Kirill Karabits, the go-ahead young conductor in Bournemouth, is welcoming survivors of the Chernobyl disaster, close to his Ukrainian home town, to his forthcoming concerts.

Shocking as it is to hear that a new generation of children is being treated for the aftereffects of Soviet negligence 24 years ago, it is warming to know that they are not forgotten.

Details in the press release, below;

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra hosts Chernobyl children at free schools concert

Over 4,000 local schoolchildren to perform song celebrating 200 years of Bournemouth

On 13^th and 14^th July, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra will perform four schools concerts in Poole, presented by the BSO/J.P. Morgan Children’s Composer, Paul Rissmann.  Over 4,000 schoolchildren from schools across Dorset, Poole and Bournemouth will attend the concerts free of charge.

At the Wednesday afternoon concert the audience will include a group of children aged just 10-12 from the Russian town of Belarus, a country still affected by the Chernobyl nuclear fallout, who are in Poole on a recuperative holiday.  This has a special resonance for Kirill Karabits, the BSO’s Principal Conductor, who is originally from Kiev, only some 50 miles from the children’s home town.  When he heard that the group, who speak no English, were to come hear the orchestra play, he recorded a special video welcome in Russian, to be played to them before they hear the concert.   

BSO Community Musician Andy Baker will meet the children in the morning to lead a workshop on the music that is to be played.  One piece he will explain to them is an interactive song, B200, written by Paul Rissmann with the help of Year 4 pupils at Muscliff Primary School, which celebrates the bicentenary of Bournemouth.  Schools across the county have been learning the words and music and will perform the song accompanied by the full orchestra.

Jacky Thorne, BSO’s Head of Communications said, “The BSO is delighted to be making such an important connection with Chernobyl, and looks forward to performing its renowned school concerts to so many young people in Dorset.“

For further information, please contact Helen Tweedy at Albion Media

020 7495 4455 helen@albion-media.co.uk

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra: http://www.bsolive.com/

Chernobyl Children Life Line: http://www.ccll.org.uk/ho/

Albion Media: http://www.albion-media.co.uk/

Editors’ Notes

Concert Details

Tuesday 13^th July

10:15 & 13:30

The Lighthouse, Poole

Wednesday 14^th July

10:15 & 13:30

The Lighthouse, Poole

Kirill Karabits, the go-ahead young conductor in Bournemouth, is welcoming survivors of the Chernobyl disaster, close to his Ukrainian home town, to his forthcoming concerts.

Shocking as it is to hear that a new generation of children is being treated for the aftereffects of Soviet negligence 24 years ago, it is warming to know that they are not forgotten.

Details in the press release, below;

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra hosts Chernobyl children at free schools concert

Over 4,000 local schoolchildren to perform song celebrating 200 years of Bournemouth

On 13^th and 14^th July, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra will perform four schools concerts in Poole, presented by the BSO/J.P. Morgan Children’s Composer, Paul Rissmann.  Over 4,000 schoolchildren from schools across Dorset, Poole and Bournemouth will attend the concerts free of charge.

At the Wednesday afternoon concert the audience will include a group of children aged just 10-12 from the Russian town of Belarus, a country still affected by the Chernobyl nuclear fallout, who are in Poole on a recuperative holiday.  This has a special resonance for Kirill Karabits, the BSO’s Principal Conductor, who is originally from Kiev, only some 50 miles from the children’s home town.  When he heard that the group, who speak no English, were to come hear the orchestra play, he recorded a special video welcome in Russian, to be played to them before they hear the concert.   

BSO Community Musician Andy Baker will meet the children in the morning to lead a workshop on the music that is to be played.  One piece he will explain to them is an interactive song, B200, written by Paul Rissmann with the help of Year 4 pupils at Muscliff Primary School, which celebrates the bicentenary of Bournemouth.  Schools across the county have been learning the words and music and will perform the song accompanied by the full orchestra.

