The great violinist, concerned about inadequate translations and possible misrepresentations of his reasons for withdrawing from the Verbier Festival, has sent me the following approved English text of his statement. I post it verbatim.

To whom it may concern

You of course remember Mark Twain’s lines to the publisher – “the rumors about my death are highly exaggerated”. Another quote belongs to the great Mstislav Rostropovich, who knew perfectly that the only justification for traveling alone with one’s spouse in those weird Soviet times, was to refer to one’s “unstable health condition”. Instead of “playing this card”, he used the following wording while applying for an exit visa for his spouse from the Soviet government:

“Dear comrades. Because I feel perfectly well and do not experience any health problems, I do want to ask your permission for my wife, the singer Galina Vishnevskaya, to join me on my next concert trip”.

Since your website published a questionable statement issued by the Verbier festival, announcing my cancellation due to “health problems”, I received numerous messages from known and unknown friends concerned for my well being.

My intention today is to use your website to reassure everyone that I am actually fine. To be “tired” does not mean to be ill. Exactly the opposite: tiredness can be seen as an extension of ones state of health and a sign of a busy and active life.

Therefore, unfortunately I must oppose the words and actions of those, who seem to be attempting to give the falsified impression that I am sick.

Dear friends and music lovers,

I am still fine. And I do hope to be around for a while. Sorry if this could be perceived as a challenge. There are many “good behaving” artists, who are obediently following the imposed “rules of the game” with endless hope that this will somehow lead them to “success”.

Some of those artists are obvious victims of aspects of this modern musical industry. Stepping out of a festival with a high profile and great ratings, I do question the integrity of those gifted musicians who are ready to trade their talent for symbolic “recognition” on the wall of “stars”.

I simply want to distance myself from the hype of “eventful gatherings”. My goal has always been to SERVE music and composers, and it will always remain to be. To please crowds, promoters and managers is another issue.

My letter, addressed to the respected organizers of the Verbier festival says it all.

I just want to underline in this text once more the symptoms of the real disease, which strongly spreads, while not always being obvious and “visible”.

All of us must be aware of the dangers that surround young talent today. They too easily become victims of promotional policies and success, especially if the last comes “too early”.

There is a certain tendency to look at brilliant instrumentalists as the “personalities”, which often they are not. Why? Because many of them are able to conquer the most difficult scores with ease, but have little to “say” as a result of it. Thank God there are also those who have the talent, ability and discipline to go into the depths of music making.

To become a real artist, to nurture one’s talent, to discover ones own path in life, this in music takes TIME and EFFORT.

It seems that the music market and its certain “rules” aiming for a quick promotion do often neglect these aspects of creative growth.

Therefore, many wonderful young and gifted artists become victims of a well-orchestrated success, which in fact becomes a real hindrance for them to discover………themselves.

All those for whom Music means more than a vehicle of self-promotion or a subject of small talk, should be reminded of its deep meaning. The fetish of following “names” should not make us blind or deaf. The history of music (supported by many documents of recorded material) should remind us of what real gemstones are, and not allow us to accept many artificial imitations.

Somehow quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, I would say:

“Life without music would be a mistake”.

It is also a mistake for it to be filled (as it happens often today) with many “raising stars” and making this emphasis on entertainment and “small talk” part of our culture.

 

To come to such a conclusion allows me to feel stronger and healthier, not always to be available when asked.

 

I do not expect everyone to share my point of view, but I am can reassure you that it is not related to any “health problems” as used misleadingly by the Verbier festival as an excuse while announcing my cancellation.

 

Nevertheless, I hope the guests and musicians of this year’s festival, will enjoy all the “fabulous performers” and special events.

 

I am sorry not to walk on stage with some of my dear friends.

 

Let’s hope we’ll still share music we all love, in the future.

 

Yours sincerely

Gidon Kremer.

Bartoli for a Halevy DVD, Rene Pape for Wagner and Villazon for an album titled Mexico!

No surprises then among the opera pack.

ECHO Klassik 2011

This list of winners is tediously long, but there are a few good calls within:

Male singer of the year: Thomas Hampson for Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Mahler, DG)

Instrumentalist of the year (accordion): Teodoro Anzellotti for the Goldberg Variations, (Bach, Winter & Winter)

Conductor of the year: Andris Nelsons, for Stravinsky Firebird (with CBSO)

New conductor of the year: Robin Ticciati for Brahms Alto Rhapsody (with Bamberg SO)

Song recording of the year: Diana Damrau, Strauss.

Hilary Hahn, Lisa Batiashvili and Ray Chen are also among the instrumental winners.

Here‘s the full list. Awards ceremony in Octoberr.

