The American conductor has put all his eggs in the new basket of James Brown Management, successor to the collapsed Hazard Chase.
Litton, who is music director of New York City Ballet Orchestra, was previously with Ron Merlino in North America. Now he’s with rown for worldwide representation.
The Italian pianist Adriano Urso has died of a heart attack while making food deliveries for Just Eat. The cause of death was a heart attack. Adriano was 41.
His brother Emanuele Urso, 37, said Adriano is a ‘symbol of how Italy has forgotten its musicians during the COVID pandemic.’
Adriano’s band says: Adriano Urso was one of the greatest, most fun and gifted musicians we’ve ever met, admired on stage, and had the privilege to share it with. His sudden passing is a big shock and still very hard to grasp. This year has taken a great toll on us all, and we must be brave and have faith we’ll get our lives and our stages back, to honor his memory. Our deepest condolences to his family and his brother Emanuele. Il nostro pensiero è con voi.
While the opera has been cancelled due to Covid, Christian Thielemann plans to conduct three concerts with the Dresden Staatskapelle and Antonio Pappano a fourth. Once of the concerts will be a gala with the Netrebkos.
The programme in overview
April 2: Choral Concert: Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden will open the Salzburg Easter Festival on Good Friday with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem in d minor (K. 626). The Bachchor Salzburg will sing alongside the soloists Golda Schultz, Szilvia Vörös, Sebastian Kohlhepp and Alexander Tsymbalyuk.
April 3: Orchestral Concert Thielemann: Denis Matsuev, one of the most in-demand pianists of his generation, will play Edvard Grieg’s Piano A minor Concerto. The same concert, under the baton of Christian Thielemann, will include Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica.
April 4: Orchestral Concert Pappano: On Easter Sunday, the Easter Festival will welcome Sir Antonio Pappano to the podium of the Staatskapelle. He will conduct Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C major. Hilary Hahn will play Mozart’s A-major Violin Concerto.
April 5: Gala Concert: The Easter Festival will close on Easter Monday with a Gala Concert featuring Anna Netrebko, Golda Schultz and Yusif Eyvazov, who were supposed to sing in Puccini’s Turandot. They will be joined by the Staatskapelle Dresden, once more under the baton of Christian Thielemann.
We have been notified of the death of John Weaver, 83, Director of Music at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church from 1970-2005.
He was chair of the Juilliard School’s organ department from 1987 to 2004 and Head of the organ department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia from 1972 to 2003.
The Hungarian principal conductor of the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Danish Chamber Orchestra has switched agents.
He’s with Julia Albrecht now at K D Schmid, having left his previous agencies Fazer and Raab & Böhm.
The opera singer character Siena Rosso was played by Sabrina Bartlett, but the voice behind her belonged to Rowan Pierce.
Applause, please.
The LA Phil are putting on a fundraising gala this weekend with, among others, Julie Andrews, Natalie Portman and Katie Perry.
The program:
Jessie MONTGOMERY Starburst
ELLINGTON (arr. BLANCHARD) “Martin Luther King” from Three Black Kings
TCHAIKOVSKY Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato
STRAVINSKY Berceuse from The Firebird
Arturo MÁRQUEZ Danzón No. 2
ROMERO Fuga con Pajarillo
MAHLER (arr. STEIN) “Das himmlische Leben”
Only in LA.
In his 1988 breakthrough novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst writes a scene where he is watchng Simon Rattle conduct Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden.
This summer, Rattle’s Tristan will headline the Aix-en-Provence Festival, just announced.
Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme are the protagonists. Simon Stone directs. The LSO are in the pit, with an Estonian chorus.
Covid permitting.
Chris Morley’s review for Slipped Disc of the latest online concert in the CBSO100 season:
Over half a century ago Hugh Macdonald. one of this country’s leading Berlioz experts, wrote in a BBC Music Guide that the composer had described his Rob Roy Overture as “long and diffuse”.
“And so it is,” confirmed the critic. “It should never be performed before an audience who are not wholly aware that Berlioz was ashamed of it.”
Rob Roy is a rarity in the concert-hall, but Symphony Hall gives it socially-distanced room-space for this latest streamed concert by a reduced CBSO. And in fact Berlioz was brutally honest with himself, and Macdonald right to quote him, and to repeat it in his lengthy article in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Even in this willing, muscular performance under Michael Seal’s eloquent conducting this emerged as a disproportionate, sagging and over-long piece. The Scottishisms are quaint, and we do get some wonderful precursors of music which Berlioz would lift for the much more acceptable Harold in Italy (why waste a good idea). But then again there are other Berlioz overtures as unconvincing as this.
We moved to central Europe for Ravel’s Tzigane for violin and orchestra, soloist Eugene Tzikindelean describing it in a pre-performance interview with Seal as “an encompassing piece of the violin repertoire”.
Certainly its gipsy context demands plenty of panache from the violinist, with flourishes of pizzicato, fluting harmonics and spectacular multiple-stopping, all of which Tzikindelean conveyed with impeccable intonation, deep throaty tone in the extended G-string cadenza, and an astute delicacy and clarity of articulation. Seal (who has previous in this piece, once having broken his violin during a lesson on it) led the CBSO in a totally sympathetic collaboration.
Conducting from memory, Seal presided over a remarkably energising account of Beethoven’s ineffable Seventh Symphony, with a wonderful balance between harmonic context and rhythmic drive.
Horns rasped proudly in the opening movement, the slow movement built to emotional heights (or, conversely, dug into emotional depths), and the clarity of the bass triplet-line under the upper dactyllic rhythms was spectacular, even on puny computer sound. The scherzo was bustling and precise. And here I pause.
There had been an illuminating discussion beforehand between Seal and principal clarinettist Oliver Janes, the latter referring to an occasion in Germany when Andris Nelsons had done an immediate “attacca” between the third and fourth movements (I was there, when the CBSO performed all nine symphonies at the Bonn Beethovenfest).
But Seal didn’t do this for this performance, though I am convinced it needs it, as the pulses of the third and fourth movements are identical. Never mind; the swift, demanding tempo he chose for this music of the dancing spheres was brilliantly encompassed, and all of this, despite imaginative camera-work, without the adrenaline of a live audience and no applause at the end!
I have always liked Alfred Schnittke’s reworking of the incomplete second movement of Mahler’s piano quartet, written for a college exam.
‘Not a fragment,’ says one of the experts about the 94-second piece. ‘It’s a full-standing new work.’
Make your mind up below.
Kreisler and Heifetz were both born on February 2, one in 1875, the other 1902.
Heifetz, Kreisler and Zimbalist in 1918, possibly shielding from Spanish Flu.
Heifetz would today have entered his 120th year.
