Uncle Normy, aka Norman Lebrecht, has just interviewed Riccardo Chailly, that sweet big bear of a man, for the BBC
... he has never headed a US orchestra, despite early triumphs in Chicago. But his eyes lit up when I pressed the point and he specified that he was in talks with 'one of the great American musical institutions'.
Should we get him a Red Sox hat already?
Continue reading "Chailly In Talks with "one of the great American musical institutions"" »
Norman Lebrecht reports that the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra has elected British-born Karel Mark Chichon as their new Chief Conductor & Artistic Director. Latvian mezzo, Elīna Garanča, is no doubt proud that her husband is nestling into her birth city, Riga. KMC was the orchestra's Honorary Guest Conductor since 2007.
American violinist Hilary Hahn chatted with Norman Lebrecht for this week's The Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3. The self-titled ~music nerd~ (no worries, Hilary, you're in good company with Lebrecht's other 2009 interviewees William Christie, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Ian Bostridge) spoke about aspects of living on road, her rise as an artist, the importance of her privacy as a performer, and about the state of classical music during the financial crisis. No glimpses into that highly-guarded private life, tho...Lebrecht's too much of a gentleman.
Norman Lebrecht interviews the great maestro William Christie tonight and the BBC will keep the audio file for a week here.
After breaking the Decca-DOA story last week, Norman Lebrecht drives the final stake through the company's shriveled heart. And invokes righteous vengeance by the zombies of the great musicians of the past:
Lebrecht sez:
ENO page here.
***
From the Indy's YouTube channel, Miller on the risks of burying Bohéme under too much schmaltz:
In a Mortal Kombat of snark, Opera Chic's Uncle Normy aka Norman Lebrecht interviews Sir Jonathan Miller, opera's favorite neurologist, for the "Evening Standard". Miller is working on a Brassai-inspired "Bohème" for ENO.
A few choice quotes:
There's also a tasty little Shakespeherian anecdote re: Sir Laurence Olivier and his love for, quote unquote, "the Hebrews".
A little video of Miller talking about the pitfalls of Bohème:
Now, one of the cool things that happen to you when you move to Europe is that you start rethinking the whole clear-cut "genius vs charlatan" thing -- you slowly learn that the two categories are not necessarily antithetical and sometimes even partly overlap. Sir Jonathan seems to be an example of such a phenomenon.
With a magical pen that farts miniature pianos, violins, and records, Norman Lebrecht was idealized for the current cover of the Shanghai Review of Books.
We're so in love with this little cartoon. Does it get any better than this? We hope not.
The Daily Telegraph chooses to join the unruly hordes of those who reduce classical music to a thumbs-up, thumbs-down thang & now attaches stars to their reviews
Three thumbs up!
Norman Lebrecht is like the antichrist of the Messiaen centennial:
What are we to make of an aria that begins: “what do you think of predestination?” This is not art, it is not even theology dressed up as art. It is plain old propaganda, no different from the choral version of the Communist Manifesto I once endured among the hardline Czechs.
The longer St Francis went on, and on, and on, the more I realised that Messiaen is the one great composer in the whole of western music whom I actively dislike.
This is, I assure you, a unique situation. The Catholic symmetries of Bruckner’s symphonies leave me open-mouthed in wonder. I can cope with anti-Semitism in Bach and Wagner. I listen without prejudice to music by misogynists, racialists, one wife-murderer and at least two paedophiles. But with Messiaen, for all his ingenuity, my gorge rises and my tolerance fails.
Now tell us how you really feel, Uncle Normy!
Your newspaper doesn't cover classical music as much as you'd like -- if they cover it at all?
Undiplomatic as always, Norman Lebrecht tries a different perspective -- that of the newspaper editor:
But seen from the editor's seat one could readily understand why US city newspapers were starting to cut back on classical coverage.As editor, try explaining to your chief executing why you are holding a full staff job to report on an art that never makes news, an art that plays the same old music, year after year, with the same parade of expressionless faces on the platform. An art whose audience is greying and unattractive to advertisers. An art whose music director is an absentee European and whose few glamour soloists will only agree to talk about their new record or hair makeover.