 

 

Tania Stavreva is giving two recitals at the Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street, next week and she’s getting carefully kitted out for the occasion. Not just kitted. Body painted.

Tania has a creative relationship with body painter Danny Setiawan and will be displaying their latest work in recital. She has posted some new shots on her facebook page

Tania Stavreva

and, if you happen to be her friend, you can see more there.

Here’s the full recital:

 

The Metropolitan Room Presents:”RHYTHMIC MOVEMENT”
A Modern View of the Classical Music Recital in the 21st Century
with multimedia collaboration featuring:

TANIA STAVREVA, Piano www.taniastavreva.com
DANNY SETIAWAN, Body Paint Art www.denartny.com
TIM DAOUST, live electronics www.timdaoust.com

PROGRAM:

Music and Body Paint multimedia art collaboration:
ERIK SATIE (1866-1925) – 3 Gnossiennes (1890)
http://www.youtube.com/wat?ch?v=9QF1UVwcLp8

ALBERTO GINASTERA (1916-1983) – Danzas Argentinas, Op.2 (1937):
-Danza del viejo boyero (“Dance of the Old Herdsman”)
-Danza de la moza donosa (“Dance of the Beautiful Maiden”)
-Danza del gaucho matrero (“Dance of the Arrogant Cowboy”)

NIKOLAI KAPUSTIN (b. 1937) – Two Jazz Concert Etudes:
– “Prelude”, No.1
– “Toccatina”, No.3

MASON BATES (b.1977) – “White Lies For Lomax” (2007) – with electronic elements

Music and visual art collaboration:
STAVREVA-CAGE (b. 1983) – 3’33 – “Silence” – World Premiere

SCOTT WOLLSCHLEGER (b.1980) – “Chaos Analog” (2007)

TIM DAOUST (b.1981) – “Moon, Tides, Cycles” (2011) – World Premiere

PANCHO VLADIGEROV (1899-1978) – “Rhythmic Movement” (1943)

ALEXANDER VLADIGEROV (1933-1993) – Variations on a Bulgarian Folk Song “Dilmano, Dilbero”, Op.2 (1954)

Cziffra-Korsakov (1921-1994) – Etude de concert No.1 – Le vol du bourdon (“The Flight of the Bumble-bee”)

Ticket Price: $15/ $12 Students & Seniors available at www.metropolitanroom.com(Tickets will be available on the web in few days)

(2 Bevarage Minimum)
For reservations: 212.206.0440Tania Stavreva

In the thick of the biggest currency crisis for a generation, the German chancellor has found time to announce her personal sponsorship of the Baltic Youth Philharmonic. The orchestra consists of 90 students from around the seaboard. They are rehearsing Prokofiev 5th this week in Kaunas, Lithuania, ahead of a grand tour. Krystian Järvi is the founder and artistic director.

Das Baltic Youth Philharmonic unter Kristjan Järvi. Foto: BYP, M. Lawrenz

Angela Merkel’s personal support is a massive morale booster for the students and a money-raiser all the way round the region. It shows that the German leader really cares what her kids are getting up to this summer.
Anyone else care? Cameron? Sarkozy? Obama? I thought not.
(Oh, and let’s not forget Scotland, where they’ve halved the youth orchestra’s subsidy. Is Alex Salmond bothered? Not a bit.)

The Department of Education has dropped cultural subjects from the proposed English Baccalaureate.

That seems so shortsighted when the creative industries are the nation’s biggest and fastest growing export. The Bacc will rank schools’ achievements in key subjects and eventually set the standard for school-leaving exams.

Here’s the breaking story. Not too late to change things.

Bombard Education Sec Michael Gove with your views.

It’s barely a year since he said that every child should have the right to learn to play an instrument at school.

And copy in Jeremy Hunt (if he’s still there after the Murdoch fiasco).

Or so the diva tells Der Stern today.

Also, she’s so fed up with Traviata, she never wants to hear it again.

Talk of biting the hand that feeds you…

Klassik-Diva, Anna Netrebko, Starsopranistin, Erwin Schrott,


The composer Joseph Horowitz is not as widely played as he ought to be.

Aside from one of the best string quartets of the past half century – his fifth (1969) – he has written a delightful Alice in Wonderland ballet and scored some of the most memorable television themes of recent times, including Rumpole of the Bailey. You see? Once heard, never forgotten.

The composer Debbie Wiseman, herself an accomplished television and film (Tom and Viv) composer, will tell the world about Joe in a BBC Radio 4 documentary next Tuesday (July 26th). You’d hardly know about it from the Radio 4 publicity office, so I’m giving it a little boost here. Both Joe and Debbie are exceptionally accomplished composers. Versatile, too.

