From the troubadours of the Orchestre de Paris.
An exclusive stream of last summer’s Athens Festival recital by Leonidas Kavakos.
photo (c) Stavros Habakis
A debutant version of the Howard Blake Snowman hit, performed Covid-style from home.
Don’t get too excited.
He has already conducted the New Year’s concerts in 2009 and 2014 so his name has come up again for a big payday.
This has nothing to do with art: it’s just business.
But if the Vienna Phil keep reverting to the same old – same very old – conductors, they will eventually kill the New Year’s golden goose.
Statement: Daniel Barenboim occupies an extraordinary place in the history of the Vienna Philharmonic. We have not only enjoyed a long and fruitful artistic partnership with him, but also a great friendship. We are grateful to Maestro Barenboim for conducting the first Vienna Philharmonic concert after the Corona Lockdown in June 2020 at the Musikverein. Next year, he will also celebrate his 80th birthday. As a sign of this deep artistic bond, we will ask him to take the podium of the New Year’s Concert for the third time on January 1, 2022.
Peter Gelb’s decision to use European musicians for a New Year’s gala instead of his own unwaged orchestra has drawn fury from AFM local 802 leader Adam Krauthamer. Here is the cutting edge of his statement:
Met management is unethically outsourcing its musicians while, at the same time, attempting to use the pandemic as an opportunity to gut the regular Met musicians’ contract through destructive bargaining. All of these fundraising events can — and should — be done safely right here in New York with members of the Met orchestra. The deepest offense any artistic institution can make is the choice to attack its own artists. Let’s be clear: hiring non-Met musicians under the banner of the Metropolitan Opera and outsourcing the orchestra’s work is an attack on the Met as an artistic institution and an insult to the very artists who work there. The Met is still the only major American orchestra that has furloughed and not paid its musicians or given them any kind of substantial financial aid or lifeline during the pandemic. This is the kind of negligent leadership that leads to the self destruction of the Met’s artistic credibility, and — on a larger scale — to a Great Cultural Depression.
The maestro tells Corriere della Serra that we should not confuse pleasure with pain:
I am against the proposals of some virologists to use closed theatres to administer the vaccine. It would be a convenient choice, but theatres should be reopened to give young people the chance to thrive on culture. I have read outrageous statements about the art world, not motivated by malice but by ignorance, which is more serious.
Slipped Disc had 23,757,707 readers in 2020, which works out at over 2 million a month when we take into account one unaccountably blank summer week in the Google Analytics chart. So make than 24m.
Our readership numbers have risen consistently for the past ten years, thanks to your interest and engagement and the support of our commercial partners. Slipped Disc is by far the world’s most read classical music news site.
But we’re not resting on our laurels.
In the depths of the Covid year, we decided to invest in a building a new site to embrace extra editorial and other opportunities. It sould roll out in the next couple of months.
Watch this space, dear readers.
We’re going places.
A message from Graham Johns, principal percussionist of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.
Make sure you watch to the end.
The Brubeck estate has announced the death of bassist Eugene Wright, last surviving member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
Known as ‘the Senator’, Wright played with played with Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker before joining the modernist Brubeck.
The Hungarian baritone Sándor Sólyom-Nagy has died in Budapest.
He made 238 appearances at the Bayreuth Festival from 1981, notable in Meistersinger and Tannhäuser.
In Budapest, he was a noted Verdian.
