We hear that the International Federation for Choral Music has terminated the internationally respected Andrea Angelini as editor of the International Choral Bulletin. He has held the post on an annual contract since 2009.

The axe was wielded in the middle of a pandemic, which has resulted in two deaths in Dr Angelini’s family.

Impeccable timing.

Stunning performance of the lullaby by Thomas Hlawatsch.

Gregg Hanson, who died ths weekend aged 77, was professor of conducting and director of wind bands for 26 years at the University of Arizona.

He achieved widespread renown as far afield as China, where he is believed to have been the firswt American to conduct a public concert with the Peoples Liberation Army Band.

The Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, has clarified that outdoor singing is permitted in all tiers across England from December 2.

In-church performance will also be permitted, subjct to the number of singers and the distance observed.

Full guidance here.

The synagogue cantor Daniel Gildar has died in hospital, of an unknown cause. H ewas much in demand both as a singer and as a piano accompanist. He was about to perform the latter role this week in a gala online concert with the celebrated Yitzchak Helfgot.

Chazzan Gildar was 75.

The soprano Sonya Yoncheva has issued a statment on social media, clarifying her Metropopolitan Opera broadcast cancellations.

I am starting to feel slightly better, but I won’t make it singing for you next Saturday at the Met Stars Live concert from Germany. In fact my doctors advised me to take at least a week before singing again. We have postponed the concert for February. Just to inform you, I don’t have COVID, but a very tenacious bronchitis.

The Berlin Senate has gone further than Chancellor Merkel in imposing contact restraints until January. Only five people are allowed to meet, outdoors or indoors.

The partial lockdown, effective since the start of November, has been extended in Berlin to December 22 at the earliest.

Cultural and sporting facilities will remain closed.

This book-length thesis by Axel Englund, professor of literature at the University of Stockholm, aruges that opera is a surrogate for our darkest fantasies and should, ideally, be directed by BDSM practitioners in leather and whips.

Pull quote: ‘The opera stage is an arena where the problem of sex, power and violenceis made manifest and played out in physical form… A staging can illuminate, interrogate and question – or endorse and capitalise on – the brutality of the plot… (it) thrives on our capacity to derive pleasure from the suffering and humiliation of others.’

Yeah, right.

No, not an enduring adolescent disorder.

Nor the bit in the Brahms D minor concerto (which I don’t remember him ever playing).

It’s the sub-head on his latest cover story.

Made my day.