A month after Carlos Kleiber died, I ran into a prominent conductor of my acquaintance at Academy Records. When talk turned to Kleiber, he sighed and said, “My God, he was the greatest of us all. The greatest.”
Watch the opening segment of Eric Schulz’s deeply moving portrait of Kleiber, in the words and recollections of his colleagues intercut with rehearsal and concert footage, here. Hat tip: Sybille Werner.
UPDATE: It’s out now on DVD in North America. Find the best price here. If you were in New York City during October 1990 and caught Der Rosenkavalier at the MET, you know what all the buzz was about.
HuffPo reports that Leonard Slatkin and Mitsuko Uchida will cover for Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti, who has been hospitalized following a fainting spell during a rehearsal.
Price made some notable recordings; two of my favorites are a characterful Mozart opera and concert arias album for British RCA and her joyful controbution to the Horenstein/LSO Mahler Fourth originally issues on Classics for Pleasure. Click here for Zachary Woolfe’s NY Times obituary.
I had hoped to blog from MIDEM, the annual international independent music business market at Cannes, but I am so wrapped up with business meetings that I will refer you to Frank Oteri, whose coverage will give you a good idea of what is going on here.
I’m a huge fan of wizardly recording engineer Tony Faulkner, a longtime practicioner of “less-is-more” audiophile recording techniques. He hasn’t hesitated to tip a few sacred cows over the years, and created a major fuss in the classical recording industry during the early 1990s when he had the audacity to criticize no less an institution than Deutsche Grammophon on the matter of their overhyped, artificial-sounding “4D” recording process. In an editorial posted to Classical Source, Tony puts the smackdown on the venerable BBC for labeling its Radio 3 transmissions as “H[igh] D[efinition]” when it simply isn’t true (we’ve been seeing similar misleading monkeyshines in the States). The editorial is a must-read for audiophiles and casual listeners alike.
Hillyer was most well known as the Juilliard Quartet’s founding violist. He was a resident of Boston; Jeremy Eichler has written a detailed obituary for the Boston Globe. Allan Kozinn’s NYTimes.com obituary is also worth a read. UPDATE: Correction to the title to reflect correct year of death. Hat tip: Jeremy Bluhm.
Gene Gaudette on classical music, cultural politics, political culture, media, and his record labels.