Intermezzo

Newly-discovered Mozart performed in Salzburg (with video)

Earlier today, two newly-discovered piano pieces by Mozart were performed in Salzburg. It is believed he wrote them at the age of 7 or 8.

Research by the International Mozarteum Foundation revealed that the works, previously thought to be anonymous, were in the writing of Mozart's father Leopold. However the compositional style and the number of technical mistakes suggest that Leopold was merely transcribing the noodlings of his gifted son.

Sadly (and predictably) they're not anything special, but it's still fascinating to see what a prodigy could turn out at an age when most kids are still struggling with their C-major scales.

Video from CBS News (includes conversation with researcher and performance of the pieces):

Stop Press!!! Netrebko and Hvorostovsky cancel tomorrow's Royal Festival Hall gig

I knew it was too good to be true.

This is the sicknote email I just received:

Dear patron,
We are sorry to announce that Anna Netrebko is suffering from influenza and has today withdrawn from the concert at the Royal Festival Hall on Tuesday 19 May 2009. At such short notice, it has not been possible to offer an alternative programme with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the Philharmonia Orchestra and Ion Marin, and so regretfully, the performance tomorrow will not take place. We are working to identify an alternative date for the concert in the future months.

Aaaaargh!!!

Classical Brits - the edited lowlights

Classical Brits - Royal Albert Hall, 14 May 2009

Well, I have survived my first (and probably last) Classical Brits. The things I'll sit through for five minutes of Jonas Kaufmann.

Onr of the low points came early on. A scratchily-amplified Plácido competing with caterwauling Jenkins. Words by the Pope (the ex-goalie, not the ex-Nazi), tune forgettable. Waste of a tenor.

 

David Mellor gassed on for an eternity before presenting Sir Charles Mackerras with an award for his Mozart CD.

 

Lang Lang bashed out Chopin's 'Heroic' Polonaise in crowd-pleasing style.

 

 

............ oh yus, there's more of this stuff............

 

Royal Opera House new season - more details

A little more information about next season emerged at last night's Covent Garden Friends' preview.

Firstly and importantly, Tony Hall confirmed that prices are definitely not going up next season (which contradicts the press conference report of three-monthly 'reviews' - so who knows).

The one exception may be Barry Domingo's Simon Boccanegra in summer 2010, which could be singled out for premium rates. This production gets some heavyweight pimping, including a (free!) Big Screen showing and community activities (mainly in the North). Why, they've even given Barry his own web page. As reported in the press, Plácido/Barry has no Covent Garden bookings any further ahead. So it could be our last chance to experience the Domingo magic on stage. But don't we say that every year?

There will again be various cinema screenings, but few will be live. Details are not finalised, but check here for updates.

There are no new operas in the main house this season because the policy is only one every other year. (2010-11's Anna Nicole Smith project has already been announced). Elaine Padmore did publicly confirm that "three or four" were in the pipeline though.

On a smaller scale, there's the Opera Shots programme of new opera in the Linbury next June. Orlando Gough is the only composer named in the press release, but Jocelyn Pook, Nitin Sawnhey and Neil Hannon have also been approached.

Another Linbury show not in the press release is an Opera Group production in July 2010, likely to be The Lion's Face by Elena Langer. (The OperaGenesis website lists new Linbury projects in development).

Bank manager nicks Dame Kiri's pension

The Mercury News reports a California bank manager has been arrested on suspicion of embezzling more than $650,000 from Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Investigators became suspicious of bank manager Sokvoeun "Cindy" Sou after Dame Kiri's financial adviser spotted unauthorized withdrawals from her retirement account. The checks were made out to Sou's family members.

So it's not just British banks you can't trust......

More here.

Royal Opera House ticket prices to be raised every three months

Well, what Reuters actually says after this morning's ROH press conference is that prices will be *reviewed* every three months. Call me cynical, but we all know what that means. If they can get away with it they will.

Royal Philharmonic Society 2009 Awards - nominations announced

The shortlist for the RPS Awards - the only British classical music awards guaranteed to be Katherine Jenkins-free - was announced earlier today.

Fabulous Ferruccio Furlanetto is nominated in the singer category - but can he beat the Brits, Susan Bullock and Mark Padmore? He deserves a lot more than applause for his magnetic performances in Simon Boccanegra and Don Carlo. I'm thrilled to see George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill and Birwistle's Minotaur given a nod too.

