The US-based Russian pianist has not managed to get a visa all year to fulfil his UK engagements.

No-one is saying what’s really going on, least of all his agents, Opus 3.

There was a disturbance at Belmar Nursing Home (pictured) in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, when a retired opera baritone took off his clothes and went on a rampage after being ordered to stay indoors. Emergency services were called and the story got into the papers.

The naked baritone, who is 63 years old, had once been a regular performer at Glyndebourne and other UK opera companies.(Maybe he thought he was in a modern production.)

Whatever, we will spare his blushes and withhold his name. (Some newspapers have been less discreet).

Last night in Zurich was another embarrassment for the 81 year-old Italian. Christian Berzins reports in his review that he had repeated first-half disagreements with the page-turner both in a Chopin mazurka, which Pollini has played all his life, and in a complex tape work by Luigi Nono.

For an encore, he began a Chopin ballade before the page-turner sat down, telling her loudly, ‘I don’t need you.’

The discomfort was widespread.

Read Berzins review here.

The Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University has announced the death of the composer and conductor Arieh Levanon.

Romanian by origin, he wrote music for films and was Conductor in Residence at the Israel Opera from 1972 to 1984.

His most famous song was this:

After the Hamas massacre of Thai and other foreign workers on October 7, a call has gone out for all hands to the harvest.

Two trombonists – Nitzan Haroz of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Micha Davis of the Israel Philharmonic – were first in line.

photo: FB

Micha writes: ‘This morning we, some of the philharmonic players, families and friends, are volunteering in the cucumber greenhouse (regular, not pickles), back-breaking work in the unusual heat and humidity…. I think it’s better to play Mahler in an air-conditioned hall.’

From my new essay in The Critic, out today:

Possibly the last thing I expected to run into in this life was Yuja Wang playing Pierre Boulez at a David Hockney exhibition in a box-room behind London’s Eurostar terminal.

The incongruities are so fantastically disparate they defeat the act of criticism, which is helpful since the organisers made us sign a prior undertaking not to review the event. It was, they said, an experiment by the Chinese-US pianist, her repertoire decisions were spontaneous and the video elements might be controversial.

All of these arguments struck me as perfectly reasonable and I had no problem at all signing-up to the review ban. Up to the midpoint, that is, when I felt that what I was witnessing in the King’s Cross Lightroom might actually be the future of concerts for the rest of the century. And if that were so, I would be professionally obligated to share the event with history (sorry, Yuja)….

Read on here.

St David’s Hall which has been allowed to deteriorate over several years, has been privatised by the city council and will now be shut for the foreseeable future for extensive repairs.

That leaves the BBC National Orchestra of Wales without a performing venue.

Classical Uprising of Portland, Maine, are collaborating with ChamberQUEER of Brooklyn in putting on two performances of the popular oratorio this weekend. Here’s an extract from the extensive programme note by Dr Emily Isaacson:

Why mess with Messiah? So that more people can share in its power.
Messiah, by George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), tells the story of one man’s work to make his world a better place. The original composition was conceived as an Easter offering that chronicled Jesus’s birth, death, and resurrection. On a macro level, this is a story of creation, struggle, and transformation. This macro narrative is universal, and Handel’s music manifests these human experiences with incredible eloquence, but on a micro level, the details are limiting to other religions and frameworks of identity. Messiah Multiplied employs Handel’s powerful music, modifying and emboldening the libretto to reflect a more universal and inclusive story.

To be clear, we do not intend this project to be anti-religion or anti-classical canon. Quite the opposite. Repositioning the story allows it to resonate with Jewish and ecumenical traditions. Reimagining the text lets it speak to a 21st-century audience. Messiah Multiplied, like so much of Classical Uprising’s work, is inspired by a belief that classical music must rise up, challenge current norms, and re-envision where, how, and for whom we are making music. Our era is marked by an unwillingness to listen to one another; we choose communities and news sources that reinforce our existing views and villainize alternative opinions. Messiah Multiplied galvanizes Handel’s seminal work to help people better understand themselves and each other, and to serve as a tool for discussion, connection, and acceptance.
While this approach may seem brazen, the ethos of Messiah Multiplied is anchored not only in Handel’s music but in the artistic traditions of the Baroque era.

