Opera Chic

Jessica Duchen & the Seamy Side of Classical Music Competitions

Jessica Duchen's liberally-redacted piece on the corruption behind classical music competitions appears in today's Independent, and it's a sobering read, regardless of the fact that it was altered under the happy red pens of editing lawyers.

With "The Murky Music Prize", Jessica delves into the scarily-corrupt world of classical auditions, where the fear of lawsuits keeps the whistle-blowers from speaking out, and under the promise of awards & promotion, "there lies an iceberg of nepotism, sexual coercion, financial greed and downright megalomania that has gone unchecked for decades."

Here's the article that appears in The Independent, and here's Jessica on how her original article was altered.

Duchen On Child Prodigies

Jessica Duchen writes in today's The Independent about Faryl Smith, child prodigies, and the parents who push them:

Boys can seem more resilient than girls, perhaps because they aren’t generally exploited for their looks. Nobody took Daniel Barenboim’s photograph walking out of the sea in a wet t-shirt when he was 14, unlike Vanessa-Mae, nor draped him suggestively over a couch, unlike Harnoy.

Ew.

Birthdays: Jessica Duchen's Blog, Javier Bardem

 

Jessica Duchen's blog turns 5.

Javier Bardem turns 40.

Coincidence?

We think not.

Buon compleanno to both!

Jessica Shanks Handel

Jessica Duchen might not be the biggest fan of Handel's ever.

(This is an example of British understatement).

She writes in the Independent:

"Beethoven said: "Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived." He was wrong: he deserved that epithet himself. Handel can't hold a candle to Bach, let alone Beethoven. A one-man baroque-and-roll hit factory, he compromised his art by selling out. Even if he did move to Britain".

More on her blog -- the director's cut, with extra snark.

If you invite the delightful Jess over for tea, please hide your antique copy of Mainwaring's
Memoirs of the life of the late George Frederic Handel.

Just so you know.

All About Korngold, Courtesy Of Jessica And The Beeb

Jessica Duchen just went to BBC Radio 3's Music Matters and owned Korngold (John Adams, too).

You can listen again online until next Saturday.

Jess 4 Korngold

Jessica Duchen -- among many other things, also a distinguished Korngold biographer -- brilliantly argues the case for Erich:

Korngold is not the first composer to be judged by what he wasn't, rather than what he was. Among others is Schubert, who has never been forgiven for not being Beethoven; Liszt, who some people seem to think should have been Chopin; and our darling Mendelssohn, who was in many ways a better composer than Schumann but committed the double-whammy error of being born Jewish and subsequently becoming a genuine, not just expedient, convert to Christianity, thereby rubbing everyone up the wrong way. Such judgments damage reputations, and quite unnecessarily: they blind the critic to whatever positive qualities an artist may be offering on his own terms, qualities which may need the critic to have enough imagination to accept a different perspective. Why should Schubert be Beethoven, when Beethoven could never have written Winterreise?

Jessica also made a podcast about Die Tote Stadt for the ROH here.

When it comes to chronically misunderstood or unjustly forgotten composers, Opera Chic is on the record as a Zemlinsky girl first and foremost, but Korngold's pretty bada$$, too. And Jess is as always spot-on, panning someone (a composer, a musician, a singer) for the crime of not being someone else is an old, unfair, terrible habit of music critics.

The Mendelssohn Affidavit: Jessica Duchen Investigates The Possible Suicide Mystery

Jessica Duchen unveils the mystery behind the shiksa-chasing last year of poor Felix's life:

Did Felix Mendelssohn's passion for the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind lead to his early death? If reports of a document buried in the bowels of the Royal Academy of Music are to be believed, a potentially devastating new light is waiting to be shed on the composer's life, his death and his music, on the eve of his bicentenary, which is sparking worldwide celebrations in 2009.

In 1896, Lind's husband, Otto Goldschmidt, allegedly placed in the archive of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation (housed at the RAM) an affidavit in which – according to Professor Curtis Price, former principal of the RAM – he declares that he'd destroyed a letter that would have been deeply injurious to the reputations of his wife and Mendelssohn: an 1847 missive from the composer to the soprano declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused. Lind, one infers, did refuse. Several months later, Mendelssohn was dead.

Jessica Duchen's BBC Mendelssohn Blog Goes Live

As 2009 is among other things a Mendelssohn year (it's also a Haendel, Purcell, and Haydn year), the BBC has hired friend of Opera Chic Jessica Duchen to blog about old Felix.

This is her first post of the year:

"Were Mendelssohn's parents classic prodigy-pushers? For once, the answer appears to be 'no'."

