Pietari Inkinen, who should have been conducting the Ring at Bayreuth this summer, has been extended to 2025 as chief conductor of the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern.
Inkinen, who has just turned 40, would have been the first Finn to conduct a Bayreuth Ring.
Rolf Hochhuth has died in Berlin, aged 89.
His play The Deputy lifted the lid on the Vatican’s collaboration with Hitler’s extermination of the Jews and its subsequent cover-up, a dirty secret that it conceals to this day.
Passionate about exposing German criminality and complacency, he once refused to share a panel with Gunter Grass, whom he called out as an antisemite.
The composer and pianist Ezio Bosso has died in Bologna of a neurodegenerative disease that forced him to give up playing nine months ago.
Bosso was hugely popular, a regular chart-topper. Italy’s culture minister Dario Franceschini called him: ‘a profound and generous man, an explosive artist capable of transmitting the joy of playing and passion for music.’
May he rest in peace.
Watch his address to the European Parliament:
The teenage-looking Klaus Mäkelä received a contracts renewal from the Oslo Philharmonic, even though he does not even start as Chief Conductor and Artistic Adviser until August (and there are no concerts likely until some months last that).
Mäkelä, who is 24, now has a contract that takes him into his 30s.
He said: ‘This commitment is of course hugely exciting for me and I cannot wait to begin my tenure with an orchestra I deeply love and respect. For a conductor there is nothing more important than a musical home where one can work extensively and where you feel that you breathe together with the musicians. The paradox of being a musician is that what we enjoy the most is the fact that we can always be better in the next concert and I am very happy to have found an orchestra like the Oslo Philharmonic which shares the same philosophy. Of course in this situation, being able to commit to the orchestra for the next seven years brings us both the opportunity to really grow together and experiment on a great variety of different styles of music.’
The secretary of state for culture Ulrike Lunacek resigned this morning under pressure from the festivals and theatres sector which complained she was not acting fast enough to let them reopen for business.
This is Austria. Logic has nothing to to with politics.
More here.