(...)
It's not the newspapers that are to blame but the orchestras that over two decades failed to make enough news of any wider relevance to enable editors, many with the best intentions, to retain their music critics. Symphonic stasis is not the sole reason that music criticism is being extinguished across America, but if anyone is pointing fingers the first cause must surely be the stultifying complacency of American orchestras in recent years.�
Diplomatic as always, Unkle Normy (Norman Lebrecht for the general public) comments on the Wagner family shenanigans we reported about earlier this week:
The only way to redeem the Wagner shrine from its appalling past is to
remove the Wagners from its management. They are the last
unconstitutional monarchy on the European continent and their festival
is among the last enclaves of encrusted privilege to receive public
funds, a regressive spa for the super-rich. It will take more than a
pair of squabbling sisters to refresh that scenario.
Waking up in the morning to Herbert von Karajan on the radio, I have to rub my eyes and check the calendar to make sure that Mao Tse-tung is not alive and the Soviet Union still a world power.
There was a time, defined by dictatorship, to which Karajan provided the musical backdrop.
Il Dottor Lebrecht unloads some new ammo on HVK.
Herbert von Karajan was a moral and creative nullity. His myth does not survive the test of time.
Norman Lebrecht wishes Herbert Von Karajan a happy 100th birthday
Now, we admit that the Herbie cult gives us the willies, and his actions during the war are inexcusable, but OC serenely concedes that HVK's Salome is the best she has ever listened to -- his Strauss is generally stellar, and his Trovatore, of all things, gives off a dark, shiny, malevolent beauty that always fascinates OC. His Sibelius is not half bad either, even if not as great as Barbirolli's. And young Karajan's Beethoven symphonies cycle has indeed a majestic beauty (the later sets are just embarrassingly pompous). We also dig a Haffner that HVK conducted in his youth.
But, moral issues aside (again, as a huge Oswald Kabasta fan OC has learned how to separate musical talent from moral flaws) the not so short list of conductors who really run circles around cranky Herbie, with all due respect, makes OC wonder what all the fuss about Karajan's anniversary really is. (Besides, as Uncle Normy points out, that Deutsche Grammophon is trying to make a lazy buck out of it).
...who is the Paris Hilton of classical music? Lebrecht laughs at the question and replies without pausing for thought: "Anna Netrebko."
"Maestro of vitriol" Norman Lebrecht goes to Australia.
A few choice bits from Uncle Normy's poison-dipped pen
- On Jonathan Mills being named director of the Edinburgh International Festival: "Just how Edinburgh got itself into such a selection muddle that it had to hire a minnow from the other side of the world is almost beyond comprehension."
- On Australians in Britain's top arts posts: "Currently here mob-handed and mostly for the wrong reasons. Their country needs them more than we ever will. The message to these misfits is: Aussies, go home."
- On singer Andrea Bocelli: "A San Remo smoocher who was snapped up by desperate classical labels as a marketing gimmick - it's the blind leading the deaf."
Tomorrow super-twin powers BBC Radio 3 + Norman Lebrecht will discuss some of those delightful blights of the classical music industry's bid for crossover that have plagued the consumers' set lists, by grilling some of the masterminds behind the contracts, and uncovering the reasons to why they were ever produced.
Many of the selections will be taken from Carissimo Norman(o)'s latest book, "Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry", specifically the awesome and entertaining addendum of the "20 Worst Recordings Ever Made"...which kept OC equally entertained and equally in awe of Uncle Normy's unwavering insights.
Titled, "Is This A Record?", the program(me) airs tomorrow on Radio 3 at 12:15 GMT...and lowhighlights will include Barbra Streisand, Neil Sedaka, and Pavarotti's duet with Frank Sinatra.
