The UK’s Channel 4 has laid hands on a 13-part series that Daniel Barenboim made for Granada TV in 1969 for Beethoven’s 200th anniversary.

At the time only six episodes were shown on Granada North West. Shot at London’s Roundhouse Theatre, the series features Barenboim in his late twenties, working with the New Philharmonia Orchestra and the venerable Sir Adrian Boult.

The production was by Allegro Films, Christopher Nupen’s company.

 

The Finnish soprano has been awarded the equivalent of a knighthood.

Not many opera singers get this high.

 

 

 

Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben is tacky in every way, a blob of sensationalist Nietzschean philosophy bound together with orchestral virtuosity and no nutritional substance. Until Carlos Kleiber conducted it.

Bloody brilliant.

 

You may not be flying for a while yet, but be aware that the rules have changed on EasyJet which used to be very accomodating for musical  instruments.

As of February 10, it seems, EasyJet passengers will have to pay extra for the use of overhead luggage lockers.

Nice company.

Don’t miss them a bit.

 

The baroque specialist Sophie Boulin died yesterday in Liège, Belgium, after suffering for a year from a brain tumour.

She performed with William Christie, Jean-Claude Magloire, Sigiswald Kuijken, Philippe Herreweghe, Gustav Leonhardt and many morfe, and had a lasting relationship with the German director Herbert Wernicke.

The excellent soprano Cecilia Fusco, a regular at La Scala and at major houses worldwide, has died at 87 after a Covid-9 diagnosis.

Roman by birth, the daughter of a film composer and an artists’ agent, Fusco made her Scala debut in 1960 and enjoyed a two-decade career.
She went on to teach voice at various conservatories.

The conductor Ludovic Morlot has switched to Intermusica for worldwide management.

He was previously with AskonasHolt.

Morlot has been without a music director title since leaving the Seattle Symphony last year.

 

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the Covid lockdown, which should have ended this weekend, will be extended for at least another month.

That means all theatres and hotels to remain closed until January. No public festivities for Christmas and New Year.
Rehearsals may continue but audiences are strictly locked out.
Ski slopes will open but tourists will not be admitted. Night-time curfew will clock in at 8pm.
‘We will have to live with further massive restrictions,’ the chancellor said.

A Guardian exclusive:

Amaraterra, a band who perform traditional southern Italian music, said they were excited when they were approached by producers who were enthusiastic about them appearing on the BBC  companion programme It Takes Two.

However, when they asked for a fee to compensate them for a day’s work the BBC producers told them, in emails seen by the Guardian: “We just don’t have money in the budget to pay for contributors.” Instead, they were offered a free lunch …

 

press release:
Lucerne, 2 December 2020. The entirety of our social life has been altered this year, and with it how we perceive and appreciate culture: in short, all the norms have been upended and gone “crazy.” This is the theme of the 2021 Summer Festival, in the multifaceted sense of the German word for crazy (“verrückt”), which suggests going mad but also a shifting of paradigms. With the program preview to be published today, Lucerne Festival expects the summer festival to be implemented as planned….

The focus will be on innovators and revolutionaries in music history, from Bach to Boulez, as well as on such musical milestones as Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps and works that go beyond “normal” expectations, such as the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. Herbert Blomstedt and the Vienna Philharmonic will take on his Fourth, the Romantic; the Royal Concertgebouworkest under the direction of Daniel Harding will perform the Seventh; the Lucerne Festival Orchestra will present the Eighth under Yannick Nézet-Séguin; and the Ninth will be interpreted by the Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim. Three operas with “crazy” plots and protagonists are also on the program: Handel’s Partenope with William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, and Verdi’s Falstaff with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer.

 

Nicolas Altstaedt has cancelled his solo spot with the Berlin Phil this Saturday ‘due to illness’.

Press release: As a result, the Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor op. 33 by Camille Saint-Saëns will not be part of the broadcast and will not be substituted by another work.

They have four days to find another cellist, and clearly they can’t.

I’ve got one living just across the road. He could be there by teatime.

Dies it have to be so ugly?

So unsexy?

So… contemporary, in the worst sense of the word?

It’s at the Bavarian State Opera online tonight. Figure it out for yourselves.