Charles Haupt was barely shaving when the San Antonio Symphony signed him as concertmaster back in the day. Lukas Foss swooped in 1966 to bring him to the Buffalo Philharmonic, where he served for 37 years. His subsequent music directors were Michael Tilson Thomas, Julius Rudel, Semyon Bychkov, Max Valdes and JoAnn Falletta.

Haupt was also concertmaster for 21 years at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival.

When Leonard Bernstein conducted his DG last recording of West Side Story, Charlie Haupt was leader of the orchestra.

Haupt died in Buffalo on August 18, 2024,aged 85.

She was half-French, half-Italian, spoke six languages and sang in twice as many.

The mega-hits of Caterina Valente, who has died in Switzerland at 93, came mostly in the 1950s.

She made her breakthrough in Germany with such German Schlagers as ‘Ganz Paris träumt von der Liebe’ and ‘Spiel noch einmal für mich, Hababero’. She topped those with a German version of Ernesto Lecuona’s ‘Malagueña’.

Perry Como booked her on his TV show. Sinatra was a fan. She had a decade in the sun.

Slippedisc, courtesy of OperaVision, is streaming  Die Fledermaus today.   Johann Strauss II’s comic operetta in three acts  premiered in 1874 and has become a synonym of the operetta genre. In only six years, the operetta was staged in more than 170 theatres in the German-speaking regions and, by the 1890s, was performed all over the world. The libretto was written by Richard Genée and Karl Haffner after the burlesque The Prison by Julius Roderich Benedix and vaudeville piece Le Révellion by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. The emblem of Viennese refinement, here the new production from Opéra de Lille returns Die Fledermaus to these origines with song and dialogue in French. The staging is entrusted to the colourful imagination of Laurent Pelly. A master of comedy – as seen in his recent  Meistersinger from Madrid – Pelly is able to indulge his taste for zany situations with precision, elegance and charm. This is sparkling Chauve-Souris turned on its head… which, as it were, is the Bat’s most natural position.

Sung in French with subtitles in English and French.

The Plot:  the most brilliant of Austrian operettas takes us to the outskirts of romantic Old Vienna. It’s New Year Eve and we are in the company of Caroline, who is determined to teach her philandering husband Gaillardin a lesson, even while she is being pursued by her former beau, the operatic tenor Alfred. At the centre of the action is the extremely wealthy, eternally bored Prince Orlofsky, whose lavish masked ball brings everything to a most delicious boil. But what if the whole plot has been a cunning plan masterminded by someone just to get back at Gaillardin?

  Streaming on Friday 13th September 1900 CET / 1800 London  /  1300 New York

Anja Mittermüller was named First Prize winner last night the 2024 Wigmore Hall/Bollinger International Song Competition.

She’s 21. Just about old enough to accept a drink from the sponsor.

Swiss based Artists Management Company has signed the Berlin Philharmonic’s assistant conductor Christian Blex.

Blex, 31, has come up through the Siemens Conductors Scholarship of the Karajan Academy.

A pair of public-minded investors, John and Jody Arnhold, have given $15m to support Juilliard’s Creative Enterprise program and $5m more for jazz.

Their hope is that it will ‘bring further vibrancy to a school that has all of the tools to create the next generation of arts performers, arts educators, arts leaders.’

Er, is that Juilliard?

The Manhattan School is a byword for sky-high fees, innate bias, dubious teachers and indifferent student care. There must surely be a better investment somewhere for $20 million.

The Dutch orchestra has just released named of its 14 Academy members for the coming season. All are EU citizens, bar one American:

Look Again: European Paintings—Rethinking Spain & The Spanish Americas​
One thing I’m definitely going to do when I get home to New York next week is to visit the newly renovated and reinstalled ​European Paintings galleries at The Met.

Spain’s “Golden Age”, Siglo de Oro, began in the late 1400s with the marriage of Catholic royals Isabella and Ferdinand, which united the kingdoms of Aragon and Castille. Over the next two centuries, Spain became a mighty empire through marriage alliance, conquest, and war.

Here’s a short ‘taster’ of one section of the exhibition, Look Again: European Paintings 1300-1800 as curator David Pullins and conservator Jose Luis Lazarte Luna  discuss the new approach to Spanish painting of the “Golden Age”.

Read more

We hear the orchestra will ppresent its next CEO before the month is out.

The key factor for the seach committee has been to recruit someone who has the trust of incoming director Gustavo Dudamel.

The only name we have seen in the frame is the Philadelphia Orchestra chief Matias Tarnopolsky, who worked closely with Dudamel when he was director of Cal Performances in Berkeley in the last decade.

Tarnopolsky has turned Philly around over the past three years with music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin.

Will they let him go so soon?

The Harlequin agency in Cardiff which has looked after the baritone Sir Bryn Terfel from the start of his career has agreed a merger with agency Keynote, a London-based artist management company.

Harlequin was started in 1986 by Welsh mezzo-soprano Doreen O’Neill, sister of tenor Dennis. Her artists are mostly Welsh.

Keynote is owned by ex-IMG VP Libby Abrahams and looks after Amanda Echalaz, Rinat Shaham and conductor Tomas Hanus, among others.

Libby says: ‘After ten successful years this is an exciting new chapter for Keynote and a great privilege to work with Sir Bryn Terfel.’

Sir Bryn Terfel, a co-owner of Harlequin, says: ‘From the onset, Harlequin Agency has played a pivotal role in developing and building my career. It has always been my dream to continue its work and expand the agency’s potential. I am thrilled that the fabulous Libby Abrahams and her company, Keynote Artist Management, share these same creative values.  The merger of these two dedicated, hard working companies will be a dream come true. I
look forward to an exciting new venture and adding more strings to our bows!’.

The prime minister has offered a tribute to the contest, presently under way. He writes:

The Leeds combines two of my greatest loves: the city that absolutely formed me when I came here as a student; and the joy and discovery of music that changed my life. Everyone involved in this competition will know what I mean when I talk about that experience of being truly moved by a piece of music – of losing yourself and finding something new in the space that artistry creates. The piano does that like no other instrument. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, in particular, never fails to take me to that state. Although that may also be because my wife chose it as her entrance music for our wedding!”

[Music] gave me the confidence to perform, and taught me so much about culture and creativity. Above all, it made me believe that music was something for me. I want that same belief for everyone. So as Prime Minister I am determined to put creativity at the heart of our school curriculum and ensure that every young person has access to music and all the arts – something I know was a lifelong passion of this competition’s long-time Founder, Chair and Artistic Director, the late Dame Fanny Waterman.

That is lavish. We have hardly ever read such words on classical music from a Conservative leader, not since John Major in the early 1990s, at any rate.

Thanks, Sir Keir. (You can keep my winter fuel payment.)

The death has been communicated of Christine Weidinger who, on the advice of Marilyn Horne, quit a string of roles at the Metropolitan Opera to become a company member in Stuttgart Oper and then at Bielefeld. Here, she became a specialist in bel canto.

She returned to the Met in 1992, after an absence of 16 years, in Rossini’s Semiramide.

Christine Weidinger died of brain cancer on August 24 at the age of 78.