Jacky Thorne, BSO’s Head of Communications said, “The BSO is delighted to be making such an important connection with Chernobyl, and looks forward to performing its renowned school concerts to so many young people in Dorset.“

For further information, please contact Helen Tweedy at Albion Media

020 7495 4455 helen@albion-media.co.uk

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra: http://www.bsolive.com/

Chernobyl Children Life Line: http://www.ccll.org.uk/ho/

Albion Media: http://www.albion-media.co.uk/

Editors’ Notes

Concert Details

Tuesday 13^th July

10:15 & 13:30

The Lighthouse, Poole

Wednesday 14^th July

10:15 & 13:30

The Lighthouse, Poole

Ottawa’s new summer festival, titled above, opened with an octogenarian pianist who put us all to shame, a string quartet at the peak of its powers, a big soprano on the comeback trail and this hardworking writer in keynote lectures on three successive days.

If you want to know what really happened, go to the Emerson Quartet’s lively blog.

http://artistled.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/july-7-esq-season-wrap-up/

Here’s a sample:

Finding dinner proved an enormous challenge as nothing was arranged for us again, like Ravinia. Although Menahem (Pressler)’s page turner called ahead, the place she sent us to turned out to be closed, and we wound up at an un-airconditioned, noisy place where we dined on dried-up burgers and soggy French fries. But the meal mattered not: what was really extraordinary was to listen to Norman Lebrecht – whom we had invited to join us – ask Menahem about his teachers and mentors. Lebrecht: “Did you know anyone who knew Brahms?”  Pressler: “But of course!” And the conversation went on like that into the wee hours and would have continued had I not reminded Menahem of his impending concert the next day.

Ottawa’s new summer festival, titled above, opened with an octogenarian pianist who put us all to shame, a string quartet at the peak of its powers, a big soprano on the comeback trail and this hardworking writer in keynote lectures on three successive days.

If you want to know what really happened, go to the Emerson Quartet’s lively blog.

http://artistled.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/july-7-esq-season-wrap-up/

Here’s a sample:

Finding dinner proved an enormous challenge as nothing was arranged for us again, like Ravinia. Although Menahem (Pressler)’s page turner called ahead, the place she sent us to turned out to be closed, and we wound up at an un-airconditioned, noisy place where we dined on dried-up burgers and soggy French fries. But the meal mattered not: what was really extraordinary was to listen to Norman Lebrecht – whom we had invited to join us – ask Menahem about his teachers and mentors. Lebrecht: “Did you know anyone who knew Brahms?”  Pressler: “But of course!” And the conversation went on like that into the wee hours and would have continued had I not reminded Menahem of his impending concert the next day.

Will Gompertz, the BBC’s highly paid arts/news editor, is about to be put on the spot. A former Tate Gallery staffer who lives in freely admitted awe of its director Nicholas Serota, Gompertz has given large dollops of attention to the Tate and such favoured artists as Francis Alys, Louise Bourgeois and Yinko Shonibare – and that’s in the past month alone.

But when it comes to the big Tate issue, his reticence is stupefying.

The Tate, along with other UK arts bodies, is facing waves of protest from environmental campaigners, outraged that a massive global polluter like BP can seek to cleanse itself in large donations to British art. The Tate’s chairman is Lord Brown, former head of BP. Next week, Brown will preside at the gallery’s summer fundraiser. Greenwash Guerillas intend to picket the party. It will be an uncomfortable occasion.

The Tate, along with the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery and Royal Opera House have issued a statement defending their relationship with BP as legitimate and essential. The company is not, on the whole, an enemy of the people and the art it supports will last long after the last of its oil spill has washed away, along with its hapless present management. Indeed, without BP funds much grassroots art might never develop.

I happen to support that position. The arts cannot afford to be too scrupulous about sources of funding. If cheques are accepted from Russian robber barons and pension-stripping bankers, there is no reason to refuse them from BP, no matter how dirty its seas. The arts are not arbiters of morality or marine police. The arts have a right to accept BP cash.

Nevertheless, there is a heated public debate around BP’s arts role and the BBC ought to be reporting it. So far, not a peep from Gompertz. Not a hint that the Tate party might be less than jolly. Not a word on the Ten O’Clock News about the collision between arts and ecology, although several newspapers have reported it.

That may be an oversight, an error of judgement, or a quiet word from his former boss. Not for us to know. But the BBC needs to be impartial. If Gompertz won’t report the anti-Tate demos, someone else should cover the story. Where’s Razia Iqbal when we really need her? 

