From the soundtrack of our lives:
A tweet from the French-Lebanese trumpeter and jazz composer Ibrahim Maalouf:
Sublime orchestre de Vienne qui chaque année excelle autant musicalement qu’il se fait tristement remarquer par son manque de diversité ethnique.
2021 on veut plus de diversité ! Si Vienne est à l’extrême, les orchestres français sont loins du compte aussi…#concertdunouvelan
— Ibrahim Maalouf (@ibrahim_maalouf) January 1, 2021
Seems he’s been watching every year – chaque année – and only just noticed it.
The annual xenophobia fest known as the Eurovision Song Contest, cancelled last year due to Covid, will be held in Rotterdam on May 22, it was confirmed today.
From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
The sound I miss most in our orchestral silence is the unexpected wail of a clarinet, in pain or pleasure like a cat in coitus, at the moment a symphony seems to be drifting towards the intermission. No way is the clarinet going to let this music end without a howl.
Of all clarinet concertos, and I include Mozart’s, Aaron Copland’s is my favourite by a Siamese smile. Grifted from a dying cadence in Mahler’s ninth symphony…
Read on here.
And here.
In Czech.
In The Critic.
If you wish to publish the Lebrecht Album of the Week in other languages, please contact us.
Musicians in the Italian part of the South Tyrol – known in Italian in Alto Adige – have formed the Südtirol Filarmonica. The new ensemble is to make its debut in May at Toblach (Dobbiaco), where the composer Gustav Mahler spent his summers from 1908 to 1910.
The website is published in the indigenous language, Ladins, as well as German, Italian and English.
The music director, Michael Pichler, is from the locality, as are most of the 64 musicians.