… that Maria Yudina died. She was, with Maria Grinberg, the foremost Russian interpreter of the Beethoven sonatas.
Partly because they were women, they never received the attention granted to Richter and Gilels.
It also did not help that they were Jewish and, in Yudina’s case, a convert to Russian Orthodoxy. A friend of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, Yudina was banned from the stage for several years after giving recitals of their poetry.
She died on November 19, 1970 at the age of 71.
The fine Italian soprano Eugenia Ratti died this week in her home town of Piacenza.
She made her La Scala debut in January 1955 in the premiere of Darius Milhaud’s David. She next appeared as Lisa in La sonnambula, opposite Maria Callas, in the Visconti production conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
In 1957, she created the role of Sister Constance in Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.
Internationally, she appeared at the Holland Festival, Paris Opéra, Munich, Vienna and Glyndebourne. She made her US debut in 1958 at San Francisco Opera and sang the following years at Dallas Opera in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Il barbiere di Siviglia, replacing Callas as Rosina.
The Metropolitan Opera, desperate to raise cash and profile but clean out of ideas, has published plans for a pay-to-view year-end gala to be streamed from the 1886 false-baroque Parktheater in Augsburg, Germany.
Taking part will be Angel Blue, Javier Camarena, Matthew Polenzani and Pretty Yende.
Excited?
On a day of many deaths, we have just learned of the passing of Gabriel Chmura, one of the finest Polish conductors of recent times.
Born in Wrocław, raised in Israel, Chmura was the first winner of the Herbert von Karajan Competition in 1971.
He went on to serve as music director in Aachen, Bochum, National Arts Center Ottawa and Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice. At the time of his death he was artistic director of the Teatr Wielki in Warsaw and Poznań.
Much recorded on major labels, he was the first to draw attention to the symphonies of Mieczyslaw Weinberg.
May his memory be blessed.
Berlin Senator Klaus Lederer has renewed the head of Barenboim’s opera house for another four years. Barenboim’s post is nominally for life, with the orchestra at least.
Lederer said:
‘After the long restoration of the opera house Unter den Linden, Matthias Schulz oversaw the company’s relocation back to its original home and its repositioning in the international music scene. I am personally very pleased that I was able to win Matthias Schulz for an extension and that he will now stay for another four years. I am convinced that he is the right person to continue to manage the Staatsoper with skill and the necessary foresight.’
The death of Victor Danchenko is being widely mourned.
A pupil of David Oistrakh in Moscow, he emigrated in 1977 and taught in Toronto and Baltimore, where his sister Vera joined the piano faculty. He was also a professor at Curtis and internationally at summer festivals.
His tudents include the BBC concertmaster Igor Yuzefovich, Martin Beaver of the Tokyo String Quarter, Paganini winner Soovin Kim and many members of major orchestras.
New World Symphony’s Martin Sher writes:
I’m still processing the loss of my beloved mentor and violin teacher Victor Danchenko who passed this morning. Nobody held higher standards for the art than him, and he held his students to it through a lot of tough love and sweat. He connected us to a great lineage of violin playing that was the source of tremendous pride to him – and the source of many wonderful stories told in our lessons. To feel like we were part of a history and tradition, thanks to him, is a gift that can’t be overstated.
Beyond that, I’m so glad to call many of his students good friends and colleagues. In a recent call he told me that it meant so much to him that many of us were staying in touch with each other. It means a lot to all of us too. Perhaps this was his greatest gift – the sense of community he created for us, with history and with each other.
Thank you for everything, Mr. Danchenko. To us, you put a dent in the universe. We are privileged to have shared some time with you. We love you and cherish your memory.
The Greek soprano Elsa Kastela, star of the Bonn Opera while the small town was still Germany’s capital, has died at a well-guarded age. Elsa went on to become a sought-after singing teacher in Vienna.
The US conductor Fawzi Haimor has resigned from the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen with immediate effect.
Haimor, 37, had been music director for three years, and was signed on until 2024. Last summer, his wife gave birth to a son.
A WPR orchestra manager said, ‘we understand that in these pandemic-plagued times he sees the center of his life close to his family, whose health he is concerned about.’
The orchestra is casting around for guest conductors for the rest of the season.
Opera singers are among many fans who mourning the sudden death of Mshoza, an ebullient artist famed for her many marriages and plastic surgeries who embodied the exuberance of the new South Africa.
She was 37 and the cause of death in hospital has not yet been established.
Our hearts go out to her two children.
Mshoza, whose full name was Nomasonto Maswanganyi, was known as the Queen of Kwaito.
We are sorry to report the death of Rodney Greenberg, a television man who turned directing concerts into an art form of its own.
When Rodney directed the Proms for the BBC in the 1980s, artists could go onto the exposed ramp of the Royal Albert Hall knowing that they were in safe hands. Any vocal slippage or wardrobe malfunction and Rodeny’s cameras would find instant distracted elsewhere. He was a master of concert control and you have only to look at today’s live events to see how far the BBC has fallen from the standards he set.
On leaving the BBC, Rodney directed for Sky, Channel 4 and other companies around the world. He wrote a brilliant Gershwin biography for a 20th Century Composer series that I edited and he was a popular lecturer onmany topics. A couple of years ago, he suffered a health setback from which he never recovered. He was hopeful, when I saw him earlier this year at a family event, that a further operation would put him back in action. Sadly, the procedure was unsuccessful.
