Category: music

As with two of the three men who previously came forward, Albin Ifsich says the abuse occurred more than four decades ago, when he was 20 and a student at the Meadow Brook summer music school in Michigan, where Levine was teaching. “He said that the abuse continued for several years after he joined a tight-knit clique of young musicians who followed Mr. Levine in Cleveland and later New York.”

With rumors having circulated for so many years, “it will come to the surprise of no one if tiny skeletons come tumbling out of James Levine’s closet like candy from a piñata. At the same time, if any and all of those accusations were to be untrue, no one would stop for a second to consider that an allegation is hardly proof. … And since you can’t prove a negative (or innocence, really), James Levine is now absolutely damned, because it’s just too convenient and all-too-plausible to believe what is being reported.”

Sebastian F. Schwarz, who became general director of the English “country-house opera” festival in May 2016, basically said (in the euphemistic way of such statements) that he isn’t cut out for running a private, non-state-funded company.

Dale Johnson, alongside longtime president Kevin Smith, saw the company through more than one crisis and led it to become one of the most admired regional opera houses in the country, one with a special emphasis on producing new work.

“The company is an outgrowth from, and a uniquely regressive example of, the 19th-century commercial opera houses that flourished through specialization, activity, and growth. August companies erected massive buildings, mounted expensive shows, packed in audiences, and concentrated prestige in the hands of very few gatekeepers, all of them men. That power structure produced a century and a half of lavishly misogynistic operas in which women are constantly going mad, turning into prostitutes, dying, or all three.”

Three men have now accused the conductor of abusing them when they were teenagers. “I don’t know why it was so traumatic,’ [Christopher] Brown, who is now 66, said in a recent interview at his home in St. Paul, Minn., fighting tears at the memory, which he said he was moved to share as part of the national reckoning over sexual misconduct. ‘I don’t know why I got so depressed. But it has to be because of what happened. And I care deeply for those who were also abused, all the people who were in that situation.'”

It all depends on how you experienced the holiday as a child, apparently. (Also, it depends on whether you’re trapped working in a retail environment where Christmas music plays endlessly, and on repeat.)

Composer David Lang wrote the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra, and “more than 1,500 broken musical instruments have been sourced from the dusty corridors of the School District of Philadelphia, which has no budget to fix them.”

The abuse started when the alleged victim was 15, and it was “sexual abuse that lasted for years and led the alleged victim to the brink of suicide,” according to the report. Also according to the report, the alleged victim informed the Met about the abuse in October of 2016. “Earlier this year, Ravinia bestowed a new title on Levine — conductor laureate — and he is expected to lead concerts and hold master classes during two-week summer residencies through 2022.”