The Amsterdam theatre group ITA has dismissed the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, following reports of ‘unacceptable behaviour’ under his leadership.
Van Hove, 65, resigned last year as artistic director but retained a €145,000 salary as artistic advisor, which has now been terminated.
The city-funded company’s entire board has also resigned. More here.
Van Hove has staged productions at the Metropolitan Opera, as well as on Broadway and in the West End.
The Very Reverend Jane Hedges, Dean of Norwich Cathedral from 2014 to 2022, has been called in to assist in the Bishop’s Review of Winchester Cathedral, where the unhappy comings and goings have been recorded in these pages.
‘In-person interviews are being organised by the reviewers throughout September and beyond,’ the website says.
The Royal Opera in Stockholm has a new artistic director, replacing Michael Cavanagh, who died suddenly in March.
His successor is Tobias Theorell, presently in the same job at Stockholm’s secondary Folkoperan.
The violinist posts:
This is the view from my hotel room here in Copenhagen and a lot of noise …
Recital is at 5 PM!
Tour number 2 – next week is the start of my Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra tour.
The Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras have engaged the Frenchman Christophe Rousset in place of Sir John Eliot Gardiner on their next tour.
Gardiner, 81, was fired after a violent incident.
Rousset, 63, is a much-recorded harpsichordist and conductor with strong early-music credentials.
He will make his MCO conducting debut in December with concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, La Scala, Milan, and other venues to be confirmed next week. They are likely to include Alte Oper Frankfurt, Konzerthaus Vienna, Konzerthaus Dortmund, and Elbphilharmonie Hamburg.
The soloists include Hilary Cronin, Bethany Horak- Hallett, Florian Sievers and Florian Störtz.
Rousset is a box-office draw. Whether he matches JEG’s force remains to be tested.
Daniele Rustioni and Dalia Stasevska meet up on a London park bench for the family-friendly Proms.
Amazing how the maestro world has changed in our time.
I had a little reflection on it with Simon Rattle in this weekend’s Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3.
The standard work on the Russian composer for the past four decades has been the four-volume study by David Brown, an English musicologist at the University of Southampton. Brown was a proponent of the narrative that Tchaikovsky died not, as officially decreed, of cholera, but by poison or suicide to suppress a homosexual scandal.
A new book by Simon Morrison, ‘Tchaikovsky’s Empire’, subtitled ‘A new life of Russian’s Greatest Composer’, dismisses Brown’s theory. He ‘presumably contracted (cholera) at one of the restaurants he frequented with family and friends’. Morrison treats Brown with disdain, pummeling him in footnotes, barely mentioning him in the text. He seems determined to reconstruct the gloomy-looking Tchaikovsky as a gregarious, fun-loving man about time.
Fashions come and go in musicology. Morrison, a professor at Princeton, writes with unassuming authority. He’s highly credible. The only problem is that weasel-word ‘presumably‘. We do not yet know for certain what killed Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Some day soon, there will be another tall story.
From the Chicago Symphony:
The CSOA family congratulates CSO cello Loren Brown on his retirement. Brown joined the Orchestra under Music Director Sir Georg Solti in 1985. Across his CSO tenure, he was a soloist in the Orchestra’s first performances of David Ott’s Concerto for Two Cellos, performed in several chamber ensembles and participated in over 40 tours. “I find it remarkable that there is such synergy across more than 100 musicians who come together to carry the legacy of this great orchestra to make music at the highest level with the best conductors and soloists,” he said.
The anti-Israel propagandist Jayson Gillham, who caused a crisis at the Melbourne Symphony, is telling his followers:
I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has shown support over the past week. Your kindness and encouragement truly mean the world to me – I can’t stress enough how much it’s appreciated.
A quick update for you all: I know many are eager to hear ‘Witness’. Connor and I are actively discussing how to release the track. For a sneak peek, tune in to Late Night Live on ABC Radio National tonight at 10pm AEST (repeated Thursday 3pm). I’ll be speaking with David Marr, alongside some brilliant guests, about whether art is political…
Your ongoing interest and support continue to touch me deeply. Let’s keep this important conversation going.
Opponents are branding him Al Jays-zeera.
The New Jersey Symphony, a peripatetic orchestra, has been given a 30-year lease on a new Jersey City hall with 550 seats.
The venue is owned by the city and the gift comes at a vital time. The NJSO has sacked staff and cut concerts to stay solvent this season.
Not many visitors go to Jersey chiefly for the music.
The violist Lee Newcomer, owner of Performer’s Music over four decades, has died, his friends report.
His store was the best meeting place for musicians in the city.
During Covid, Lee raised $40k in donations to keep it open, saying:
Performers Music has been a refuge for musicians in Chicago and around the world, and we want to keep it that way.
We need your help to secure a future.
Performers Music is a sheet music store and practice space in the Fine Arts Building on S. Michigan Avenue. We are the only independently-owned sheet music purveyor in the city and one of just a handful remaining in the nation.
We serve all musicians—professionals, amateurs, teachers, and students at every level. Our selection of sheet music includes classical solo, chamber, and orchestral music, as well as opera, jazz, vocal standards, and show tunes, with a wide variety of methods, studies, and educational materials. We also excel at researching hard-to-get music. Here you can look at music in person and compare different editions and pieces.
The store was opened in 1981 by Lee Newcomer, a violist. Since its inception, it has grown in size, diversity, and scope: with a staff of knowledgeable, helpful musicians. Recently Performers Music has been challenged by the rise of digital sheet music, and budget cuts to schools and community music programs.
The UK-German cellist Sophie Kauer, who gave a credible performance of the Elgar concerto in the Todd Fields film Tar, has landed another screen role. Sophie will play one of two sisters in Jaclyn Bethany’s English village story, All Five Eyes.
In Tar, she played Cate Blanchett’s latest love interest in the orchestra as the conductor’s marriage unravelled.
Kauer won a DG recording contract on the back of her performance.
