The organist and conductor Michael Hedley, resident at Amsterdam’s Sint-Nicolaasbasiliek for the past twenty years, died yesterday, two weeks after being diagnosed with Covid-19.

An organist in his teens in Newcastle, he studied at the Guildhall with Nicholas Danby and moved in 1978 to the Netherlands, where he was regarded as one of the country’s foremost church musicians.

It’s the centenary of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt. Premiered in Cologne on December 4, 1920, it became the most performed opera in Vienna between 1920 and 1938.

Cologne Opera is streaming it live tonight:

Mind that chair.

The Vienna Phil are going ahead with their Strauss extravaganza in an empty, locked-out Musikverein.

The national broadcaster ORF will inject ‘interactive’ applause at appropriaute intervals, just as it does in football matches.

This is literally fake news.

Maybe Maestro Muti should put in a word?

Chris Morley’s review of the latest CBSO centenary concert:

CBSO (streamed from Symphony Hall)
*****

This latest streamed concert from the CBSO in these locked-down times was well-conceived, two refreshing open-air works preceding one cathedral-closed. Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla introduced the programme charmingly and persuasively, and trumpeter Jonathan Quirke prefaced the opening item enthusiastically and informatively, telling us how John Ireland’s Downland Suite had been composed as a brass band competition test-piece (as was Elgar’s Severn Suite). I have to say I prefer the string orchestra transcription, which was the title-music to BBC TV’s The Pearcross Girls, with the wondrous Penelope Wilton, nearly 50 years ago, but this was a crisp account from the brass players here, lyrical, smoothly-phrased and sensitively-balanced.

The trouble was, I couldn’t see it! There was no vision from the link I was given, so all I had to work on was puny sound from my laptop. If only this had been a broadcast heard through my well-setup loudspeakers, but in the event this was the most difficult reviewing experience I have ever endured in over half a century.

Never mind, it was good to hear the Bartok Divertimento for Strings (the first time the CBSO had played it in over 40 years, said new concertmaster Eugene Tzkindelean in his eloquent introduction, before leading a vibrant, biting, dynamically sensitive account).
Having to concentrate on just the sound, I had never realised the homage Bartok pays to the Ravel String Quartet in the central movement (and what a wonderful high violin attack in the middle there from the CBSO), and the pizzicato just before the end of the finale was gripping.

I wish I could have seen the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis which ended the programme, to observe all its built-in social distancing in Symphony Hall between the two orchestras and solo ensemble. Mirga conducted a reading smoothly manipulative in tempo, fully appreciative of the music’s ethereal qualities (she described the second orchestra as “the voice from heaven”), and this music cast a spell which worked even in my technologically hampered conditions.
Christopher Morley

Dozens of Slippedisc readers rushed to defend Ein Heldenleben, an appalling musical concept that is redeemed from time to time by a brilliant conductor.

Here’s its companion piece, the self-regarding domestic symphony in which Richard Strauss portrays a day in the life of his marriage, including breakfast, childcare and marital intimacy. Way beyond embarrassing.