Kudos to Jess!

p.s.: Purcell will be blogged by the Superfreak Rick "I'm Rick Jones, Bitch!" Jones.

London Philharmonic Orchestra Tours Germany, Mr. Jessica Duchen Blogs About It

The London Philharmonic Orchestra tours Germany and they're blogging about it -- the orchestra's Konzermeister, jogger Thomas Eisner, aka Mr Jessica Duchen, is in charge of the blog.

Jessica, in the meantime, instead of throwing wild champagne-and-laudanum-fueled parties at her and her husband's place, has decided to embark in a complicated venture: an Internet poll to decide once and for all who's the greatest conductor of them all.

Vote early and often!

(OC said six months ago everything she felt she needed to say on the topic)

Oh, Schiaffi Graziosissimi! Jessica Duchen Slaps Around The HIPsters

Never Mind The Bollocks, It's Jessica Duchen:

Please pardon my French, but the you-must-not-vibrate-ever-ever-ever movement is a load of utter bollocks. I don't know how people have been duped by it for so long. Has everyone forgotten that the cut-down forces of the misleadingly-named 'authentic' movement in the 1980s coincided beautifully with political funding slashes which meant fewer musicians could be paid? Or that Leopold Mozart in his mid-18th-century treatise provides exercises for practising something that any Grade V violin pupil would recognise as vibrato (yes, he calls it 'tremolato' instead, so what?). LM complains about the application of indiscriminate 'tremolato' - the implication being that in the mid 18th century string players didn't use no vibrato: they used too much! That does not mean 'you mustn't use any'. Most irritating of all is that audiences who lap it all up in good faith have been swindled. Enough, already!

Blimey!

When Jess Met Dani: La Duchen Profiles La De Niese (The Director's Cut)

Jessica Duchen interviews Danielle de Niese in today's Independent.

"They look you up and down, and they're like, 'You're an opera singer? You don't look like an opera singer".

In Mighty Duchen's personal blog, Jessicamusic, we are treated to a much longer and uncut version of the interview (those highbrow d00ds at the Indy, bless them, were mostly interested in how hot DDN is and in who's she's dating, hence most of the opera-related stuff
is to be found on the longer version in Jessica's blawg)

Hit The Road, Jess

Jessica Duchen's new tale of secks and violins, Hungarian Dances, goes on tour, touches English towns with crazily charming names.

Jessica Duchen's Hungarian Dances

We bow our heads to the superior woman: novelist, musicologist, critic, Independent writer, Korngold and Fauré biographer, playwright, blogger, cat owner, pianist, hottie, friend of Opera Chic Jessica Duchen. Her new book, Hungarian Dances, is out.

Mighty Jess ftw

Renée Fleming Goes To The Prom

Fleming tonight at the BBC Proms sings Korngold arias from Das Wunder der Heliane and Die Kathrin.

That sexy novelist/critic/playwright/hawtgirl, the phenomenon that is Jessica Duchen, has much moah.

Praise for Jessica Duchen's Elgar Prose

Today’s Corriere della Sera makes mention of Jessica Duchen’s recent (stimulating and informative) article in The Independent, with her ruminations on the (poorly timed) decision to remove the representation of the late-great British composer Sir Edward Elgar from the Bank of England‘s £20 note, only to be marginalized/swapped for an image of unfamiliar economist Adam Smith.

We were thrilled to see her name in our favorite paper, and heap her with hearty applause for the original Independent article!

Merci, Henri

The dear Jessica Duchen and I and, we hope, many other music lovers, are still hungover after the big Chausson birthday parties we threw last night. And the music of chance is sometimes so funny that today, just one day later, we celebrate the birthday of the great, half-forgotten giant to whom Maestro Chausson dedicated his Poème de l'amour et de la mer: Joyeux Anniversaire to Monsieur Henri Duparc.

No funny hat, for once, because Opera Chic thinks that the late maestro's life has been too unhappy already and he doesn't really need the indignity. He just needs our thanks, once again.

Joyeux Anniversaire, Maestro Chausson

This is a day of great joy Chez Opéra Chic: at OC headquarters the party is on. The Krug's flowing to celebrate the birthday of a great maestro -- and the author of one of Opera Chic's favorite pieces, the Poème de l'Amour et de la Mer: so give it up for Ernest Chausson. Send a shoutout to Maestro Barbirolli and la divina Ferrier, because it's right. And then party like it's (Jan 20) 1855.

^^^^^UPDATE^^^^^

I forgot to add that the excellent Chausson essay in the Andante link above is written by the mighty Jessica Duchen, novelist/journalist/critic/operalover/catlover, always present in Opera Chic's blogroll, in her FireFox's History, and in her thoughts.