Intermezzo

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.

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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.