Some of the nominations are listed below; the full list can be found here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Conductor: Ivan Fischer, John Eliot Gardiner, Valery Gergiev

Ensemble: London Sinfonietta, The Monteverdi Choir, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Ensemble 10/10

Instrumentalist: Daniel Barenboim, Steven Isserlis, Janine Jansen

Large-Scale Composition: George Benjamin: Into the Little Hill, Simon Holt: A Table of Noises, Mark-Anthony Turnage: Chicago Remains

Opera and Music Theatre: Barbican: Present Voices – operas by Glass, Golijov and Saariaho, Harrison Birtwistle: The Minotaur (ROH), English National Opera, Independent Opera: Pelléas and Mélisande

Singer: Susan Bullock, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Mark Padmore

Young Artists: Aurora Orchestra, Allan Clayton, Boris Giltburg, Yannick Nézet-Séguin

Royal Opera House price rise shock

and the shock is.........the prices for next season (a few 50p roundings aside) are exactly the same as last year. For the first few productions anyway.  Last year's across-the-board price increases have not been repeated.

What I think we may see instead is that productions move up into a higher price category than before. With so many price categories and no labelling it's hard to tell when this is happening.

But it is 'interesting' that this season's Traviata and Tosca for example, are in the highest price category, previously reserved for five hour Wagnerian epics, which tops out at £210.

Metropolitan Opera mikes up

  "John Tomlinson boomed potently via microphone as Fafner, and Lisette Oropesa, also amplified, chirped sweetly as the Woodbird."

With that one innocent little sentence, the FT's Martin Bernheimer lays out on the page what has long been speculated by its audiences and denied by its management.

As his elegant review of Siegfried confirms - the Met uses amplification.

Would a critic of Mr Bernheimer's stature make such a bold assertion if he wasn't absolutely confident of his facts? Hardly likely.

Can we expect the Met themselves to come clean now?

2009 Proms to cost more for the poor

The Proms must be suffering from rising costs like everyone else. So it's to the BBC's credit that they've managed to hold most 2009 ticket prices at 2008 levels, including season tickets.

But what a shame that the only price increases - of up to 20% - are on the cheapest tickets. A seat in the airy reaches of the Royal Albert Hall's top deck, the Circle, now costs between £1 and £5 more than it did last year. And the concerts in the lowest price band, G - the new music, the late nights, the family shows, the hard sells, the really interesting stuff -  have gone up from £10 to £12.

A couple of quid might not sound like much. The people who are happy to pay upwards of £40 for the best seats probably wouldn't even notice it - so why wasn't it stuck on those tickets instead?

For the students, old people, families and low paid who go for the cheapest seats because that's all they can afford, it can be a real dent in the wallet.  

And a price increase of 20% on the family concerts, which are specifically designed to introduce young people to classical music, simply beggars belief.

Wasn't the original idea behind the Proms to make music more accessible for everyone? 

Has Roger Wright really thought this through?

At best it's a PR blunder, at worst it's a betrayal of the entire spirit of the Proms. 

Another day, another scrap - Ioan Holender vs the Vienna Phil

Vienna Staatsoper intendant Ioan Holender leaves in June 2010 after 18 years in charge (here's the just-announced final season, 2009-10), but he's not going without a fight.

In a combative interview with Gilbert Kaplan of WNYC, he details his problems with the legendarily-bolshy Vienna Philharmonic (also the opera's house orchestra). They don't listen to him, they don't listen to the conductors, and all they want is more dosh.

The pre-recorded interview is due for broadcast tomorrow 5 April - more details and a full transcript here.