Opera Chic's dear Uncle Normy (Norman Lebrecht for the general audience) wonders:
Whatever became of Jean Sibelius? For the first half of the 20th century, the square-headed Finn was the totemic symbol of a heroic nation and the most admired living symphonist.
His second symphony was performed more often than all of Gustav Mahler's put together. The world's top conductors trekked to Helsinki to bend their knees and inquire after his long- awaited eighth symphony. The British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams said that all modern music should be ``like Sibelius.''
Today, half a century after his death, the commemoration is being marked by virtual silence. Apart from an October symphonic cycle planned in Los Angeles and London by Esa-Pekka Salonen and another in Birmingham, England, by fellow Finn Sakari Oramo, few Sibelius retrospectives have been announced beyond the Baltic. (The Lahti Symphony Orchestra's Sibelius Festival is in September.) Boston, where Serge Koussevitzky made Sibelius a citizen of Symphony Hall, is mysteriously muted, as is Berlin, where Herbert von Karajan cultivated a distinctive Sibelius style. New York -- with Lorin Maazel, a noted Sibelian, at the helm -- will hear only the violin concerto.
A profession that celebrated Mozart's 250th anniversary last year with grotesque overkill has downplayed the Sibelius jubilee to the point of near-oblivion. If only as a matter of natural justice, we ought to be hearing more Sibelius this year.
Please, yes. Please. More Sibelius. Feed more Sibelius in Opera Chic's hungry maw.
Now!
Opera Chic's reader and commenter, the wonderful young Milanese maestro Francesco Maria Colombo, has conducted less than two years ago a heartbreakingly delicate Sibelius 7 at Milan's Auditorium Verdi with Orchestra Verdi, and we have been horrified to learn that it was the first time -- I mean, dude, the first time evar -- that the immortal work had been performed in the city of la Scala.
It's just amazing how a giant can fall out of fashion for silly reasons. Every once in a while a lazy record company cranks out a Sibelius cd with the unavoidable horrible cover art with snowy panorama, or icebergs (waiting for the Polar bears cover anytime soon!), and then nothing. He's reduced to a curiosity.
Opera Chic loves Lenny's Sibelius, and Karajan, of course, and the Jarvis deserve to be listened to carefully, too.
But the Sibelius that makes her dream is always the one conducted by the glorious John Barbirolli, another underrated giant. Ignore the stupid frozen cover art: the box set contains highly flammable material.
And if the pros would rather play the same trite material, safer of course, let us hear it from the kids. Maybe they kinda suXXor, but they're playing Sibelius with the awe he deserves and -- dare we say it? -- with love.
If Opera Chic were lucky enough to be in London this week, she would be first in line to buy tickets for tonight's (Tuesday, March 20, 2007) seminar on music, "Off the Record - the life and death of classical recording," at The British Library Conference Centre. As part of their Patrick Saul Seminars, Norman Lebrecht will present a dialogue on the evolving (and past) history of classical recordings and the classical recording industry, in reference to his upcoming book, “Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry,” (Amazon pre-order only) adding to the dynasty of his previous works.
Last night in Milan was the first Aida performance after the Alagna scandal, and the audience’s reaction have been extremely positive. This only serves in positively reinforcing Teatro alla Scala’s hard-line response to Alagna’s walk-off.
Reuters has started polling British music critics, and they are also dipping their cups into the punch-bowl of Alagna Hater-ade.
Norman Lebrecht states, "I can't recall any incident where an artist has walked off stage leaving colleagues open mouthed for no reason other than a bit of barracking."
[…]”’This could be the end of his mainstream career.’ Lebrecht and others said opera houses would now be more wary of hiring Alagna, unsure how he might react under pressure and knowing that his name would long be associated with the walkout. The fact that he is threatening to sue La Scala will not help.”
[…]"It's another fall in his stock," said Neil Fisher, classical music and opera editor at The Times newspaper in London. "It all adds up to a rather bad prognosis."
