I opened my recent talk at Jewish Book Week with this clip of Barbara. Half a minute into the song I wondered, how do I follow that?
The song is about a woman going to a distant town where someone is dying. It turns out to be her father.
The father who assaulted her.
One of the greatest songs ever written.
The League of American Orchestras has just named Simon Woods as its next president, succeeding Jesse Rosen in September.
Woods, who left the LA Phil in September last year, will head the Grand Teton Music Festival until the end of August.
A pop single on Deutsche Grammophon?
You heard it here first.
The classical violinist Lisa Batiashvili shares a Georgian origin with the pop singer Katie Melua. Lisa has an ambum coming out in late June, but who knows where we’ll be by then.
So DG are putting out one track today.
We think this must be DG’s first pop single.
From Mark Volpe, president of the Boston Symphony Orchestra:
… I remain hopeful that we can have concerts at Tanglewood this summer. Naturally, the pandemic we are currently experiencing is unprecedented and unpredictable, and we will certainly follow guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and our government leaders. The health, safety, and wellbeing of our audiences, neighbors, players, and staff is our foremost concern. Yet, we will try the best we can to be a presence in the Berkshires in every way possible this summer.
We have heard from a considerable number of our friends in the Berkshires, including the many businesses in the area that rely on summer tourism, asking when we will make our ultimate determination on what this summer will bring. The honest answer is that we have not set a definitive timetable for this. Because of the uncertain nature of the epidemic, we are considering many options for the Tanglewood season on a near-daily basis. We recognize the importance of Tanglewood and other cultural organizations to the Berkshire community, and we intend to remain in close contact with our partner organizations and businesses in the region to assess the situation and announce any news we may have.
Tanglewood is a complex operation with many distinct components, from the festival and popular artists to the Tanglewood Music Center, Tanglewood Learning Institute, and more. Though each is certainly connected, they are also in many ways independent, necessitating a multi-faceted approach to our decision-making. The financial implications of any decisions or changes are significant to the BSO and the Berkshires, so we are taking a careful and measured approach in our reasoning, while recognizing that we cannot predict the future of our world in the coming months….
From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
In a dark moment of isolation, I found myself listening to Viktor Ullmann, a student of the atonalist Schoenberg and the microtonalist Haba who never really found his voice until darkness descended and he faced segregation and extinction. Before 1939 he’d enjoyed fragments of international attention, with a piano sonata premiered in London at the Wigmore Hall and a few more glimmers of invitation.
In 1939, after the Germans occupied Prague, he set about writing a piano concerto …
Read on here.
And here.
The Quatuor Terpsycordes has announced the departure of François Grin.
He’s off to be director of the Conservatoire in Montreux.
The other three have already chosen the Geneva cellist Florestan Darbellay as his immediate replacement.
Dartington festival and summer school has joined the list of closures. It would have Sara Mohr-Pietsch’s first festival as Artistic Director.
The Dartington Hall Trust announced its decision today to cancel this year’s Dartington Music Summer School & Festival due to the uncertainly caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis.
photo: Kate Mount
Mail is pouring in at Slippedisc Towers from innumerable readers who are sharing their experiences of loss in these isolated times.
What are they missing most? Obviously, musicians are miss rehearsal, performance and audiences. Music, theatre and ballet are the sociable arts. Writers and painters are fairly accustomed to isolation. Maestros don’t know what to do on their own, except sleep.
What are audiences missing? To judge by our mailbag, the ritual of concertgoing, seeing the same faces in the same places, sharing a common life-enhancing convocation.
What is the music business missing? Everything. No cash-flow, no security, not much future direction.
Beyond these crippling deprivations, we’re seeing signs of shortening attention spans.
One home-based video might go wildly viral, but the next one won’t. A cute idea might catch the moment, but it will be gone by afternoon.
We’re looking to be surprised, but we don’t know how to build on an intriguing sensation.
We’re looking for guidance, but who can we trust?
This is a short sample of impressions of the first two weeks from the thousands of comments that reach us.
Feel free to add more.
The English National Opera might as well drop the last word in its name. This is not the end of a new beginning.
Round-robin from Michelle Williams, head of casting:
Dear Friends and Colleagues
I hope that you and your loved ones are well and safe.
Today it will be announced that Hairspray, which had been due to open at the London Coliseum on 23 April, will now be opening at the start of September for a run of ten weeks.
Inevitably, this has an impact on our planned season here at English National Opera.
As you know, we stage musicals at the London Coliseum in order to help us fund as much opera as possible. This income is of even more importance due to our current closure. This announcement will therefore be made today for those who had already purchased a ticket for the musical.
We are keen to reassure you that staging opera is still ENO’s main priority. We are working hard to create a new season of work both at the London Coliseum but also in other venues across London and the UK. We hope to have further details in due course, and are extremely sorry for any worry or frustration caused by delay in hearing from us.
To aid us in this planning process, it would be useful if you could share your availability from 1 August to 20 December 2020.
Like us, we expect many other opera companies are currently remodeling their upcoming seasons. If your artist receives an enquiry but is currently contracted to ENO, please do get in touch before you decline the offer as it may be possible for us to release them.
For now we wanted to ensure that you heard the news about Hairspray’s new dates from us first. Thank you for your continued patience and we will be in touch again as soon as we can.
Due to the nature of this announcement and given the current circumstances we hope you understand that this email has been sent to all artists and agents directly
We hope you continue to stay safe, and I will be intouch with more information soon.
Best wishes
Michelle
Michelle Williams
Head of Casting
ENO and London Coliseum
A weekly reckoning for the music community.
This was week 1.
Week 2 remains steady.