Some choice extracts:

"I had a lot of discussions with Simon Rattle when he came to conduct Parsifal, and he comes now back next season with Tristan. And I try to say without any success, to members of the orchestra, “We don’t like how this man is conducting Salome. This is not our style.” And I say to them, “You have to play as he conducts, if you like it or you don’t like it. You must give the respect to the conductor to play his interpretation. And, not he has to conduct as you like it.” This is a fundamental thing, by the way, by this orchestra. And this, I go, but this is the biggest problem what we have, and I told to Welser-Möst and Dominique Meyer if they don’t resolve this problem, it wouldn’t work out. Because today you cannot make music so, they know it, I know it, let’s go ahead with it. The time is over with this. An orchestra must try to play as the conductor is conducting. These nice jokes from Vienna, “What the man conducted yesterday?” And the answer is, “I don’t know what he conducted, we played Beethoven’s Fidelio.” "

"They wrote an agreement from 1952 - are ten Philharmonic concerts, and somebody changed ten with a pencil with 12. That’s all. Today, we don’t pass one day that they are not playing somewhere, something - in Vienna, as you say, or out of Vienna. The record time is dead for the moment or for the moment also for the future years surely. The records - what they did was - in Vienna, done in Vienna in the afternoon, and they didn’t have to leave the town. The world is full of money today, much more as it ever was, and all the cities can pay everybody. This is the biggest problem from the interpretive arts. Caruso sang at the Metropolitan. In his life, he sang two performances at the Vienna State Opera; he sang for La Scala, but he didn’t go all over the world. Today, from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, to India and to China, and to Japan, not only Tokyo, and, and, and, and they want the best of the best. All the world can pay the best of the best, The Vienna Philharmonic is the best of the best, so they go also to Australia, and they are more away than here."

"As more they do there, as less they are here, the more tired they are, is less times they have to study, to read, to prepare themselves. That’s how they make chamber music, which is very important. Then they teach, which is very important. Now they have a fantastic contract with Rolex, but for this fantastic contract they get a lot of money, but for a lot of money they have to do also something. The Musikverein is the best concert hall for Vienna, as you know they cancelled now five concerts in the Musikverein, to do it somewhere else, where there is more money. And newspapers write about this as the situation is really very, very, very bad."

"I regret that I couldn’t resolve, really deeply all the problems with the orchestra about what we spoke."

Olivier Awards - ENO come out on top

The 2009 Olivier Awards winners have been announced and it's no surprise to see ENO's Partenope named as Best New Opera Production and their Edward Gardner receiving the Outstanding Achievement In Opera award. 

These are perhaps not the recipients the professional critics would have chosen (Partenope's reviews were mixed to say the least). But with half their judging panel made up of enthusiastic theatre and opera-goers, the Oliviers reflect public taste better than most.

Radu Lupu returns

Radu Lupu's self-imposed exile from London is at an end. An occasional visitor at best recently, the Howard Hughes of the piano is set to become its Lindsay Lohan as he schedules a massive three - yes three - concerts in London this year.

On 1 October, he performs Mozart's great Piano Concerto No 20 with Sir Colin Davis and the LSO at the Barbican. A repeat of the concert on 4 October is a sign that it may be recorded for the LSO Live record label - and that would be another scarce occurrence.

On 11 December Lupu visits the Royal Festival Hall for Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with Jukka-Pekka Saraste and the LPO.

His transcendental grace and poetry are rare and precious, and his London performances in 2007 and 2008 were ecstatically-received and near-impossible to get tickets for, so early booking would be smart.

No Grigory Sokolov at the Southbank

 

Visa problems have again made Italy-based Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov cancel a London booking. After last year's Barbican concert was called off at short notice comes the news that he won't be visiting the Royal Festival Hall on 29 April as planned.

The issue is that as a non-EU visitor he needs a visa to enter the UK. In the past, someone else could have organised and collected this for him. But with the new-style 'fingerprint' requirements, he has to present his digits in person to be inked and stamped at an authorised British Consulate office. (The visa arrangements for British visitors to Russia are different, but equally tiresome, by the way).

The difficulty for Sokolov is that he lives in Verona, and the nearest office is in Rome, a long exhausting drive, several hours away. Is it worth the sacrifice of time and sanity - on top of the long trip to London in April - just to entertain a British audience for an hour or so?  It seems Sokolov thinks not, so we won't be seeing him.

The Southbank were clearly well-prepared for red tape to stop play. They've arranged a replacement concert at suspiciously short notice - Angela Hewitt will tackle Bach's Goldberg Variations on the date that Sokolov was due to perform.

EXCLUSIVE!!! - Covent Garden premiere for Mariinsky Ring

The Mariinsky Theatre's Ring Cycle is to receive its London premiere at the Royal Opera House this summer.

The production, which opened in St Petersburg in 2003 and visited Cardiff in 2006, has met a mixed reception on its extensive travels so far.