Debbie has a new CD out, by the way. I shall be listening. So should you.

 

The News of the World journalist who broke the prostitute story about Jeffrey Archer in 1986 has signed a deal to write a book about the rise and fall of the Murdoch empire, reports the Bookseller.

John Lisners, when he tired of doorstepping, retrained as a lawyer. But he can’t stay away from a hot story. He has worked for Rupert on three continents and knows the empire inside out. His publisher, John Blake, describes the book as “a human story, an affectionate portrait, and a story like something out of Shakespeare”.

Hmmmm… are we talking Macbeth, King Lear or Midsummer Night’s Dream?

 

Not the Stanley Kubrick film soundtrack, which is mostly Beethoven 9th, but the songs that Anthony Burgess wrote for an unstaged musical of his novel. They are going to be performed in Manchester next year to mark the book’s 50th anniversary.

Malcolm McDowell as Alex in a scene from the infamous film version of A Clockwork Orange

Burgess has fallen out of fashion since his death in 1993. Most of the 33 novels are forgotten and the music he wrote remains unplayed. A book on the novels and the music by Paul Phillips, published last year by Manchester University Press, has hardly been reviewed. Editors with whom I discussed it could barely manage a yawn. Such are the fluctuations of fashion.

But Burgess will be back. He’s a marvellously fluent writer with an unerring rhythmic ear. The opening sentence of Earthly Powers is one of the most enticing in the English language.

See here for more events in the anniversary year.

 

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone

Two months ago, I reported the death of Vitalij Margulis whose stature among musicians was always miles higher than among media. Since then, I have yet to see an obituary appear in English or German, the two cultures he inhabited in exile (correct me if you’ve seen one).

Just how important a figure he must have been was revealed on the Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3 this week, when the conductor Semyon Bychkov movingly described his role as a pioneer of Russian musicians in exile, ‘the first of us to get a proper job’, a man always willing to share his contact and good fortune with others less fortunate.

Bychkov wanted the world to know of the hope and kindness Margulis shared with hundreds of others. He was a moral guide, said Bychkov in an off-mike comment, almost an archaic exilarch.

Here‘s Mary Kunz Goldman’s report.

Bychkovnorman

With the confidence of well-fed poodles, we snuggled down in  the basket last night to watch the BBC’s 1950s Mad Men tribute, The Hour. It was, as expected, beautifully produced. The costumes walked straight out of V&A showcases, the women smoked with conviction, the walls were tiled by Dutch masters and even the walks were a good imitation of Brighton Rock.

Every leading actor had been puffed in the press for two weeks and expectations were sky-high. Or should that be Sky-high?

And then they opened their mouths.

The language was all wrong. The moment one character said ‘I’m a big fan of yours’, the illusion was shattered. This was not the 1950s but the 2010s making a feeble attempt to sound like the mid-1950s. The more one listened, the wronger it got. Cliché after cliché, pleasantry after unpleasantry, the script reeked of anachronism.

The Hour was supposed to be a thinly-disguised take on the birth of the BBC’s Panorama programme. Not one journalist sounded like the oldies I knew when I came into the profession in the 1970s. This was pastiche crossed with word-search, neither witty nor catty, nor period. It was wrong, wrong, wrong all the way down the hour.

The writer’s credit goes to Abi Morgan. I’m not sure credit is the right word. Morgan’s chief past achievement is the screenplay for Birdsong.

This was a good idea, spoiled for want of a writer’s ear. All that detail, all that expense, and no-one to listen to the language. It would not have cost the BBC much to employ a word-checker, someone who cut the anachronisms from the script and produce a period drama as faultless as Mad Men.

Memo to Mark Thompson: next time, have a good listener on set.

The latest artist to join the informal international boycott of the Brazil Symphony Orchestra is a star bandoneon player from Argentina, the justly celebrated Rodolfo Mederos. His withdrawal is announced in O Globo.

 

The announcement that Roberto Minczuk has been removed from his post as artistic director, while continuing to plan and conduct most concerts, has done little to attenuate international discomfort with an orchestra that has sacked 33 players after they refused to reaudition.

The players appear to be receiving tacit support from immigration officials, who are refusing visas to foreign musicians that Minczuk tried to hire earlier this year to replace them. I hear  from local musicians that the authorities have also blocked an application for a concertmaster from the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra to lead the OSB during a Beethoven cycle conducted next month by Kurt Masur. The status of that cycle must now be in jeopardy.

It is unlikely the boycott will abate until there are changes in the orchestra’s management, together with an acknowledgement that head-on confrontation is no way to improve a performing ensemble.