It’s showing here, from Paris.

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

Among composers of the post-War avant-garde, Ligeti is now the most performed. You can go from one end of the year to the other without hearing a note of Boulez or Stockhausen, but Ligeti – who died sooner than the other two, in 2006 – is somehow freshest in mind. His opera Le grand macabre is practically made-for-TV with its post-modern anarchic comedy and his violin concerto is a back-to Bartok contemporary classic.

These piano studies, written in the 1980s and 1990s when Ligeti had fallen out with the didactic avant-gardists, are fiendishly difficult to play and irresistibly easy on the ear…

Read on here.

And here.

En francais ici.

In Czech here.

The long-serving director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Jerold Ottley has died at 86 of the effects of the pandemic.

His wife JoAnn was the Tabernacle Choir’s vocal coach for 24 years.

Ottley’s duties with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir included preparing and performing nearly 1,300 weekly radio and television broadcasts of “Music & the Spoken Word.” He also led the choir in more than 30 commercial recordings and more than 20 major tours, in addition to regular concerts at the Salt Lake Tabernacle.

Aaron Boyd, director of chamber music at Southern Methodist University, has taken his 330 year-old violin to bed to protect it from frost during the power shutdowns.

‘Once it’s cracked, you have to have it fixed -and it’s never quite the same afterwards,’ he explained. 

Many people believe there is a special quality to the Vienna concert audience (read here). Even to the Viennese ticket queue.

Is there?