Friday Miscellanea

I didn't attend a concert yesterday, but tonight is the opera by Luigi Nono, Intolleranza, which should be interesting. So let's have a miscellanea. The Guardian relates how one music educator's work is likely to be imperiled: Afghan orchestras in peril: ‘I cannot imagine a society without music’

For more than a decade, Ahmad Sarmast has taken impoverished children from the streets of Afghanistan and filled their lives with music. One, an orphan girl who hawked chewing gum in one of the most conservative areas of the country, became a conductor of Afghanistan’s first all-female orchestra.

All that is now at risk as the Taliban tighten their grip on power.

“Right now, my biggest concern is for the safety and security of my students and what their future might be. Given the visibility of the school, we are very worried about everyone’s safety,” Sarmast told the Guardian. “Whether the Taliban will allow us to continue, that seems problematic.”

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Via Slipped Disc we learn about the Salzburg Festival's house doctor: TALES OF SALZBURG’S SAVIOUR … THE HOUSE DOCTOR

If you fall ill during the Salzburg Festival, whether as a performer, stagehand or anyone else, the likelihood is that the next face you’ll see belongs to the house doctor, Josef Schlömicher-Thier.

An ear, nose and throat specialist in Neumarkt am Wallersee, he has been the official festival doctor for three decades. One of his first emergencies was to save Placido Domingo’s voice in 1992. Others have been more life threatening.

Through the two summer months, he maintains his own morning clinic in Neumarkt and an afternoon surgery at the festival. He reckons only five percent of his patients are artists.

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From Gramophone; The art of the recording engineer: a conversation with Simon Eadon

I always think that a recording engineer is a bit like the aural equivalent of a photographer, or possibly a painter, in that you are trying to represent as clearly as possible what the artist is doing. To present musicians to the listener with the sense that there's no barrier between the performer and the listener. And you try and present the sound in a way which is going to be convincing over headphones, earbuds and loud speakers. It’s always difficult. Just as with a photograph, what you think of as a good photograph of you might not actually be the truth in how it presents you – that can also be the case with sound. And that's more of an issue these days because artists seems to have a lot more say in the sound rather than letting the engineer, who should know what he or she is doing, decide. But in essence it’s about presenting the musician, or musicians, or orchestra or whatever, in somebody's home in as convincing a manner as possible – given that listening to Mahler’s Eighth out of two wooden boxes with holes cut in them is the most ridiculous idea! But that’s what you're trying to do.

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From the New York Times: Exploring the Jewish Artists Who Helped Make Salzburg a Success

At the exhibition’s opening last month, Austria’s federal minister, Karoline Edtstadler, said that the Salzburg Festival’s Jewish origins were “long swept under the carpet — as so much about Austria’s Nazi past.” In a news release, she called the exhibit, which was supported by the Salzburg Festival and its longtime president, Helga Rabl-Stadler, a valuable step in showing “how profoundly Jewish life influenced Austrian history and our identity.”

The festival granted the museum access to its archives and lent most of the objects on view, which suggests a new willingness to explore the dark corners of its history. The endorsement is a far cry from the outrage that Tony Palmer’s documentary about the festival, which included Nazi-era footage, provoked 15 years ago.

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Creative approaches to a career in music: This musician will sing about your enemies over WhatsApp

“You pay, I sing and dance out your gossip via WhatsApp,” Chitsama said. “I package your slander, anger, congratulations and turn a client’s emotions into shareable songs and beats to dance to.” In many ways, Chitsama acts as not just a songwriter and singer but also a song publisher and a record label, by using WhatsApp to distribute the finished songs.

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Leaving out a few sensational items such as Daniel Barenboim's fit of temper after a concert at the Salzburg Festival, that brings us to our envoi. No obvious choices, it seems. Young and upcoming soprano Regula Mühlemann is a soloist in the staged performance of Handel's IL TRIONFO DEL TEMPO E DEL DISINGANNO at the Festival. Here she is with "He shall feed his flock" from the Messiah.

And for something with a bit more sparkle here is Exsultate Jubilate from Mozart: