The Nick Canellakis send-up interview gets a double send-up from Igudesman and Jewish person.

‘Every interview should be like this. The usual classical music interviews are so… xxxxx boring.’

Don’t hesitate. Just watch.

igudesman and joo

Everyone’s taking a bypass to see the concert grand that has been washed up near the Brooklyn Bridge.

It has been there now for all of a week and every network news channel has had a gawk at it.

In any European city, the authorities would have removed it and a sentimental philanthropist might have paid to restore it for some public benefice. But New York is New York. What gets washed up there just stays. Forever. Whatever.

 washed up piano2

Wonder who once owned it.

Bavarian Opera’s gala concert for local boy Richard Strauss’s 150th birthday on June 9 will be conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. It should have gone to the music director, Kirill Petrenko, but he’s totally preoccupied with the difficult and unwieldy Die Soldaten.

press release below.

Franz Welser-Most being interviewed by Norman Lebrecht for

UMBESETZUNG: DIRIGAT FESTKONZERT ZUM 150. GEBURTSTAG VON RICHARD STRAUSS

Franz Welser-Möst wird anstelle von Kirill Petrenko das Festkonzert zum 150. Geburtstag von Richard Strauss am 9. Juni 2014 dirigieren.

Generalmusikdirektor Kirill Petrenko möchte sich bis zum Ende der Premierenserie vonDie Soldaten voll und ganz auf die notwendigen Vorbereitungen und Aufführungen dieser Partitur konzentrieren und sieht sich daher gezwungen, die musikalische Leitung des Festkonzertes am 9. Juni abzugeben: „Nach der Premiere habe ich realisiert, dass diese Oper von mir 200%ige Konzentration verlangt, daher ist es mir leider unmöglich, das Konzert ausreichend vorzubereiten.“

Der Generalmusikdirektor der Wiener Staatsoper, Franz Welser-Möst, wird die Leitung dieses Konzertes übernehmen und damit sein Hausdebüt geben. Kirill Petrenko wird im Dezember 2014 mit Die Frau ohne Schatten wieder Musik von Richard Strauss dirigieren.

Those friendly folk at Standpoint magazine added up the essays and columns I had written for them these past four years and decided they had enough for an e-book. Then they asked for an introduction, a kind of Weltanschauung as to where music is heading in mass media.

That was easy.

It begins:

In the summer of 2009, I gave up on newspaper journalism. The immediate cause was the fire sale of the paper on which I was Assistant Editor to a Russian KGB man, an early beneficiary of the Putin kleptocracy. Without lingering to judge the new owner, I had no trouble deciding that print journalism had shed most of its values, as well its readers, in a spiral of self-destruction that some regarded as a perfect firestorm.

A frantic pursuit of reluctant new readers in a video-led society had bred an ethics-free appetite for sensation and a strenuous justification of the unjustifiable. The day I found myself defending our front-page picture of a businesswoman leaping to her death from the upper floors of a London hotel was the day I realised how far my vocation had fallen from its once-lofty self-perception. 

I’m afraid you’ll have to download the book if you want to read more. It costs £2.99. Click here.

conduct unbecoming

 

His release of Shostakovich symphonies 4, 5 and 6 from St Petersburg repeats his 2004 Decca set from the same musicians and venue.

Except that it’s less coherent, less well played and recorded, less attractive in every way.

So why did he release it? Is there a political reason?

The set is my Album of the Week on sinfini. Click here.

 

gergiev

We’ve just been informed that Jose Antonio Abreu, founder of Venezuela’s El Sistema,  will give a press conference in London on Saturday.

This is quite unusual. Abreu is a fairly reclusive figure who gives few interviews and is usually accompanied by a political minder.

In London he will face questions about his connections to an increasingly unpleasant Venezuelan regime.

Should be interesting.

 

abreu dudamel

Nicolas Altstaedt reports:

..just got to know that my beloved Schubertringhotel I have been staying for years has been closed. A little bit of Vienna dies in my heart, leaving lots of memories behind. I will miss the labyrinth of floors, the smell of the curtains and the very special hospitality of the staff knowing each of their artists coming back..

hotel am schubertring   hotel am schubertring2

If you stayed there and liked it, share a memory below.

Possibly the most thoughtful, ego-free rendition ever given to the national anthem.

Aretha Franklin, who received an honorary degree at Harvard University’s 2014 Commencement, opened the Morning Exercises in Tercentenary Theatre with a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

aretha franklin

Ari Bayme was riding an empty subway car when a group of singers came on board and started to practise their stuff. A minute later, the subway conductor came in. ‘That was pretty good guys,’ he says, ‘but what about a little Sam Cooke?’

Turns out he’s more than one kind of conductor.

Anyone know his name? He can check our ticket any time…

 

subway conductor

Kirill Gerstein, who won the Rubinstein in 2001, has been talking to our SanFran pal, Elijah Ho.

 

kirill gerstein

 

 

Gerstein: The funny thing about competitions is that one has to be careful about the final rounds. By the time they come around – there’s probably web-streaming and more people are tuning in – very often the performers are tired, and they haven’t toured with their concertos with orchestras in thirty or forty different cities over the past ten years. So I sympathize with the finalists. It’s not an easy experience. Very often, the finals of the larger competitions are actually weaker than some of the playing in the earlier rounds, and this certainly invites criticism. Some will say, ‘well, this year wasn’t very strong, how could this be the best ?’. The ‘meat’, I would say, is probably found in the earlier rounds.

….

To win a competition, things probably went very well for about two or three weeks against a group people and under whatever circumstances. From then on, everybody says, ‘well okay, let’s hear the new Rubinstein or Cliburn winner’, and every presenter and musician you come in contact and play with, is a test. It’s a much more serious situation than the competition, which is a prelude to that.

If I practiced a lot before the Rubinstein, I was practicing and working in various ways a lot more after I won. They will ask you if you can play this piece or that piece, and it’s no longer perfect lab-conditions, where you can prepare for as long as you’d like, where you select your own repertoire, etc. My advice is that it’s important to be prepared for that eventuality, to learn as much repertoire as possible.

There’s also the necessity to try to quickly convert yourself from a Rubinstein winner, or a Leeds winner, or a Van Cliburn winner, to whatever your name is. Because there is going to be a ‘next winner’ in the coming years. If presenters and audiences simply identify you as the current winner, your shelf-life is only three or four years. So this is where individuality and personality needs to be projected.

Click here for full interview.