MUSIClassical ALLEGRO
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Topic: NEWS performers
Sir Colin Davis — “the reluctant king of English music making,” the FT calls him — recounts in conversation a turning point in his life that sounds like a parable for each and all of us and maybe for great nations, too. The year must have been 1962. Davis, who’s now 80, was then 35, a tempestuous young superstar conductor with the BBC and other symphony orchestras in London. He had just come through “the last night at the Proms,” the traditional spring revels, when… MORE. 
Violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has been named music director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra. Salerno-Sonnenberg will lead four sets of subscription concerts each season for the 17-member string orchestra. The internationally known Salerno-Sonnenberg has played with a number of orchestras and was a recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize in 1999. The New Century Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1992. The orchestra performs without a conductor and makes musical decisions collaboratively. The music director chooses programs and guides the artistic vision of the group. 
She's a leading singer at the Metropolitan Opera, she's been knighted by the French government, and she's the most recorded mezzo-soprano of all time. But Jennifer Larmore insists she's not a diva. 
Pier Miranda Ferraro, an Italian tenor who sang in the 1960s and 1970s and was noted for his interpretation of Giuseppe Verdi's "Otello," died Friday 18 JAN 2008, at his home in Milan, family members said. He was 83. 
"Brigg Fair" is an English folk song. It is best known in a choral arrangement by Percy Grainger and a subsequent set of orchestral variations by Frederick Delius. In 1907, Delius heard the setting and was impressed by both the tune and the arrangement. With Grainger's permission, Delius used the song as the basis of an orchestral work. The first public performance was in Liverpool, on 18 January 1908, under Granville Bantock. There was an earlier private performance in 1907 shortly after completion in Basle under the direction of Hermann Suter. The work was dedicated to Grainger, who claimed to have suggested the form, which he described as in the manner of a passacaglia. 
Giuliano Ciannella, an active exponent of the lyric tenor and Verdi repertory in the 1980s, has died, 13 JAN 2008. A student of Carlo Bergonzi, the tenor made his professional debut at Teatro Nuovo, Milan, in 1974, and arrived at La Scala in 1976, as Cassio in Otello. His first appearances with the Met were as Alfredo in spring 1979 Parks concerts of La Traviata: his official Met debut came the following autumn, as Cassio in a season-opening Otello that was also telecast on Live from the Met. 
Sergej Larin, a Russian tenor who found praise in European and American houses singing lirico-spinto roles as well as Russian repertory that included Boris Godunov's Grigory and Onegin's Lensky, has died following a long illness. Larin, who would have been 52 in March, died on January 13, 2008, in Bratislava. 
Manchester's Halle Orchestra is 150 years old. And what a difference it's made to the cultural life of the city...... The Hallé's 150th Anniversary Concert is at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (photo) on 30 January. The Hallé 150 season continues throughout the year... 