Wayne Barlow? Not a composer I’ve heard before.

Now I want to hear more. He is just so timely for this season.

 

The fabulous French chanteuse who once dated Miles Davis and Quincy Jones at the same time, died today aged 93.

She had class. Albert Camus was one of her boyfriends, Sacha Distel another.

This song says: undress me. not too fast.

This is the seaonal torch song

And this her greatest hit

 

The Metropolitan Opera, it is well known, runs a deficit bigger than the entire budget of the next largest US opera company. The US opera industry depends on the Met functioning at full power, drawing foreign stars and attention to the sector as a whole.

When the Met shuts down for a year, as it did today and has never done before, the rest of American opera falls into a coma. Opera goers and donors and administrator in cities far from New York will say, if the Met can’t stay open nor can we.

It is only hours after the Met’s announcement and we are still assessing the consequences, but there is no doubting the severity of the blow for opera in America. In the best-case scenario, it may take years to recover.

 

‘One of the things that we have to mind going forward is a way with our unionized employees, new economic arrangements that the company can afford going forward.’

This statement by Peter Gelb can only mean one thing – deep pay cuts for musicians and backstage staff, plus some job losses elsewhere in the company.

Other consequences of the year-long Met shutdown, announced today, will be a loss of talent for the next couple of years. People will make other plans. Since the Met has toploaded its 21-22 season with non-central repertoire, world stars will be hard to entice back.

The Met will need to grow its own.

 

The signals we picked up were right. The Met will not reopen until September 2021.

This has never happened before in the comany’s 140-year history.

Peter Gelb says the company’s losses will total $154 million.

Next up: pay cuts and personnel losses.

The company plans to reopen on September 21, 2021 with “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” a jazz work that premiered at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis in June 2019. Two other new works in the schedule will be Matthew Aucoin’s “Eurydice,” which premiered at the LA Opera last February and Brett Dean’s “Hamlet” from Glyndebourne.

Gelb said: ‘We can’t resume performing until the pandemic is over with a vaccine that’s widely available and herd immunity having been achieved, and even then the audience is going to return slowly. One of the things that we have to mind going forward is a way with our unionized employees, new economic arrangements that the company can afford going forward.’

Commentary: Is this the end of opera in America?

The soft-soap Hollywood director Ron Howard has been signed to film Lang Lang’s life story.

The executive producers are Lang Lang and his agent, Jean-Jacques Cesbron.

Howard made the recent glossy biopic of Pavarotti.

Objections are already being raised that westerners lacking in an intimate knowledge of China’s rcent history cannot grasp the background of the country’s greatest entertainment celebrity.


Lang Lang with Cesbron

The unorthodox conductor has a miserable lament with violinist Pat Kop.

Recorded with the Southwest German radio orchestra.

Watch here at 24:00.

 

The Colston Hall used to bear the name of the slave trader Edward Colston.

Now it’s to be known as the Bristol Beacon.

It took them four months to land on that utterly dazzling name, announced today.

AskonasHolt have placed Corinna Niemeyer as music director of the Luxemburg chamber orchestra. She’s just finished two years as assistant conductor at the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

 

HarrisonParrott has signed Daniel Reith, winner of a Norwegian conducting contest.

 

 

The Curtis Institute has published the results of an independent legal inquiry into allegations by the violinist Lara St John that she was raped at 14 by her teacher Jascha Brodsky, among two-dozen other complaints of a similar nature.

The report is uncompromising: Many of these accounts sounded a recurrent theme: a reluctance to report abuse driven by the perception that “students remained at Curtis at the discretion of their major instrument teacher,” which created an unhealthy climate and had a chilling effect on reporting misconduct because of the “real threat that one could be dismissed for any reason at any time”.

In other words, a state of terror.

Earlier today, Roberto Díaz and Board Chair Deborah M. Fretz expressed their sincere apologies on behalf of Curtis to Ms. St. John for the way in which she was treated by the school and those leaders in whom she confided, and specifically for failing to provide any opportunity to help her cope with and recover from the abuse inflicted upon her or the school’s continued dismissal of her concerns.

We were wrong, and we express publicly our sincere apology to Lara St. John for the way she was treated by Curtis for the past 34 years. We failed to provide her with a safe learning environment, failed to carefully investigate her claims, failed to communicate our grave disappointment in how she was treated by Curtis, and repeatedly failed to communicate the steps that were taken to prevent such abuse from occurring in the future.

None of this should have happened to Ms. St. John, and we are profoundly sorry that it did. We are in awe of her courage and spirit, which led to a long-overdue public reckoning about the pain and suffering that she and others endured over a number of decades. For this reckoning, we owe Ms. St. John a debt of thanks, along with the public recognition that as a direct result of her coming forward, Curtis today is far better equipped to protect students against sexual abuse or misconduct.

All past victims have been offered counselling, along with the apology.

Read the full report here.

 

Word on the street is that the Metropolitan Opera, shut since the start of Covid, is about to cancel its spring 2021 season. An announcement is expected today or tomorrow.

Covid safety aside, Peter Gelb has many reasons to maintain closure, not least that many of his major donors have fled to Florida or the Hamptons and won’t be back in town until the pandemic has gone. Also, some singers are reluctant to fly.

Getting the bad Levine news out of the way yesterday was necessary before the company delivered its next dollop of gloom.

 

Paavo Järvi has just released the fifth set of the four symphonies of Franz Schmidt.

None of the previous four sold enough copies to pay for a coffee machine but conductors are enamoured of these tedious screeds and continue to perform them. I have argued long and vigiorously with Franz Welser-Möst and Semyon Bychkov that the symphonies lack either dramatic or diversionary interest, but they for some reason remain enamoured. I have heard the symphonies several times without once being convinced. Is it a central European thing?

There are two-dozen post-War symphonists whose work is far more gripping than Schmidt’s, not to say more relevant. Nothing about him excites my attention.

Schmidt (1874-1939)  was a cellist in Mahler’s orchestra at the Vienna Opera and one of his chief opponents. He later became a vociferous Nazi. The Vienna Philharmonic are proud of him as one of their own.

Have I left anything out?