10 Spanish critic Julio Andrade Malde
11 Brazilian conductor Martinho Lutero Galati de Oliveira
12 Brazilian conductor Naomi Munakata
13 Italian bass Luigi Roni
14 Spanish mezzo Mabel Perelstein
15 Spanish opera costume designer María Araujo
16 Jazzman Ellis Marsalis
17 Stacy’s Mom songwriter Adam Schlesinger
18 Aurlus Mabele, Congolese King of Soukous Music, 66;
19 Reported: Brazil concertmaster Margarita Chtereva
20 US country musician Joe Diffie
21 Dance legend Willy Burmann
22 Jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli
Please let us know if there are others we should add to this lengthening list.
Welcome to the 52nd work in the Slipped Disc/Idagio Beethoven Edition
Beethoven: Razumovsky Quartets, opus 59 (1806)
Outside of the boxing ring, there are few ordeals more terrifying in sport than facing a fast bowler in cricket, a man hurling a rock-hard object at you from less than 20 metres and at a speed of ninety-plus miles an hour. At the receiving end, the batsman has time while the bowler is running in to say his prayers while steeling himself for being hit, getting out, or being made to look ridiculous. From the moment the ball leaves the bowler’s hand, the batsman has a fraction of a second to decide what to do. In Test cricket, there is nowhere to hide.
The 1981 series between England and Australia was a brutal encounter between cricket’s oldest rivals. England lost one Test and looked to be heading for a thrashing when, before the third Test, Mike Brearley was appointed captain and everything changed. A philosopher who would retrain as a psychoanalyst, Brearley devised a strategy for dealing with murderous fast bowling. While the bowler was running in, Brearley would hum the opening cello motif of Beethoven’s first Razumovsky Quartet, opus 59/1. Why this particular phrase he never explained, but it worked for the England captain and it works just as well for me, as an aid to concentration and courage in times of great stress.
The triptych of quartets, ordered by the Russian ambassador in Vienna, Count Andreas Razumovsky opens the second phase of Beethoven’s engagement with the string quartet. They are his 6th, 7th and 8th quartets and each of them has a buried Russian tune, the most obvious being the sub-theme of opus 59/2 which pops up in the coronation scene of Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov and in the works of other Russian composers. The Russian flavour, however, is incidental. Beethoven is driving these quartets into new territory, no longer as playthings for high society but as inward-looking reflections on the state of the human race at a time of war, hunger and inhumanity. Opus 59/2 begins with a huge question mark and Beethoven lets the second note hang in the air, as if leaving space for the audience to provide an answer. He seems to have resolved something in his own life at this time: he no longer hides his deafness. Let the world know, he says, what a musician must suffer for his art. Asked by an uncomprehending listener what he was trying to convey in these searching works Beethoven is supposed to have said, ‘Oh, they are not for you, but for a future age.’
Among our panel of expert listeners, two – the violinist Gidon Kremer and the former BBC music chief Roger Wright – make the strongest possible recommendation for the Philips recording by the Quartetto Italiano. You will not have to listen long to be seduced. The quartet, founded by post-grads in Reggio Emilia in 1945, cultivated a warmer, deeper tone than the edgier style of German and American rivals. The players – Paolo Borciani, Elisa Pegreffi (violins, married couple), Piero Farulli (viola) and Franco Rossi (cello) – made their first European tour in 1948. Three years later they had an immersive encounter in Salzburg with Wilhelm Furtwängler, who advised them to loosen up and embrace Romantic freedoms. Two decades later, when they recorded the Beethoven cycle, the quartet had a distinctive sound and an introspective manner that was ideally suited to these middle-period quartets. I am particularly drawn to the way they express Beethoven’s open colloquy with his imagined future audience. There is also an elegance of expression that few others can rival.
The Amadeus Quartet are faultlessly civilised, fearlessly slow, daringly boring at times. One is forever conscious that they are aiming for the ultimate performance and settling for the reliable. I don’t mean to be perjorative – they were a tremendous ensemble and they have much to say in the next group of quartets – but I can’t escape the conclusion that their approach did not quite work in this set.
The Barylli Quartet in 1955 and the Alban Berg Quartet quarter of a century later convey a Viennese sense of ownership in two very different modes. The Baryllis are sweet as apple strudel, the Bergs as reserved as a ticket to the New Year’s Ball. Beyond the ultra-Viennaness of their manner, both are probing, thoughtful groups who never let us forget that deep questions are being asked, whatever they might be.
The American style of the Guarneri Quartet (1967) is decidedly less inquisitve, albeit pinpoint in its perfection. I am more inclined to the swagger of the Emerson Quartet (1997), no holds barred. For the full Russian flavour you need to hear the Moscow-based Beethoven Quartet, close friends of Dmitri Shostakovich, who play for themselves without regard for consumer confidence. It’s rough in patches but refreshing to hear musicians who really don’t give a damn who’s listening, if anyone.
Of all musical genres not has undergone such collective improvement over the past half-century as the string quartet. There are groups today who run rings around the practices of the last century, playing standing up if they please and choosing speeds that would have shattered a metronome of Beethoven’s time. The Berlin-based Artemis Quartet are a byword for high performance and the rising Cuarteto Casals from Spain have a richer range of colours than most and a really slinky way about them in the Adagio. My current favourite is the Parisian Quatuor Ebène (2019) – Pierre Colombet (Violin), Gabriel Le Magadure (Violin), Marie Chilemme (Viola), Raphaël Merlin (Violoncello) – athletic in the most graceful way, like a hundred-metre Olympic runner breasting the tape. It may not be cricket, but it’s great sport.
