The funny old world of Erik Satie.
The funny old world of Erik Satie.
A replacement season was rolled out today, with a small ensembles performing online without an audience.
‘It’s totally different,’ said Matías Tarnopolsky, president and CEO. ‘Because of COVID, it’s not safe to convene a large orchestra in a large concert hall with audiences present.’
Ensembles of 25 to 30 musicians will perform at an empty Verizon Hall or outdoors at the Mann Center, filmed for online transmission. Yannick Nézet-Séguin will conduct seven concerts. Guest artists will include Emanuel Ax, Angel Blue, Yefim Bronfman, Lang Lang and Branford Marsalis.
They’re calling it ‘reimagined’. Just like every other orchestra.
One of the most intriguing lost programs made by Glenn Gould has just been retrieved on Youtube.
Watch now before someone manages to take it down.
Gould says: ‘I think Mozart, especially in his later years, was not a very good composer’.
He goes on to say: A five year-old could have written this…’
The clue to tongue positioning in cheek may be that phrase ‘in his later years’. Mozart never lived to see later years.
The controversial Swiss-based violinist was pointedly ignored at the fat-cat Lucerne Festival when she tried to draw a broader context for the present pandemic. She writes:
In yesterday’s podium discussion in Lucerne about COVID and music I tried to point out that the COVID crisis is the general rehearsal of the climate crisis which will be much much worse.
The Italian writer Ornella Volta, a friend of Fellini and Pasolini, died in Paris on August 16 at an advanced age.
In 1981 she founded the Archives of the Erik Satie Foundation, becoming the ecentric composer’s greatest expert and advocate.
Scientists from the Charité Berlin have agreed a new Covid protocol for orchestral layout which will be applied in the new season by the Berlin Philharmonic and the Deutsches Sinfonieorchester.
The significant changes are that strings will play one metre apart between seats instead of 1.5m. Wind players will maintain 1.5m distance, reduced from two metres. And the brass section will no longer require plexiglass partitions.
The air conditioning will operate at HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air Filter).
The death is reported of Maurice Kaplow, long-standing conductor of New York City Ballet.
As a viola player in the Philadelphia Orchestra in the mid-1950s, he was encouraged by Pierre Monteux to take up the baton. Where other maestros of that era put on airs. Monteux forever searched for potential heris to continue the tradition. Neville Marriner, the most prominent of his discoveries, told me several times of Monteux’s personal humility and his devotion to continuity.
Kaplow was another who found fulfilment through the little Frenchman who, in 1913, gave the world premiere of The Rite of Spring.
More here.
The LA-based composer Michael Robinson remembers a fallen New York institution:
…. Will never forget how one day a frightening, unhinged, and loudly aggressive man entered the store, and we were all taken aback, not sure what to do. Before anyone could phone the police, Joseph came down the staircase to see what the commotion was, and without any visible hesitation metamorphosed from a aristocratic, restrained, and meticulously mannered shop owner into someone like Muhammad Ali, storming towards the much younger intruder with arms waving in a menacing manner while shouting for him to get out, leaving all of us with mouths open in astonishment at his instantaneous transformation. Mr. Patelson had scared the Alfred Garrievich Schnittke out of the fellow who turned and hurried out…
Read on here.
Joseph Patelson