The Brucknerhaus in Linz , upper Austria,will reopen on July 5 with a one-hour concert of music by exiled Jewish composers. A week later, the Orchester Wiener Akademie and Martin Haselböck will perform Beethovens Pastoral Symphony.

Concerts will take place in the large hall of the Brucknerhaus, but with 400 instead of 1,400 in the audience and without an interval.

Each concert will be performed twice.

These are tentative first steps towards a resumption.

 

The Edinburgh pianist and university lecturer Colin Kingsley has died after a long life nurturing native talent.

‘Nominally, the hours spent with Colin Kingsley were piano lessons; but in actual fact they were remarkable, holistic musical journeys delving deep into the composer’s intentions, whether melodic, harmonic structural or even orchestral,’ said Deutsche Oper music director Donald Runnicles.

Obituary here.

Nonny James, who presented music programmes on BBC Hereford and Worcester, BBC Radio Shropshire and occasionally BBC Radio 2, has died of Covid-19. She was 69.

 

Distressing news of the death of Mark Beech, a polymath Oxford-educated critic who, while writing books about rock music, seemed to know every other genre just as well. We worked happily together for several years on Bloomberg Muse.

It was reported that Mark, who was 60, had been in a car crash in Scotland and suffered subsequent complications. UPDATE: His fiancée says that there was no car crash.

Since 2015 Mark had been editor of DANTE magazine.

Always a pleasure to work together.

 

The Beethven Festival in Bonn has announced a successor to Nike Wagner, 74, who will step down in October 2021.

The new chief is Steven Walter, 34, a German-American cellist who runs a festival in Esslingen.

With the exit of Nike from Bonn and her cousin Katharina from Bayreuth, we may see the beginning of the end of the Wagner family saga.