The 2014 festival, just announced, will aim to reflect the event’s idealistic origins in the aftermath of war. ‘The Last Days of Mankind’ by Karl Kraus will take centre stage. The Australian Cambridge historian Christopher Clark will give the keynote address on his book, The Sleepwalkers, an account of the bumbling diplomacy that bred the global catastrophe. And a new opera by Marc-André Dalbavie will relate the life of Charlotte Salomon, a young Berlin-Jewish artist who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. ‘The festival is a fruit of war,’ said its president, Helga Rabl-Stadler.

Much of the rest of the festival will focus on Richard Strauss, one of the festival co-founders, whose 150th anniversary falls next year.

Details here (auf Deutsch).

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The week’s results are in from Nielsen Soundscan. They show that the top-selling classical album was a debut by Alma Deutscher, the eight year-old English child who is being traipsed around the chat shows as the next Mozart.

 

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The next highest new entry is, heaven help us, this:

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Looks like the classical recording business in the US has been boning up on Barnum & Bailey.

The veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell is planning a mass picket of the conductor’s Barbican concert tomorrow with the London Symphony Orchestra, Pink News reports.

Last week, Tatchell was removed from the Barbican stage after making a statement protesting against Gergiev’s alliance with Vladimir Putin, whose government has passed an anti-gay discrimination law. Gergiev has dissociated himself from the law, but is tainted by association with Putin, who has built him a splendid new opera house and awarded him state honours.

Russian President Putin presents a Hero of Labour award to Mariinsky theatre director Gergiev during an awards ceremony in St. Petersburg

 

 

The moral imperative here is ambiguous. While the Russian law is disgusting and deserving of protest, nothing in Gergiev’s record shows any sign of prejudice against minorities. On the contrary, there is much to indicate that he promotes them at the Mariinsky Opera. In a word, he’s pro-gay.

My judgement is slightly swayed however, by the reaction of a member of last week’s audience. The friend, a journalist and festival organiser, said she was unaware of the extent of anti-gay legislation in Russia. ‘I was really glad to have been informed (by Tatchell),’ she said.

I guess that clinches it.

 

Kaija Saariaho’s speech at the McGill University on November 3rd:

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As a Finnish, left-handed woman composer I represent several minorities, a subject that I would like to briefly discuss here. After having gone through many battles during my early professional years I felt that the equality of women in music was advancing.

Therefore I have not spoken about this publicly for many years. Recently, however, there have been polemics generated by statements coming from public persons and even the head of the highest music education institution in France, arguing that there are several natural reasons to explain why women are not suitable for conducting. This made me understand that today, 30 years after my own battles, young women still have to experience much the same everyday discrimination I went through.

In reading more studies about our recent history in this matter, I have understood that the situation is not slowly getting better, but that the improvements seem to have stopped a while ago. In politics, economy, research and culture in general, women still have to find their place. This is a matter of custom or habit and of familiarization, and in many fields we have been able to change these customs already.

I feel a strong necessity to act against the deeply commercial society and a world vision perhaps too univocal because predominantly controlled by men. We need more real, profound human culture, not only the popular mass consumer culture, which is invading the planet and which is mostly profit-driven. All over in the world, we need to pay more attention to how we educate our children, to teach them to grow up into empathetic and caring human beings. We need to incorporate more of the brainpower of women to create a diverse, multidimensional society.

Exactly how to realize this, I don’t know. Nobody wants to be evaluated for things other than their actual skills. But I would like us all to realize (or, to be reminded) that the situations in which we make the evaluations are never objective and that our judgments, however rational they seem to us, can always be colored by our biases.

Institutions such as McGill University are primary venues, well-equipped to strive for equal rights and possibilities in all the fields of study. Please continue this work by encouraging and supporting a rich human future, a future of diversity AND equality.

Thank you.

 

h/t: Anssi Karttunen

 

See also:

Why Scandinavian women make the rest of the world jealous

Click here.

More horrors from the dubious world of musical contests.

Last week in the Ukraine they held the first Oleh Krysa International Violin Competition. Krysa (below) is described as ‘an international violinist’. A new event with a 20,000 Euros first prize it drew talent from major conservatories around the world.

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Reports from an insider say the strongest competitors were eliminated in the opening round. Two winners were announced at the weekend. Both, believe it or not, are students of Oleh Krysa, founder of the competition and chairman of the jury.

After an outcry, the videos of the final round were taken down on Youtube and a row continues over the prizes.

A Russian violinist, Oleg Kurochkin, vented his outrage on The Violin Channel: ‘What a shame!1st prize of Krysa competition divided between students of chairman of jury,actually Krysa. Listen to their caprices on the 1st round.They should not pass even to semifinal! And they did not play a obligatory piece by heart as written in rules of competition.’

