known today as the Fidelio overture. The original Leonore no 1 overtured was tacked on posthumously to Beethoven’s catalogue as its final entry, opus 138. Still with me?

The four overtures have audible differences – an extra drum roll, a contemplative flush of strings – some experimental, others insubstantial. The main thing to remember is that Leonore 1 is much shorter than the others. It comes in at 9-10 minutes, while Leonore 2 and 3 run to 14 minutes or more. In George Szell’s exhilarating 1968 interpretation it sounds like an invitation to all sorts of possibilities, many of them nothing to do with the prison drama that Beethoven is about to enact. Szell delivers Leonore 2 on the same recording for ease of reference, although only people writing a doctoral thesis will want to attempt repeated comparison. There are plenty more recordings of Leonore 1 and 2, the instantly recommendable ones including the no-nonsense John Eliot Gardiner, the authoritative Fritz Busch (1950), the unassumingly satisfying Wolfgang Sawallisch , the enegretic Günter Wand (1991), the imposing Bernard Haitink with the London Symphony Orchestra (2005), and the unaccountably underrated Stanisław Skrowaczewski with the Minnesota Orchestra in 1994.

But the best known and most performed Leonore overture is number 3 and that acquired an independent existence around the turn of the 20th century when Gustav Mahler, director of the Vienna Opera, inserted it into Fidelio as an orchestral interlude in the middle of the second act, after the prison scene and ahead of the finale, in order to heighten the drama. He went on to liberate the overture altogether from the opera, performing it as a concert item no fewer than 18 times. Mahler made extensive changes, known as ‘retouches’ to Beethoven’s instrumentation, principally by cutting back the strings and giving greater prominence to the brass. Leonore 3 thus became the best known of the four overtures.

Bruno Walter, Mahler’s closest disciple, gives the clearest indication as to how Mahler’s version might have sounded with a 1936 Vienna Philharmonic recording which has Mahler’s brother-in-law Arnold Rosé in his customary front seat, directing the strings. The approach alternates leisurely charm with unprovoked aggression, a peculiarly Viennese combination that I find profoundly unsettling, especially in the closing pages, from 11 minutes onwards.

A couple of years later, in Dresden, Karl Böhm presents an expensive velvet glove with a mailed fist that bursts through at 12.30. Böhm was a brilliant theatrical musician and a sworn Nazi; he must have known what he was delivering to the microphones. Wilhelm Furtwängler in Vienna, June 1944, is almost his antipode, introspective where Böhm exaggerates and suggestive where he is over-explicit. This is another of those inexplicable Furtwängler performances that imprints a date/time stamp on the music as it is heard.

Ferenc Fricsay, a Hungarian who conducted Berlin’s radio orchestra in the 1950s, gives an uplifting 1958 account of the overture with the Berlin Philharmonic and another, two minutes slower and three years later with his own ensemble. The second is an exercise in taking all of the beauties out of the score, holding them up to the light, examining them from all angles and replacing them in perfect order. Taken together, these two performances amount to a masterclass in the maestro art, an analysis of all the possibilities in an important score. Against all my expectations, Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra reflect something of Fricsay’s inquisitive approach in their late account of this score in 1989, albeit faster and much louder.

You want slow? There’s Sergiu Celibidache at 16.22, to no obvious purpose. You want exciting? Bernstein and the NY Phil. You want small-scale? Daniel Harding and Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen do tender and beautiful. Dramatic and compact? Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe take some beating. The range of dynamics and the internal tempi are just right.

That’s enough of overtures. Tomorrow, we’ll assess the whole opera.

UPDATE: Did someone say Klemperer? Watch this space.