Jumping in for Perlman with the IPO:

 

It’s a milestone birthday for Romania’s finest, 55 today.

Did you know she sang Brel in both French and Dutch? One of my alltime favourite tracks.


 

This post is not music-related. It is aimed at occasional deniers on this site who imagine Covid has gone away or is no worse than a bad flu.

Paola De Simone, a professor of modern history at Universidad Argentina de la Empresa (UADE) in Buenos Aires, collapsed and died during a class she was giving on Zoom. She had been suffering from Covid and was 46 years old.

Her lifeless body was discovered by her husband, a medical doctor.

Take care out there. Wear masks.

Confirmation of sad news from Manfred Eicher of ECM:

Gary Peacock (1935-2020)

Bassist Gary Peacock has died, aged 85. An inspired contributor to music over the last half-century, he was already featured on ECM’s third album, “Paul Bley With Gary Peacock”, issued in 1970.

Manfred Eicher: “I’ve lost a life-long friend, and a musician whom I had admired greatly since the first time I heard him. We were so pleased and proud to be able to feature him so early in our programme. Along with Scott La Faro, Steve Swallow and Charlie Haden, Gary was one of the bassists I most appreciated, and I loved his playing on Albert Ayler’s ‘Spiritual Unity’ and Bill Evans’s ‘Trio ‘64’. We started working together more closely with ‘Tales of Another’, in retrospect an influential album. It laid the groundwork for one of the longest-lasting groups in jazz…”
Born in Burley, Idaho, Peacock studied piano, vibraphone and drums before settling, at the age of 20, on the double bass, the instrument with which he would leave his mark on jazz history. He honed his playing while stationed with the US army in Germany, participating in many jam sessions in clubs around Frankfurt and Dortmund. By the early 1960s, Peacock’s imaginative, alert, and elegantly singing bass was heard across the full spectrum of creative jazz in New York – from the trios of Paul Bley and Bill Evans to the groups of Tony Williams, Lowell Davidson and Albert Ayler. Gary was steadfast in his view that creativity could not be limited or defined by an idiom or a style. The point of music-making, he insisted, was to locate and follow the freedoms that each context revealed, a mindset that made him the ideal bassist for the trio with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, where he was equally happy to mine the chord changes of jazz standards for fresh information or to abandon the security of song forms altogether.

The Jarrett/Peacock/DeJohnette trio had been assembled originally for Gary’s “Tales of Another” in 1977. This album of Peacock pieces was effectively Gary’s “comeback album”, recorded after an extended period in Japan, where he had met Masabumi Kikuchi, an important ally, and immersed himself in Eastern culture. A nonpareil improviser – no one was more committed to the notion of playing in the present moment – Peacock was also a composer of strikingly original tunes. Some of them, like “Moor”, “Vignette”, “Gaya”, December Greenwings” and “Requiem”, their themes concise as haikus, were returned to frequently throughout his long artistic life, and covered by many musicians.

Gary’s ECM recordings as a leader – primarily produced in Oslo – include “December Poems” (mostly solo bass, plus duets with Jan Garbarek), “Voice from the Past – Paradigm” (with Garbarek, Tomasz Stanko and Jack DeJohnette), and “Guamba” (with Garbarek, Palle Mikkelborg and Peter Erskine), as well as duo albums with Ralph Towner (“A Closer View”, “Oracle”), and collaborative recordings with John Surman, Paul Bley and Tony Oxley (“Adventure Playground”, “In The Evenings Out There”). “Shift In The Wind”, featuring Gary’s trio with Art Lande and Eliot Zigmund, was produced in New York.

In the 1990s it was Gary who brought about a reunion of the Paul Bley trio with Paul Motian for the New York-recorded album “Not Two, Not One”, leading to tours and, eventually, the Swiss concert recording “When Will The Blues Leave”. Collaboration with Marilyn Crispell – another long-term association – was initiated with the album “Nothing Ever Was, Anyway”, an exploration of the music of Annette Peacock. In his last years Gary was enthusiastic about his trio with Marc Copland and Joey Baron, particularly enjoying the way the sound of his bass and the sound of the group meshed and resonated in the acoustics of the Lugano studio on the album “Tangents.”

 Photo (c) Eliott Peacock

Details are emerging of the background of Maria Kolesnikova, a member of the three-person council that is coordinating protests aimed at toppling the Belarus dictatorship.

It is reported that Kolesnikova taught flute from age 17 at a school in Minsk while playing the National Academic Concert Orchestra. She studied flute and conducting at the Belarus State Academy of Music. At 25 she enlisted at the state conservatoire in Stuttgart to study period instruments, completing maters’ degrees in early music and contemporary music in 2012.

Early today she was kidnapped by armed and masked men in the centre of Minsk.

 

One Hungarian tongue planted firmly in cheek.


Our Czech pals at Operaplus report the death of soprano Miloslava Fidlerová, a stalwart of Prague’s National Theatre for four decades.

Hired by chief conductor Vaclav Talich while still a student in September 1941, she went on to star in the first opera performance after the German defeat in May 1945 and remained a favourite of Prague audiences until her retirement in 1978.

 

From Fiona Maddocks’ Observer interview with the South African soprano Golda Schultz:

Your mother, who named you after Israel’s fourth prime minister, Golda Meir, was a big influence?
Yes, she chose Golda because she liked the idea that people had elected this woman to rule – here was someone who stood in the line of fire for her country, a strong name to live up to. My mum’s a registered nurse who studied child psychology. She encouraged creativity as well as a more formal education.

Read on here.

 

The phenomenal coloratura soprano Christiane Eda-Pierre has died at her home in central France at the age of 88.

Raised in Martinique, she made her debut in Nice in Bizet’s Pearl Fishers and burst to intenational attention as Lakmé at the Aix-en-Provence festival in 1958.

She went on to sing at Covent Garden, the Met, Vienna, Salzburg, Moscow and beyond. Solti and Karl Böhm were among her admirers. She sang opposite Pavarotti and Domingo.

 

From 1977 she taught at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1983 she created the role of the Angel in Olivier Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise.

 

The great organ in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna is about to return to service after 30 years’ silence.

Last played in 1991, the organ – installed in 1956 to replace its bombed-out predecessor – was painstakingly restored over the past three years in a small workshop under Government supervision. It is not clear why it was left idel for so long.

It will be reconsecrated by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn next month and played by organists Konstantin Reymaier and Ernst Wally.