Some criticised 'Production Supervisor' (oh yus) Valery Gergiev for sporting one hat too many.  "Bereft of ideas and dramatic interaction between the characters" was a typical response. Many found the soloists less than ideal: not all the Mariinsky singers are of the exemplary calibre we heard at last week's Barbican performances. Add to that Gergiev's notoriously hot-cold conducting and the results are unpredictable.

But still, as the Times puts it "Even a mediocre Ring is better than none at all".

Dates and ticket information to be announced soon.

 

 

 

 

all photos © Valentin Baranovsky 2007

Daniel Barenboim sticks it to the States

In between rehearsals for tomorrow's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra concerts at Berlin Staatsoper, Daniel Barenboim found time earlier today for a press conference, where he described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as 'local' and criticised the US and Iran for sticking their noses in.

On a musical note, some rehearsal photos below.

From the garrets of Paris to your living room

Sky TV is to simulcast the opening night of ENO's La Bohème on 2 February. Described by Norman Lebrecht in the Evening Standard as "something that looks like the monochrome film set of Hotel du Nord", the new production is directed by Jonathan Miller and features housewives' choice Alfie Boe.

There's a twist. The opera itself will be shown on the Sky Arts 2 channel, while Sky Arts 1 simultaneously broadcasts the backstage action - an idea ENO first tested more than a year ago, when it successfully streamed a dual-angle Carmen on the Radio 3 website.

Sky Arts is now available from Virgin Media as well as Sky. There's a possibility the screening may be made available on the Sky Player site later, too (the usual charge is a reasonable 98p). So no need to rush out and buy a satellite dish. Though a second TV would obviously be handy for the full live-action dual-channel experience.

Daniel Barenboim and West-Eastern Divan cancel Middle East concerts

 

Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan orchestra have cancelled concerts planned for Egypt on 10 January and Qatar on 12 January, citing security risks as the conflict in Gaza continues. It's not clear from the reports I have seen so far whether this was the organisers' choice or the orchestra's (the musicians, who are mostly Arab or Israeli, have some say on the issue of performance locations).

Bloomberg's Shirley Apthorp reports from Barenboim's press conference at the Berlin Staatsoper earlier today:

Barenboim said that he and the orchestra were “sad and appalled” about the situation in Gaza.

“We are not a political organization, and we have never had political goals. But as you can imagine, we have all been deeply affected by the events of recent days.” Barenboim said a late change of plan enabled him to replace the canceled performances with a concert at the Staatsoper.

“Our orchestra has been flatteringly described as an orchestra for peace. It isn’t. Peace calls for different measures. But perhaps it is a model. The fact is that even during this war, our members want to come together and make music with their enemies. I don’t despair. If I did, I would not be here, and we would not be performing. I do despair of the short-sightedness of those who think there is a military solution to this problem.’’

The hastily-organised Berlin Staatsoper replacement concert at 8pm on 12 January sold out so quickly that a second show has been arranged for 11pm. Tickets available here (available in all price categories at the time of writing).

Best of luck to whichever hero is sorting out travel, accommodation and assorted red tape for a full orchestra at six days' notice.

Covent Garden just got cheaper (for some)

The current weakness of the pound is bad news for British operagoers travelling to Europe. Opera is never cheap, anywhere, but now that a pound is worth roughly the same as a euro, continental houses are looking particularly pricey in comparison to Covent Garden.

For the lucky euro-tourists visiting London though, Royal Opera House tickets are about a third cheaper than last year.  Covent Garden top prices of £160 to £210 (depending on the show) compare favourably with Vienna's €168 to €240 and Munich's €138 to €243; even Paris - a shade cheaper at €100 to €172. Could that be one reason why, despite the recession, London so far continues to enjoy packed houses all round?

Viktor & Rolf's opera premiere

Genius art-frockers Viktor & Rolf  are to follow up their Spring 2008 'violins' collection, below, with another musical venture.

Taking their first plunge into operatic waters, they will design the costumes for Robert Wilson's new Baden-Baden production of Der Freischütz, which opens on 30 May 2009.

Wilson's trademark strike-a-pose style should allow them to ignore quotidian dullities like can you move in it? and indulge in the complex constructions they are famed for.

Though this classic from 2005 might be more suitable for the audience: