The Royal Academy of Music has recruited Brenda Hurley as its next Head of Opera, starting (hopefully) in July 2020.
She replaces Gareth Hancock, who resigned in November after allegations of inappropriate conduct.
Hurley has been head of Zurich International Opera Studio since 2012. Before that she coached singers at the Metropolitan Opera in New York for four years, spent nine years at the Salzburg Festival and 15 seasons at Glyndebourne.
She’s a catch.
The Swedish opera director Knut Hendriksen has died at 75 after a long illness.
After working with Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and Götz Friedrich in London and Salzburg, Knut became head of Den Norske Opera in Oslo from 1981 to 1984.
Afterwards, working mostly at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, he went on to direct many international productions.
The head of Czech National Opera Per Boye Hansen describes him as ‘ a firework of a human being, with a huge energy and enthusiasm.’
While the Chancellor went into quarantine, others came out onto their balconies.
Lisa Rogers, Düsseldorf:
Kai Adomeit, Ludwigshafen:
Jennifer Arnold, Berlin:
Han Xiaoming, Berlin:
Izzo Hristov on electric guitar
This is the sought-after Anna Prohaska on her Berlin balcony.
She should have been singing Idomeneo at the Staatsoper.
Instead, she sang it at home. Watch here.
That went so well, she tried some Puccini:
Message from PD:
I feel it is my moral duty to announce to you that I have tested positive for COVID19, the Corona virus. My Family and I are all in self isolation for as long as it is deemed medically necessary. Currently we are all in good health but I experienced fever and cough symptoms therefore deciding to get tested and the result came back positive.
I beg everyone to be extremely careful, follow the basic guidelines by washing your hands frequently, keeping at least a 6 feet distance from others, doing everything you can to stop the virus from spreading and please above all stay home if you can ! Together we can fight this virus and stop the current worldwide crisis, so we can hopefully return to our normal daily lives very soon. Please follow your local government’s guidelines and regulations for staying safe and protecting not just yourselves but our entire community.
Plácido Domingo
Catching site of the Rotterdam Philharmonic’s viral home performance of Beethoven 9th – 80,000 views on Slipped Disc and rising – home-bound members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra put their techs together to play, remotely, Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.
The driving force in the project was principal double bass Jeff Beecher. The music was recorded in various homes with a click-track provided by Jeff, who then edited the outcome.
You are among the first to see it online.
A-mazing.
Who’s best?
Vote here for Trotters or Rotters.
She saw us through the second world war, she will see us through the plague.
Dame Vera turned 103 on Friday.
Watch to the end.
A man called Jonathan Smith, 57, was found guilty at Hove Crown Court on Friday of twice raping a young girl.
Smith faced other charges of buggery, indecent assault and gross indecency with a child dating back to the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was founded guilty on all counts by a 10-2 majority and will be sentenced on May 19.
The court was told that the defendant was known also as Jonathan Grieves-Smith, a well-known conductor.
Grieves-Smith was music director of the Brighton Festival Chorus from 1983 and conducted several orchestras before moving to Australia, where he was Director of Music at Trinity College, at the University of Melbourne.
photo: Facebook
The authorities at that college have just contacted staff and past students:
I am writing to inform you of some serious news. I have just learned that Jonathan Grieves-Smith, the Director of Music at Trinity College from May 2014 until January 2016, was recently found guilty of sexual assault in Hove County Court in the UK.
Mr Grieves-Smith was employed as the Director of Music while you were a Chorister in the Trinity College Choir.
We learned of these allegations against Mr Grieves-Smith in December 2015. The allegations related to offences in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the UK. When we were made aware of the allegations, we terminated Mr Grieves-Smith’s employment. No one at Trinity College was aware of the assault, or any other criminal allegations, when Mr Grieves-Smith began at Trinity in May 2014 and to my knowledge there have been no allegations since.
As you were a chorister at that time, I offer you my support. If you have any concerns about his behaviour while he was employed by Trinity College and you would like to discuss these concerns, please contact me by responding to this email. Trinity College has a very clear no tolerance policy for sexual misconduct and assault and allegations of this nature are treated with extreme seriousness.
While this information may be distressing, I hope that it does not negatively impact the memories you have of your time at Trinity.
warden@trinity.unimelb.edu.au
The Oregon Symphony has stopped paying its musicians and staff.
Health benefits will continue for musicians, but will end for staff after 3 months.
The decision was announced to the orchestra as it gathered for a rehearsal of Berio’s Sinfonia.
This was to have been the final season under music director Carlos Kalmar.
Our pals in Oregon say some of the musicians fear they may lose their homes.
We are saddended by the death of Hellmut Stern, a concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for 34 years and leader of the final rebellion against Herbert von Karajan.
Hellmut, who was a dear friend, was 91.
Born in Berlin in 1928, he fled at the age of ten with his parents to Manchuria, where he kept the family alive by playing violin in bars and selling trinkets in street markets. In 1949 he moved to Jerusalem, working as a bar pianist in the King David Hotel, where he was discovered by Isaac Stern (no relation), who introduced him to the Israel Philharmonic as a violinist. After a spell in the US, he returned to Berlin in 1961 and was admitted by Karajan to the front row of the Berlin Phil.
The pair stayed friendly until Stern accused Karajan’s people of taking kickbacks on an Asia tour and led a successful uprising against the conductor. At the height of the insurrection, he asked me to fly over from London to share some inside information that had come my way with a secret meeting of rebels. Such fun. Afterwards, Hellmut and I went to dinner at his favourite Italian with Zubin Mehta.
Hellmut wrote a memoir, Saitensprünge, and lectured extensively on his life’s experiences.
