The Nashville Symphony has appointed Peter Otto as its new concertmaster, starting in January.
Peter Otto, German born, has been Acting Concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra from 2018 until 2022.
The Bucharest National Opera orchestra will make its first appearance tonight as Vienna’s Musikvereinsaal, with music by the Romanian composer Ciprian Porumbescu, who died in 1883 at the age of 29.
His Ballad for violin and orchestra is among the most popular pieces in his own country, and unknown elsewhere.
Tonight’s The soloists, choir and orchestra are conducted by Daniel Jinga.
The Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes, who takes her first bows at the end of next month in the Hollywood Bowl, will follow up with a record debut titled Amazonia.
It is described as a ‘celebration of the Amazonian rainforest through works by Heitor Villa-Lobos and Philip Glass.’
Whataever, it’s a fresh take on a major global issue.
The detah has been announced of Jim Parker, composer of Midsomer Murders since 1997. He enjoyed a long collaboration early on with the poet John Betjeman. Away from TV, he wrote copiously for brass bands.
His most memorable piece of scoring was the solo trumpet sequence in House of Cards.
The closing concert of her Buenos Aires festival was Beethoven’s dry run with piano for his eventual ninth symphony.
Be amazed.
Press release:
This September, Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) returns to the Barbican Theatre with the world premiere of King Stakh’s Wild Hunt, a thrilling gothic noir based on the celebrated Belarusian novel.
Directed by BFT co-founders Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, King Stakh’s Wild Hunt is a conversation between art forms, interlacing opera, theatre, multimedia and live music to tell a story rooted in the history of Belarus with blazing relevance to Europe today and our indifference to brutality.
The production brings together actors, opera singers and musicians from Belarus and Ukraine – many of whom have been forced to flee their homelands due to war or dictatorship. It is the most ambitious artistic venture BFT has ever undertaken as well as being a statement of solidarity between Belarusians and Ukrainians, united in total condemnation of the war in Ukraine.
King Stakh’s Wild Hunt is one of the most popular novels by the visionary Belarusian writer, Uladzimir Karatkievich. Inspired by Eastern European folklore it follows the ghostly hunt to free a young heiress from an evil curse….
This world premiere features a score by Olga Podgaiskaya, conducted by Vitali Alekseenok, Artistic Director of the Kharkiv Music Fest in Ukraine and incoming Principal Conductor at Deutsche Oper am Rhein. On stage: seven actors from BFT’s permanent ensemble, all exiled from their Belarusian homeland and now living in Poland and the UK; seven on-stage classical musicians from Belarus and Ukraine, known as the Five-Storey Ensemble; and five opera singers from Ukraine – with the lead roles of Andrey Belaretsky and Nadzeya Yanouskaya performed by Ukrainian baritone Andrei Bondarenko and Ukrainian soprano Tamara Kalinkina.
The debut album of Malakai Bayoh has shot on release to the top of the UK classical charts.
Malakai, now 14, was booed by an audience member in Handel’s Alcina on first appearance at Covent Garden.
His representatives have made the most of that headline incident to launch a considerable career.
Malakai attends Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in west London. His appearance on Britain’s Got Talent was curtailed by a mistaken choice of repertoire, but that blip will soon be forgotten.
Vladimir Jurowski, music director of Bavarian State Opera and the Berlin Radio Symphony, has been outspoken in condemning Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
His younger brother Dmitry (pictured) is music director of two Russian opera houses, in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk.
War always divides families, this Ukraine war more than most.
The soprano Anna Pirozzi, leading the second cast of Aida at the Arena di Verona, found herself being applauded all the way to her hotel as she carried her bouquets through town.
Pirozzi, who has not had an easy rise, deserves every accolade she is getting.
UPDATE: we are advised that the video is from July 28 at Piazza Bra after she sang a second cast Abigaille in Verdi’s Nabucco (with Enkhbat, Vinogradov, Mezzaro, Lo Monaco under Casellati). She is about to sing two Aidas in August (with Margaine, Kunde, Tezier/Y.Park, Siwek under Oren.
A Canadian member of the Houston Symphony first violins, Boson Mo, has been appointed concertmster of the Phoenix Symphony. He starts next month.
Mo was one of CBC Canada’s ’30 under 30 Top Classical Musicians’, alongside Ji So Choi, whose tragic death he mourned last week.
Ruth Miriam Wolkowsky Greenfield, who died this week in Miami, was a rebel with a cause.
As a student she dated a Jamaican classmate. On returning from studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, she opened the Fine Arts Conservatory, possibly the first fully integrated music school in the southern United States.
She taught at Miami-Dade College for 32 years and organised all manner of lively arts events.
We haven’t managed to identify the contestant at this competition, but she looks an awful lot like Martha. Any thoughts?
The judges are all well known, and named.
