Lebrecht Weekly - my/maSCENA

Margot and Rudi: were they lovers?

By Norman Lebrecht on 11 September 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

This post is originally from the source

Royal Opera House In part two of The Daily Telegraph’s serialisation of his extraordinary book on the Royal Opera House, Norman Lebrecht recounts the explosive impact the young Rudolf Nureyev had on both the Royal Ballet and the flagging career of Margot Fonteyn Fonteyn’s secret pension Diana: the Royal Ballet’s biggest fan WHILE the Royal Ballet was dancing in Russia in June 1961, news broke that would change its destiny. A young soloist had broken free from the Kirov Ballet in Paris and requested political asylum. At the height of the Cold War, weeks before the Berlin Wall went…

How the Garden lost its glory

By Norman Lebrecht on 9 September 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

This post is originally from the source

Royal Opera House Arts Council of England In his new book, serialised over three days in ‘The Telegraph’, Norman Lebrecht lifts the lid on the Royal Opera House’s turbulent history. Here, using unprecedented access to key players and private documents, he reveals what happened after Jeremy Isaacs let television cameras into the House The humiliation that forced Genista to resign Backstage, the death of a genius Three costly tenors At the end of 1995, the Royal Opera House stood at a crossroads. The flagship of Britain’s performing arts needed to close for reconstruction but had nowhere to go…

Living on the edge – Reputations are on the line as audience opinion goes live on Radio 3

By Norman Lebrecht on 6 September 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

WITH a week to go before the series goes on air, nothing has been fixed and no participants booked – which is just as I intended. Lebrecht.live, the new freespace on BBC Radio 3 for contentious issues in the arts, is designed to cut against the grain of all the over-scripted, pre-recorded, corporately manacled and politically neutered talk slots that clutter the public-service airwaves. Live, in my view, ought to mean live. In cultural radio, it is more often euphemistic, a cover for institutional cowardice. So-called “live” concert commentary, for instance, is typed up hours ahead for approval by presentation…

A Maestro Need Not be a Mister

By Norman Lebrecht on 1 September 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

The treatment of female conductors is unfair, counterproductive and must stop There was a woman conducting at English National Opera last June. Nothing unusual about that. There are now 64 orchestras in the United States with female music directors. The Berlin Philharmonic, which 17 years ago vehemently resisted Herbert von Karajan’s attempt to introduce a female clarinettist, has quietly accepted Graziella Contratto as assistant conductor. Both of London’s opera houses engaged women as music directors during the past decade and Simone Young has lately taken charge of Opera Australia. On paper, it all looks admirably equitable. Prejudice is a thing…

He might be smiling now… – Franz Welser-Möst Returns to Conduct the Proms

By Norman Lebrecht on 16 August 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

WHEN Franz Welser-Möst last flew out of London in 1996, he was in no hurry ever to return. Installed as music director of the London Philharmonic at the tender age of 29, he found himself on a bucking horse that unseated three managing directors in his six years. Welser-Möst made matters no easier by riding bareback. He opened the LPO’s South Bank residency with a seven-work concert, more than it could afford to rehearse. He got rid of a popular chorus director and publicly sacked a front-desk violinist for not trying hard enough. Raised in Upper Austria, where a maestro’s…

British Pianism and the Art of the Possible

By Norman Lebrecht on 9 August 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

BRITAIN never used to be much of a country for pianists. There was Dame Myra Hess, who played us through the war, and Solomon, who played us out of it until his arm was paralysed by a stroke. Then John Ogdon won the 1962 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, sharing top prize with Vladimir Ashkenazy, and a sea change overcame the self-perception of British pianists. Suddenly, it seemed that our diffident artists were ready to join the mainland of piano playing, where big cats of the keyboard prowl the Liszt études and lazily survey the broader fingerspans of late Busoni. Ogdon…

Salzburg teaches the French a lesson

By Norman Lebrecht on 3 August 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

Salzburg teaches the French a lesson Berlioz’s Les Troyens in Salzburg by Norman Lebrecht / August 3, 2000 BEFORE we all head off for Britain’s favourite holiday destination, let us briefly plumb the hidden depths of French insularity. The nimbus of musical obtuseness now hangs heaviest around Paris. The Salzburg Festival opened last week with its first-ever staging of Les Troyens, the late masterpiece that Hector Berlioz neither saw nor heard and which, for nearly a century after his death, was held to be unperformable. Based on Virgil’s Aeneid and deploying the armies of Athens, Troy and Carthage, the epic…

On Wagner

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 July 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

On Wagner by Norman Lebrecht / July 26, 2000 An orchestral veteran was telling me in the Garrick the other day how Sir Thomas Beecham sent him to Bayreuth in 1934 to buy some heavy-metal instruments for a Ring at Covent Garden. The young visitor was adopted by Bayreuth’s principal hornist, who was so taken with his ‘kleiner Englander’ that, between acts, he rushed over to Winifred Wagner, the English-born festival director, and formally introduced him. Frau Wagner, in return, presented her companion for the evening – and that’s how my friend John became one the few English musicians to…

Poison in the Garden – The declining importance of the arts in the political agenda

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 July 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

Poison in the Garden – The declining importance of the arts in the political agenda. by Norman Lebrecht / July 19, 2000 AS you sit down to read this, I shall be sitting with one of our more rapacious media moguls discussing the ever-widening gap between illusion and cultural reality. We have a government that tells us that it is pumping unprecedented amounts into the arts, yet around the country the arts are in greater distress than ever. Welsh National Opera has announced that it is cancelling its annual visit to Plymouth and halving its fortnight in Liverpool because constraints…

Long Live the Russian Revolution

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 July 2000 Lebrecht Weekly

Long live the Russian revolution Amid scenes of wonderment the visit of the Kirov climaxed this week with an awe-inspiring War and Peace. For the third time this century Russian visitors have opened our eyes and set new standards in opera and ballet. by Norman Lebrecht / July 12, 2000 WITH the outbreak of War and Peace at Covent Garden, the last slab in the monumental Kirov season has been put in place, and it becomes possible to assess the project in its historic perspective – for historic is the only word. Three times in the 20th century the Russians…

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