I was just back from a research trip to Vienna when the phone rang and a friend offered me a part in a major feature film about Gustav Mahler. If it had been the lead role with a credit above the title, I might have given it more than a minute’s thought, but the best I was told I could hope for was a non-speaking part in the scrummage at a high-society orgy. In short, I could have been a Hollywood stud.

The film was Bruce Beresford’s Bride of the Wind and it sank into video oblivion without proper cinema release, weighted by the silliness of its paltry fictions.

It came to mind this morning when someone directed my eye to a Los Angeles Film Festival premiere of Mahler on the Couch, Felix and Percy Adlon’s fancification of the composer’s encounter with Sigmund Freud. You can tell that it’s fiction because Mahler was never on the couch. He met Freud in a small Dutch town in August 1910 and they set off on a four-hour walking cure. The rest can be read in Why Mahler?, newly obtainable on amazon. 

The first critical grab on Mahler on the Couch suggests that it is afflicted by the same silliness as Beresford’s wretched effort. I don’t expect to watch Johannes Silberschneider, Barbara Romaner, Karl Markovics struggle through 101 minutes, and I don’t object on the whole to the fictionalisation of historical incidents, so long as they enlighten us in some way about the human condition.  The trouble with most such biofilms is that they are riddled with cliches. I hoped for better from the Adlons, but I fear the worst.

Let me know if you’ve seen it.

You can post reviews either here, or on the Why Mahler? facebook page.

The London Jewish Museum of Art last night opened an exhibition of crucifixion images, called Cross Purposes. It contains some extraordinary interpretations from varied collections, by artists Jewish, Christian and neither.

The centrepiece is Marc Chagall’s chilling 1945 analogy of Hitler’s assassination of the Jews and their faith, along with a 1942 companion work by Emmanuel Levi in which a man in prayer-shawl and phylacteries is crucified beneath the sign ‘Jude’ in Gothic script.

There is a skeletal Graham Sutherland, a stagey Maggie Hambling and an unforgettable Duncan Grant that accentuates the Christ-figure’s sexuality. A post-colonial triple crucifixion of black men and white, by the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza (1824-2002), somehow follows you around the room and out of the door into the sun-baked street.

But what’s a Jewish art gallery doing putting on a show of crucifixions? The idea has drawn torrents of abuse from Jewish supporters of the museum, who argue (rightly) that the crucifixion image has been the incitement for 2,000 years of Christian persecution of Jews. The gallery counters that the man on the cross was Jewish; it’s time to reclaim that heritage and discuss the terrible act from the victim’s viewpoint.

I don’t subscribe to either standpoint, but the issue is worth examining with greater intellectual clarity and the show should certainly be on your calendar.

LATE EXTRA: The story has been taken up by the JC:

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/33409/jewish-art-museums-crucifix-exhibition

The London Jewish Museum of Art last night opened an exhibition of crucifixion images, called Cross Purposes. It contains some extraordinary interpretations from varied collections, by artists Jewish, Christian and neither.

The centrepiece is Marc Chagall’s chilling 1945 analogy of Hitler’s assassination of the Jews and their faith, along with a 1942 companion work by Emmanuel Levi in which a man in prayer-shawl and phylacteries is crucified beneath the sign ‘Jude’ in Gothic script.

There is a skeletal Graham Sutherland, a stagey Maggie Hambling and an unforgettable Duncan Grant that accentuates the Christ-figure’s sexuality. A post-colonial triple crucifixion of black men and white, by the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza (1824-2002), somehow follows you around the room and out of the door into the sun-baked street.

But what’s a Jewish art gallery doing putting on a show of crucifixions? The idea has drawn torrents of abuse from Jewish supporters of the museum, who argue (rightly) that the crucifixion image has been the incitement for 2,000 years of Christian persecution of Jews. The gallery counters that the man on the cross was Jewish; it’s time to reclaim that heritage and discuss the terrible act from the victim’s viewpoint.

I don’t subscribe to either standpoint, but the issue is worth examining with greater intellectual clarity and the show should certainly be on your calendar.

