Soundbites
Taking a bow
What to do when, midway through the UK premiere of Glière’s Violin Concerto, your £24,000 bow breaks? If you are US violinist Stefan Jackiw (above), playing the work at the Lighthouse in Poole, you simply lean over to the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s leader, borrow their bow, and carry on.
‘This is something I have never experienced before,’ reflected Jackiw later, adding that the incident gave the performance ‘some sort of joyful spontaneity’.
A bright Tom Borrow
One trusts that Tom Borrow has never broken a piano mid-concert. If, however, he should ever do so, he now has an extra £7,000 to help pay for the repairs. The Israeli pianist has been named as the winner of this year’s Terence Judd-hallé Award which, as well as the cash prize, wins him a concerto performance with the Hallé plus a chamber recital at the Manchester-based orchestra’s Hallé St Peter’s venue.
Open the door, Handel
Following a £3m restoration project, the Handel Hendrix House in London is open again to the public. Consisting of 25 Brook St – home to George Frederic Handel in the 18th century – and the adjoining flat at No. 23, which was Jimi Hendrix’s pad in the 1960s, the museum has been expanded. Additional artefacts have been added and a series of recitals is also planned for the year ahead.
Voices from the cave
Conductor Nathalie Stutzmann has received a public ticking off from her own musicians for suggesting in a New York Times interview that playing in an opera orchestra must be a boring existence that involves ‘being in the back of a cave’. Heading onto social media, New York Met orchestra members responded that ‘Our time spent in the orchestra pit is anything but a mundane experience, and we do not consider it a cave’.