Handel, like many Baroque composers, prioritized the performance experience over an “accurate” rendition of the original score. From the work’s inception in 1741 to Handel’s death in 1759, the composer constantly modified Messiah, as academics explain, to bring new interest to audience members, to oblige the needs of a particular soloist, or to compensate for changing performance conditions. Ultimately,
nearly a third of Messiah underwent revision during Handel’s lifetime, with some arias and choruses existing in three or four different versions. As scholar Jens Peter Larsen explains: ‘The basic question is whether we can talk at all correctly of an “authentic” form of Messiah, understood in our later sense as a final version which as a whole and in details presents the composer’s ultimate view of the form in which he wished to hand down his work to posterity. Strictly speaking, there is no such version.’ For Handel, Messiah was a fluid document intended to be altered for different audiences, not a rigid work of art…

Classical Uprising and ChamberQUEER aspire to make classical music more inclusive, but this project strives for an even loftier goal: to encourage our audience to ask what we can all do to bring about acceptance. Our world is suffering from our inability to speak without yelling and to listen to ideas different from our own. Without civil discourse and without accepting our shared differences as being
worthy of kindness and compassion, we will be our own undoing. Messiah Multiplied aims to encourage open-minded conversation, to foster acceptance, and to ask, “What if ‘Messiah’ is not someone but something: an ethic of care, a movement of inclusivity? What if ‘Messiah’ is a change we can bring about together?”

Your thoughts?

Statement from Moscow: ‘The administration of the Moscow Conservatoire announces with deep regret the death of the head of the chamber ensemble and string quartet department, People’s Artist of Russia, Professor Tigran Abramovich Alikhanov on October 29, 2023.’

Alikhanov was 80.

Moscow born, son of the founder of the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, he taught at the Conservatoire since 1971 and never retired.

It has emerged that both the winner and the joint second-placed candidate in Genoa’s Premio Paganini competition are students of the jury chairman, Salvatore Accardo.

Simon Zhu’s biography lists him as studying at the Walter Stauffer Academy in Cremona with Accardo.

The same academy also congratulates Jingzhi Zhang for coming second.

Once again, the international music competition industry has lived down to its well-deserved reputation.

The classical app continues to hoover up live-performance suppliers.

Press release:

HOUSTON—October 30, 2023—Houston Grand Opera (HGO) is proud to announce its partnership with Apple Music Classical, Apple Music’s new app designed to provide classical music lovers with the ultimate listening experience. The partnership represents a historic opportunity for HGO to share its world-class music-making with a broader audience than ever before.

“As an international company serving an international city, one that each season hosts singers and musicians of peerless artistry, we invite you to join us from around the globe,” says HGO General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor. “Today, we are thrilled to expand our programming to a worldwide audience through our strong new partnership with Apple, whose commitment to excellence and innovation is in perfect alignment with our own long history.”

HGO is the second American opera company to join forces with the brand. As part of the new partnership, the company will be presenting new recordings of classic and contemporary operas from current and future seasons alongside special remastered releases from its rich back catalogue, which spans decades and includes history-making productions such as Treemonisha (1975) and Porgy and Bess (1976).

The company’s first new release on the platform is a Spatial Audio remastered recording of HGO’s iconic 2011 production of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking, conducted by HGO Artistic and Music Director Patrick Summers and starring mezzo-sopranos Joyce DiDonato and Frederica von Stade. Released with Erato/Warner Classics, the album has been remastered in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos for an unparalleled immersive, multidimensional listening experience. HGO’s remastered version—the only Spatial Audio recording of the work, the most performed American opera of the 21st century—became available to audiences exclusively on Apple Music Classical on October 27, 2023. 

The British violinist Leia Zhu, who has made debuts with three of the four independent London orchestras, has gathered her memoirs into a book.

Amazon describe it as ‘independently published.’

This is her story. Told with her own words.

With raw honesty, infectious humour, and boundless passion, Leia Zhu unravels her worldwide escapades and the artful balance of other pursuits with her extraordinary childhood in this captivating memoir.