Category: music

John Neschling, the child of Austrians who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, is a conductor and composer of film scores (“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” for instance). But now he’s been fired as artistic director at São Paulo’s opera house after he was accused in a corruption scandal: “I’m being attacked by liars and thieves in a witch hunt of the lowest caliber,” he says.

Sellars: “Mozart’s very courageous and breathtaking gesture is to treat all people of all classes as equals in the quartets and sextets and trios, where people of very different social status are treated equally by the music. Their humanity is equally honored and represented.”

The Met hasn’t performed an opera written by a woman since Ethel Smyth’s “Der Wald” in 1903. (Read that sentence one more time, and think about it hard.) So it’s a major statement for the company to be adding Ms. Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” to its history — though this is a slightly delicate matter, since she has long resisted being categorized (read: ghettoized) as a “female composer.”

Last year the company announced it was moving to a festival format. General Director Kim Gaynor: “I don’t want to abandon our presence throughout the year. The festival I really believe in because a festival allows you to do things you can’t do in a regular season. But at the same time, we must maintain our traditional audience until they die or they go to Florida or Mexico to retire. We must do that because those audiences still are the lifeblood of the organization.”

The musicians are taking a sizable pay cut in the first year of the new contract’s five-year term, with salaries edging back upward later.

“The sides could agree to a deal as soon as this week, resuscitating the symphony’s dormant season, people with ties to both sides in the labor dispute told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week.”

Covers of novels are ‘revealed’ on social media with no mention of the illustrator, signings take place without both the author and the illustrator of a picturebook present, publishers forget to list illustrators on Amazon, and in a recent case the illustrator of Pigín of Howth by Kathleen Watkins, Margaret Anne Suggs was left off the Irish Book Awards brochure. This is not acceptable and needs to be addressed.

Miloš Karadaglić is giving up performing for at least a season to deal with the recurrence of what he describes as a “complex and uncompromising movement disorder.”

The Funeral Song, written in memory of Rinsky-Korsakov in 1908 and believed lost in the Russian Revolution, turned up last year in a back room at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra will premiere the piece early next month in a concert carried on medici.tv and Mezzo.