Originally part of the folk revolution (see below), Ewen MacColl’s song for his lover Peggy Seeger was elevated by Roberta Flack into another zone – not just by her vocal interpretation but by her singing.
I used to wake up to Roberta’s voice every morning in the early 1970s.
Compare to the original, wonderful as it is:
Welcome to the 48th work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition
Missa Solemnis, opus 123 (1824)
Written around the same time and with the same forces as the ninth symphony – four vocal soloists, chorus and large orchestra – the Mass in D is light-years removed from Beethoven’s only previous Mass, the Mass in C. The architecture is stronger, the ambition higher, the communication more urgent, almost to the point of desperation. It’s as if Beethoven knows he has entered the final stretch of his journey and walks entirely alone in an unmapped land.
He received the commission in 1818 while at work on the Hammerklavier sonata (read more here), and composed some sections, on and off, while he was composing the ninth symphony. The ideas shared between the two works are so obvious that one to stand a pace back to remember that the two summits are opposite in their intent – one for the glory of God, the other for the untapped possibilities of mankind.
The Missa Solemnis is a dramatic work, more gripping in places than Beethoven’s opera Fidelio. It is also a work of outreach – ‘from the heart to the heart’, as Beethoven put it on his dedication page. In his fifties, lonelier than ever and in failing health, his yearning for human contact gives the Mass its universal message. That he took so long to write it is further evidence of his no-turning-back frame of mind. ‘I remember his mental excitement, wrote his friend Anton Schindler, ‘I must admit that never before and never since that time have I seen him in a similar state of removal from the world.’ At 80 to 90 minutes, it would be unendurably long were it not for its structural tautness.
A leading Beethoven scholar, Martin Cooper, calls the Missa Solemnis ‘a personal document without parallel in the history of music.’ The conductor Roger Norrington considers it ‘possibly the greatest piece ever written’. The first performance was given in St Petersburg on April 7, 1824, followed by a partial Vienna premiere a month later. Unlike the ninth symphony, the Mass in D has no political significance or designated space in the musical calendar. Performances are infrequent and each is a great occasion. The most momentous I have attended was a memorial concert to Herbert von Karajan at the Salzburg Festival.
Early recordings by Bruno Kittel (1928) and Serge Koussevitsky (1938) can be set aside on grounds of poor sound. Arturo Toscanini did not touch the work until he was in his 60s and the results are less convincing than his mastery of the ninth symphony, despite the soaring wonder that was the young Jussi Björling and the bottomless depths of Alexander Kipnis. Since you’re going to listen, go straight to the Agnus Dei. Zinka Milanov is stunning.
The abundance of great singers who converged on Vienna in the 1950s makes several mono recordings irresistible – Volkmar Andreae, for instance, with Teresa Stich-Randall, Hilde Rössel-Majdan, Julius Patzak and Gottlob Frick; or Karl Böhm with Maria Stader, Marijana Rade, Anton Dermota and Josef Greindl. A Stockholm excavation of Erich Kleiber conducting Birgit Nilsson and Jussi Björling is unmissable.
The first rounded performances were in stereo – Karajan from Vienna, Bernstein from New York. Karajan has a falutless, idiomatic grasp of the work and his singers – Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda, Nicola Zaccaria – are immaculate. His pacing is so impressive, no over-dramatising, no longueurs. For me, this is Karajan at his peak, before the peacock in him takes over.
Bernstein plays it by the book, and it’s not a book he got read at bedtime. There’s a hint of Broadway in some of the big numbers and a very large dose of Handel in the finale, none the worse for that. The soloists are almost top-drawer – Carol Smith, Richard Lewis, Eileen Farrell, Kim Borg – but they get swamped by the Westminister Choir. Bernstein’s subsequent recordings lack the fizz of this effort.
Many swear by John Eliot Gardiner in this work; I’m more inclined to swear at him. Try as I might, I canlt find a coherent line among Gardiner’s sometimes fascinating impulsiveness. His second attempt, in 2012, is even jerkier. For a considered, historically informed reading, stick with the reasoned, consensual Norrington or the devout, organic Harnoncourt.
Georg Solti in Chicago conceives the mass as a struggle between life and death, drawing interpretations of heavenly tenderness from his singing quartet – Lucia Popp, Yvonne Minton, Mallory Walker and Gwynne Howell. Solti is sometimes criticised for unevenness of line, but here he is a master bricklayer, building a great mansion.
Not to be ignored in the Missa Solemnis is Beethoven’s debt to Georg Frideric Handel, especially to Messiah of which he made a special study before composing the Mass. Some of the influence is overt. In the concluding Dona nobis pacem you will hear the unmistakable tune of ‘And He shall reign forever and ever’ from the Hallelujah Chorus. Other Handel citations can be traced in the Gloria. Beethoven named Handel on several occasions as ‘the greatest composer that ever lived’, saying he ‘would uncover my head, and kneel down at his tomb.’ He also referred to the Missa Solemnis as ‘the greatest work that I have composed thus far.’
It is Handel’s temperate influence that tones down the Missa Solemnis from high-church Austrian Catholicism to a more unifying message and raises it to a high plateau of cooperation across musical generations, a place above mere doctrinal divisions.
The expert Handelian Colin Davis conveys this connection better than most in his 1977 London Symphony recording with Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Patricia Payne, Robert Tear and Robert Lloyd as soloists, let down by a slightly underwhelming chorus in the cavernous Walthamstow Town Hall.
So, coming down to final choices, I’d put the early Karajan and Bernstein in the bag, along with Norrington and Solti. A 2015 Bernard Haitink concert from Munich should also command your attention. It is the distillation of a liftetime’s Beethoven performance with a crop of modern singers who can hold their own with the best – Elisabeth Kulman, Genia Kühmeier, Hanno Müller-Brachmann and Mark Padmore.