LATE EXTRA: The story has been taken up by the JC:

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/33409/jewish-art-museums-crucifix-exhibition

Before your brains get addled by the soundbite merchants from Government and Opposition, I’ve looked at one headline figure in the Budget and come to the conclusion that the arts are going to get off lightly – much more so than they would have done under Labour.

In the months before the last election, major arts instutitions were told to plan for succession ten percent cuts over three years – that’s 27.1 percent.

George Osborne spoke to day of cutting government spending by 25 percent over four years – that’s two percent less and over an extra 12 months.

Crunch this one whichever way you like, but it means the arts ought to get away with less pain under the LibCon coalition than under the feckless hand of Ben Bradshaw.

And if Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt decides to shake down the Arts Council, that measure would be cheered from Land’s End to Hadrian’s Wall. The southwest of England, a LibDem stronghold, has been cruelly neglected by the mandarins of the ACE.

Ahead of today’s austerity Budget the Arts Council of England, which distributes government subsidy across the lively arts, has cut £19 million from its purse. Half of the money is being dredged up from ‘reserves’, but arts organisations have been strimmed for the rest.

All 808 receipients of ACE grants receive a 0.5 percent reduction, spread evenly across the board. That means the Royal Opera House will lose £142,000 – that’s about two-third of its chief executive’s salary, not that he will be taking a pay cut – while your local ethnic arts centre may be down as little as £200. Fair’s fair, right? Everyone must have prizes, and everyone must share the pain in equal measure.

Wrong. The Arts Council was set up by Royal Charter 1945 to nurture creativity by supporting promising start-ups. It was designed to favour excellence and shun mediocrity. Its unstated motto was along the lines of: the best is the enemy of the good.

Today, it delivers equal shares and pain to everyone, regardless of merit. A London orchestra notorious for its minimal rehearsals receives the same grant as a world beater. A theatre in Hampstead that should never have been publicly rebuilt is pumped full of subsidy while little startups like the Broadway-storming Menier Chocolate Factory get nothing.

Given a challenging opportunity to make choices on where it should cut, the ACE simply shut its eyes and spread thin gruel across the board. This is institution that has loss all will and right to exist. Its chief executive, Alan Davey, a former Culture Department bureaucrat, said limply: ‘there really is no more to save.’  

Really? He could start with his own six-digit sinecure and work his way down through an eight-person executive that has proved itself incapable of making decisions, big or small.

The ACE is presently advertising a vacancy for an officer in Corporate Communications. Have they lost all semblance of plot? The ACE is a government welfare agency. It has no corporate function and it can barely communicate the time of day. It should be cutting itself.   

Ahead of today’s austerity Budget the Arts Council of England, which distributes government subsidy across the lively arts, has cut £19 million from its purse. Half of the money is being dredged up from ‘reserves’, but arts organisations have been strimmed for the rest.

All 808 receipients of ACE grants receive a 0.5 percent reduction, spread evenly across the board. That means the Royal Opera House will lose £142,000 – that’s about two-third of its chief executive’s salary, not that he will be taking a pay cut – while your local ethnic arts centre may be down as little as £200. Fair’s fair, right? Everyone must have prizes, and everyone must share the pain in equal measure.

Wrong. The Arts Council was set up by Royal Charter 1945 to nurture creativity by supporting promising start-ups. It was designed to favour excellence and shun mediocrity. Its unstated motto was along the lines of: the best is the enemy of the good.

Today, it delivers equal shares and pain to everyone, regardless of merit. A London orchestra notorious for its minimal rehearsals receives the same grant as a world beater. A theatre in Hampstead that should never have been publicly rebuilt is pumped full of subsidy while little startups like the Broadway-storming Menier Chocolate Factory get nothing.

Given a challenging opportunity to make choices on where it should cut, the ACE simply shut its eyes and spread thin gruel across the board. This is institution that has loss all will and right to exist. Its chief executive, Alan Davey, a former Culture Department bureaucrat, said limply: ‘there really is no more to save.’  

Really? He could start with his own six-digit sinecure and work his way down through an eight-person executive that has proved itself incapable of making decisions, big or small.

The ACE is presently advertising a vacancy for an officer in Corporate Communications. Have they lost all semblance of plot? The ACE is a government welfare agency. It has no corporate function and it can barely communicate the time of day. It should be cutting itself.