If you’ve never heard Max’s Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, you’re in for a treat.
photo: Suzie Maeder
The Queen Elisabeth Competition has postponed this year’s piano contest to 2021.
The cello session scheduled for 2021 will take place in 2022, the 2022 singing competition will be held in 2023 and the 2023 violin session will be organized in 2024.
The age limit for candidates will be raised by one year, until the piano competition of 2025.
The family have announced the death of Florian Schneider, co-founder of the electronic group Kraftwerk. He had been suffering from cancer.
An icon to David Bowie, he left the band in 2008.
In a two-hour video conference this morning, the French President extended unemployment rights to musicians through to the end of August.
Some bookstores and museums may reopen after May 11, but he said there could be no assurance that performances would resume from September and he urged artists to rethink their activity.
He spoke of a need to to invent new forms of engagement with the public, combining ‘common sense and innovation’.
The Berlin music critic Shirley Apthorp is using her lockdown time to custom-make funky facemasks for persons of style, with profits going to a really important South African charity.
This is mine.
Get yours here.
The 70th season of Marlborough Music Festival has fallen to Corona.
Mitsuko Uchida, Jonathan Biss, their senior artist colleagues, and all of us at Marlboro send heartfelt wishes to our friends and audiences that they remain safe and engaged.
Else Blangsted, reputedly the best music editor in Hollywood, has died weeks short of her 100th birthday.
A refugee from Nazi Germany, she worked with the likes of Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg, Quincy Jones, Dave Grusin and Randy Newman.
Robert Redford said she had ‘the mind of an artist and the soul of a saint.’
She started out in Hollywood as a nanny in a movie family.
The Hungarian Gábor Káli who won the Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award in 2018 has signed to HarrisonParrott.
He’s an Ivan Fischer protege.
English Heritage has just granted Grade 2 protected status to the BBC Maida Vale Studios, which the Corporation had put up for sale.
The listing will knock as much as £100 million of the sale price as developers cannot turn the site into luxury apartments.
Really bad news for the BBC’s mismanaged property portfolio.
And for the BBC Symphony Orchestra which was looking forward to new premises.
By delaying for years, the BBC has totally mismanaged the sale of this asset. Bad, call, Tony Hall.
Meurig Bowen, who stepped down from the Cheltenham Festival three years ago to run orchestral planning for the BBC NOW, has joined the Britten Sinfonia as chief executive.
The Britten’s last boss, David Butcher, has gone up to run the Halle.
We hear that BBC contingency planning for saving the Proms is 2 weeks in an empty Royal Albert Hall and 2 weeks with a minimal audience, all televised.
It’s a last-gasp solution, and few believe it will work.
First, judging by Germany alone, it is unlikely that any places of entertainment will eb allowed to open before mid-September, earliest.
Second, last week’s empty-hall concerts in Germany were judged a failure: uninspiring to audiences, dispiriting for musicians.
Third, the BBC has no original plan for filtering its own musicians and camera crews into the hall and distancing them once inside. If one person catches Covid, the enterprise will blow up sky-high. It’s not worth the risk.
The Proms have given no indication when a final decision will be made, but the plans that have been leaked to Slipped Disc do not inspire confidence.
This is a message from a piano teacher whose student, albeit gifted, did not make it to the semi-finals of BBC Young Musician of the Year. The round took place in early March and the results have only just been broadcast.
The teacher’s reaction is significant in the sense that it highlights the nebulous nature of all music competitions. Unlike athletics, the judges marks can be subjective at best and the emotions provoked by their conclusions may often be irrational.
Here’s what the teacher has written:
... we are putting former complaint to BBC Ofcom for formal and legal investigations…
I am devastated and disgust(ed), actually. I thought I will let it go, but now I feel like this must to be said.
I am struggling (for the first time!!!) to find words and explain to (x) judging decision yesterday.
The boy was at the top, in the different league with his performance. Audience and Friends went to buy tickets for next week semifinals to listen him before results were announced! This is how all obvious was!
And somehow judges choose the weakest performer to be a winner!!
And what do I say to the boy when Piano Professors and well established pianists in UK and worldwide coming to him after results has been announced and saying that he was the best and he should have won!!!?!! Do I say that Music is subjective and people are looking for different things and etc?! No, I can’t as this is not the case. I could tell that if performances were shoulder to shoulder….
But what I will say is this….
Shame on you … (for whatever reason you had) by promoting low standards, discouraging young people to believe (and perhaps to stop participating) in fairness in Competitions…..
We have every sympathy for the teacher. It’s the competition system that’s at fault.
