Joan Harris, who danced with Margot Fonteyn in the  Sadler’s Wells Ballet and went on to hold major administrative roles in Europe, has died soon after reaching her centnary.

With her first husband Alan Carter she became Ballet Master and Ballet Mistress at the Bavarian State Opera in 1954. Six years later she moved to Oslo, married Arne Neergaard and took over as head of ballet at the Norwegian Opera House. In 1965 she founded the Opera Ballet School, running it until 1988.

 

The death has been reported of Warren Helms, a faculty member of the Juilliard School, William Paterson University in Wayne and Caldwell University. He had endured a long battle with cancer.

The William Paterson music department notes:

Professor Warren Helms passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer. His family lost a husband and a father. The William Paterson community lost a devoted educator and brilliant musician.
A graduate of William Paterson, Warren was an excellent pianist, a devoted coach, and a dedicated colleague. Over the years, in addition to coaching many of the students in the Vocal Area, Warren also worked with and led our Choirs, co-taught Opera Workshop, and music directed operas and musicals, most recently the 2019 production of THE FANTASTICKS. One of Warren’s last performances was the February 2020 midday performance in Shea Auditorium, for which he collaborated with the entire voice faculty in a performance of French art song. There is a GoFundMe page set up to help the family deal with medical expenses. Please consider a donation of any size.

The Met’s former music director was paid $3.5 million to drop his unfair dismissal lawsuit and walk away quietly, according to leaks to a pair of NY Times reporters.

Levine was fired in March 2018 for a history of alleged sexual misconduct.

Nobody comes out of this well. The money he was paid came from well-intentioned donors who expected it would go towards producing opera.

Report here.

The two reporters are Michael Cooper, who covers classical music and dance, and James B. Stewart, a Times columnist and author of ‘Deep State: Trump, the FBI and the Rule of Law.’

UPDATE: Zubin Mehta says it’s the media that ruined Levine

Christian Berzins has the first review of Zurich’s phoned-in Boris Godunov.

He begins:

The Zurich Opera House defies the virus, streams the orchestra live from the rehearsal room into the hall: It’s more terrible than you can imagine.

A season opening at the Zurich Opera House has never been so terrible. And everyone in the house who cheered and clapped rhythmically at the end knew it. …

Do you have to describe how terrible it is when the orchestra is not in the house, when it can only enter via fiber optics? Should you write that the fortissimo choir and orchestra became a brutal, booming metal sound? That it sounded like the death knell …

Read on here.

The SF Opera is filling social media with every other topic but refuses to answer questions about a deal that cuts musician wages by half.

Here’s what the players say:

Tonight, the musicians of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra voted to accept devastating changes to our existing contract. Had we rejected these cuts—including 50% of our weekly salary for the fall season and deep but graduated cuts for the ensuing 2 years—we would immediately have been without any income or the guarantee of health coverage.

The modified contract leaves key orchestra positions vacant for seven years, and ties the musicians’ compensation to ticket sales. Both of these modifications are unrelated to the pandemic and outside the musicians’ control. Everyone agrees that the San Francisco Opera Orchestra consistently meets the highest performance standards. The musicians are not invited to collaborate on artistic decisions or marketing strategies, and yet our compensation will nonetheless remain reduced for years if management fails to do its job of selling tickets. The reverse will not be true—management’s generous compensation is not tied to its sales or to the performance of the orchestra. Nor is management sharing equitably in the sacrifices it is imposing on its musicians, chorus and other employees.

We are told that the Opera Board considers these changes necessary, though the company has amassed a Quarter Billion Dollar endowment. If there was ever a time to release more endowment funds in order to support the company while its artists work to reinvent the way we share music, a global pandemic is indeed that time.

 

The early music group La Venexiana has suffered its second death with the loss of the Italian bass singer Daniele Carnovich. He was 63.

Based in the Spanish town of Fuenterrabía and married to the Spanish mezzo-soprano Maite Arruabarrena, Carnovich performed internationally with leading baroque ensembles.

Three weeks ago, La Venexiana mourned its founder Claudio Cavina, aged 58.

 

We hear that Viacheslav Shchurov died today in Moscow of Covid-19. He specialised in studies of Russian folk music at Tchaikovsky Conservatoire and directed the Moscow Folk Song Ensemble.

 

Zurich Opera House last night opened a full staged production of Boris Godunow, one of the biggest shows in the canon.

Barrie Kosky directed, Michael Volle sang the title role. There were 900 permitted in the audience.

Due to Covid distancing rules there was no room in the pit or on stage for the large orchestra and chorus.

They performed in the company’s rehearsal venue of the orchestra, about a kilometre away, and were streamed into the opera house though glass fibre cable.

Could that be the new normal?

Reviews have yet to appear.

Photos: Monika Rittershaus

Here’s the official version: The orchestra and chorus will perform from an external rehearsal room, which has been converted into a recording studio, and will be broadcast live to the Opernhaus for performances. The soloists will be on stage performing, breathing life into the music as they normally do. This mixture of live vocal performance, music broadcast live, and a specific spatial sound is unique to the Opernhaus. And this performance model enables the Opernhaus Zürich to make only minor changes to the season’s schedule of events.

 

The restored Katharina Wagner has named Oksana Lyniv to conduct Flying Dutchman next summer.

Bayreuth says the Ukrainian will be the first woman to lead a new production.

Lyniv, 42, is music director of Graz Opera.

Ms Wagner has also been explaining her own summer-long absence. Sje told local media that she had been in a coma for six weeks in at the Regensburg university hospital, where her life was saved. She is now fully recovered.

Both the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia Roma have called off upcoming concerts due to Covid travel restrictions.

The Vienna Phil will jump in for one of the empty nights.

 

The superhyped First­ International Competition of Women Conductors. ‘La maestra’, was won in Paris by Rebecca Tong of Indoniesia.

Tong, 35, is resident conductor of the Jakarta Simfonia Orchestra.

She is signed to the AskonasHolt agency.

Media coverage was diminished by Covid.

Four of the original contestants were unable to attend.

 

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