Moral of the story: beware talent contests.

 

The website of the Italian Museum of Musical Instruments has posted some heart-rending pictures of the aftermath of the devastating  fire, along with an appeal for financial help to aid in its reconstruction.

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The appeal is a worthy cause, but wouldn’t it be better if the museum were relocated away from Reggio Calabria, out of reach of the local Mafia? The probably cause of the fire is arson.

 

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The Catalan tenor (below, left) will play the judge in El Juez, an opera by Christian Kolonovits that will premiere next April in Bilbao. The story, by Angelika Messner, is about children who were stolen from their parents under the Franco regime and raised under false identities in monasteries.

It has powerful personal resonances for Carreras. Both of his parents were from republican families that suffered under Franco’s fascism.

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Georg Paul Bongartz, father of the German-American violinist, has sought a court injunction against the publication of a biography of his son in which he claims he was made to practise the instrument eight hours a day as a child. Bongartz maintains the boy never had to practise more than four hours.

David Garrett, who took his mother’s maiden name, is described on his website as ‘the David Beckham of the violin’.

Will Beckham sue?

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The veteran composer and conductor has withdrawn from a pair of December concerts with the Orchestre de Paris. He has not conducted a full concert since undergoing eye surgery early in 2012, but remains hopeful that he might at some point return to the podium.

He is replaced in Paris by Alain Altinoglu and a much softer programme.

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BBC Radio 3 has reported the death of Bernard Roberts, whose 1980s cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas on Nimbus was a byword for thoughtful interpretation and state-of-art recording. He was 80 years old.

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If Beethoven had lived that long, he would have looked like Bernard Roberts.

It’s 75 years this week since the German government launched a pogrom against Jewish communities and homes, destroying hundreds of buildings and sending thousands of innocent people to concentration camps.

The violinist Daniel Hope, whose family was attacked in the pogrom, will lead a commemoration on Sunday at the Brandenburg Gate. Details below.

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On November 10, British violinist and 6-time ECHO Klassik Award-winner Daniel Hope will perform at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in a ceremony honoring the victims of “Kristallnacht.” Also known as the Night of Broken Glass, the massacre of November 9-10th, 1938, alerted the world to the barbarism of the Nazis. This year’s ceremony, which marks the 75th anniversary of “Kristallnacht,” invites everyone, especially Berlin’s schoolchildren and students, to come together at the Brandenburg Gate in a memorial that signals the value of diversity in today’s Germany and promotes vigilance against all forms of intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism, and violence.

Daniel Hope has a strong connection to Berlin’s history. His own family lived in Berlin until 1938; some of them fled to the U.S. and South Africa, others lost their lives. At his last “Kristallnacht” concert in 2008, Hope converted the former Tempelhof Airport into a concert hall and brought together friends and colleagues to make a stand against racism and promote tolerance with his “Do Something!” campaign. Daniel Hope says: “What fascinates me most about Berlin is its perpetual history still hidden deep inside so many of its buildings. And so I decided some years ago to fill these places with music, one after the other, by performing at the Reichstag, the Ministry of Finance (formerly Göring’s Ministry of Aviation), the Felix Mendelssohn-Remise, (the former carriage house of the old Berlin headquarters of the Mendelssohn Bank) and Tempelhof Airport. Making music in these buildings, surrounded by the ghosts of my family and of times gone by, let me into a past which I did not experience, but can still sense. “

On November 10, the city will send a united message to the world from the Brandenburg Gate: “Never again!” Statements, short films, and mobile phone clips will be projected onto the Brandenburg Gate for people to see and hear. The ceremony will recall those years which destroyed diversity, remembering those who were excluded, persecuted, and had their livelihoods destroyed during the Nazi pogroms. The ceremony will also emphasize what diversity means in today’s world, where exclusion and discrimination still exist.

Hope will be bringing Heinz Jakob “Coco” Schumann, the legendary Berlin jazz musician who survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, to the ceremony. Hope’s latest DVD-documentary “Refuge in Music” (Deutsche Grammophon, 2013), an excerpt of which will be shown during the ceremony, tells the story of 89-year-old Schumann and the oldest living Holocaust survivor, 109-year-old pianist Alice Herz-Sommer. All artists appeared in the film without a fee and all artist royalties will be donated to charity. The DVD project is supported by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and will benefit organizations that serve the memory of those murdered in Theresienstadt.

Daniel Hope will also perform music by 1930s composers who were condemned during Nazi rule. He will be accompanied by the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin.