Gianluca Marcianò, the highly rated young Italian conductor, has walked out on the State Opera in Tbilisi, Georgia.
His team explain why, below.
1. Gianluca Marcianò arrived in Tbilisi to conduct a charity concert in April 2010. After an inspirational meeting with David Sakvarelidze (general manager of Tbilisi State Opera and Ballet) agreed to become music director and principal conductor. The project was to create an international opera hub for the entire ex-Soviet Union area which would become the bridge between east and west. Right now, the Georgian operatic school is leading in the world. Tbilisi State Opera Orchestra had wonderful tours in China, Italy, at Al Bustan Festival, in Estonia.
Georgia in 2010 was full of potential and perspective in many fields. Now, sadly, there is deep stagnation. David Sakvarelidze, was dismissed after an oligarch came into power. His dismissal was not the only politically motivated decision taken by the new government.
2.The law that regulates theaters in Georgia was changed. Under the new law, there is an artistic director with full power over opera and spoken theatre, and some committees (soviets). The Artistic Director in the Opera House, because of this law, is also Music Director. The last two artistic directors (Davit Kintsurashvili and Giorgi Jordania) are both conductors. They employed themselves as conductors in the theatre, which can create conflict with the principal conductor. The conflict between the former artistic director and Marcianò ended in a massive demonstration at the Ministry of Culture with a huge national media exposure, a kind of revolution which brought back some hope (for a little while).
Mr Kintsurashvili sent Marciano several emails to inform him that he took some strategic decisions which usually would need the approval of the principal conductor. Marciano was informed after the decisions were taken, like removing the leader of the orchestra from her position, planning auditions which would include principal players of the orchestra, changing the titles for next season and deciding at the last moment to cancel the agreement with a guest conductor (Alessandro Benigni) who was invited to perform Lucia di Lammermoor.
After all this, he was obviously very concerned. Being in Leeds, conducting La Traviata at Opera North, Marciano couldn’t go back to Tbilisi, but he was constantly in touch with musicians and singers. Just before his planned return, Marciano was informed that because of the Georgian law his position had been changed to Principal GUEST Conductor as he doesn’t spend enough time in Georgia.
He was given two options: a contract by performance or a 1 year contract paid only for the days that he would spend in Georgia. The position of Principal Conductor in the theatre is not existing anymore and he would be in any case be Principal GUEST. He accepted the first option , so that he could conduct a Rossini’s Stabat Mater and 2 concert performances of Lucia di Lammermoor till Jan 30 2015 and discuss with the management his role in the theatre for the future.
3. When he joined Tbilisi State Opera, under general manager Sakvarelidze, planning was done month by month while any artist’s or any theatre’s schedule in the world is at least 1, when not 2/3 years in advance. He was able to plan his work in Tbilisi very well, but now he can’t wait till the last moment when he is booked elsewhere. Marciano requested to tell how many performances per year he should conduct as principal conductor but the answer was that they cannot say.
4. He tried to explain his concerns to the Minister of Culture, Mikheil Giorgadze, but never got a chance to meet him. He mentioned to the Minister what should be done urgently for Opera and it is not done, but…… The above mentioned are the reasons why Gianluca Marciano could not continue his relationship with Tbilisi State Opera. He will be back in Georgia to conduct a big concert which will celebrate Paata Burchuladze’s 60th birthday. Many Georgian and international opera stars will sing and it will be the best possible farewell concert for him!
He would like to say that he loved being in Georgia and had wonderful time there, meeting wonderful artists, friends, colleagues. They wrote to him extraordinary moving messages after they heard about his decision and he is really happy.
He is hoping that one day the situation in Georgia will change, that the great plans, perspectives and projects which he found when he arrived in 2010 will be back. He hopes that the stagnation will end and it will be possible again to work properly. In that case he will be available for Tbilisi State Opera and Ballet and they will know how to find him. Until then he will continue to work elsewhere and enjoying music.
The music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has issued the following statement:
‘I am very sorry to learn of the passing of Andrew Patner this morning. I had enormous respect for him as a man of great culture and deep humanity. We had a sincere friendship and his death is a tragic loss to the cultural life of Chicago. My profound condolences to all his family and friends.’
Salzburg, summer 2011
The CSO adds: ‘The entire Chicago Symphony Orchestra family expresses its deepest sympathy to the family and friends of longtime Chicago journalist Andrew Patner. A regular and welcome presence at CSO concerts here at home and around the world, Andrew had a unique way of communicating his deep knowledge and passion for classical music to audiences of all ages and walks of life, creating new fans for this art form. He was a champion for all arts in his beloved Chicago, and his voice – both on the air and off – will be sorely missed.’
We are mortified to learn of the death of Andrew Patner, Chicago broadcaster and music critic for the Sun-Times. His station WFMT has just issued this statement:
It is with a profound sense of sadness, sorry and shock that we must announce that our dear friend and colleague, Andrew Patner, passed away this morning after a very brief battle with a bacterial infection that overwhelmed his body. The news came to us from Tom Bachtell, Andrew’s long-time partner who said, “Our Andrew is no more.” Andrew’s voice, keen intelligence and great spirit will be sorely missed at this radio station, which was part of his professional life for many years. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Tom and to Andrew’s family. When details about services are announced we will provide them to you. Rest in peace dear friend. Your many contributions to WFMT and to this community will never be forgotten. -Steve Robinson, General Manager
I met Andrew in Salzburg in 2008 or thereabouts and we bonded instantly. We were in regular contact on social media, on the same side in most important issues. He was a generous colleague with a lively sense of humour. He and I both got on well with Riccardo Muti. I am speechless at his loss. My deep sympathies to Tom and his family.
Andrew was 55. He learned his trade on Capitol Hill before moving into the choppier waters of cultural politics. He’ll be terribly missed.
Norman Lebrecht
His biography:
Andrew Patner has been Critic-at-Large for 98.7 WFMT Radio Chicago and its website WFMT.com since 1998. On WFMT, he hosts the weekly conversation program CRITICAL THINKING and his “Critic’s Choice” commentaries are heard three times each week. For WFMT and the Chicago Sun-Times, Andrew Patner has accompanied the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on its last 17 tours — to Europe, the East Coast, Japan, and South America. He has been Contributing Critic to the Chicago Sun-Times since 1991, covering classical music and opera, theater and dance, art and architecture, cabaret, books, and film, including one year as acting theater and dance critic, and is currently acting classical music and opera critic. He appears as a commentator on cultural and political matters for WTTW 11 television, WFMT’s sister station.
A third-generation Chicagoan, Andrew is the author of I.F. STONE: A PORTRAIT (Pantheon, 1988; Anchor Books, 1990) on the veteran independent radical journalist, he received a Peter Lisagor Award in 1984 for his coverage of race and politics in Chicago magazine (staff writer and editor, 1981-1983) on the eve of Harold Washington’s election as the city’s first black mayor, and the 2000 James Friend Memorial Award from the Friends of Literature for his written and broadcast arts criticism in Chicago. A former staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal (1989 and 1990), he was a critic, host, and producer for WBEZ (91.5 FM), Chicago’s National Public Radio affiliate, from 1990 to 1997, and he was a 2003 Getty/USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Fellow in Los Angeles.
A lifelong Hyde Parker, Andrew was born at Michael Reese Hospital on December 17, 1959, the son of Irene Patner and the late attorney and activist Marshall Patner, and attended Hyde Park Union Nursery School, Ancona Montessori School, William H. Ray Elementary, and Kenwood High School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Kenwood Kaleidoscope. After working as a staff assistant to the late Congressman Ralph H. Metcalfe in Washington, D.C., he attended The College of The University of Chicago where he studied liberal arts and history and was editor-in-chief of The Chicago Maroon in 1979-1980. He later attended The University of Wisconsin at Madison from which he holds a B.A. in History — Thesis of Distinction (1985), and The University of Chicago Law School from which he emerged relatively unscathed but with no degree.
A member of the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA), the Authors Guild, Inc., a charter member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and a founding member of the Chicago Art Critics Association, he has been a member of the executive committee of the American Theater Critics Association (ATCA). He was the first director of the Program on Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago and was also a director of the Minority High School Summer Journalism Camp at Roosevelt University in Chicago. He taught students from 19 nations for The Soros Foundations/Open Society Institute for three summers in Prague and Budapest in the early 1990s. He was co-chair of the Interarts Council of The Arts Club of Chicago for nine years and is a member of the Visiting Committee to the Department of Music of The University of Chicago by appointment of the University’s board of trustees. He has been a board member at one time or another of KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation, where he became bar mitzvah and where he later taught religious school for two years, the Chicago Children’s Choir, and the Independent Voters of Illinois, elected to the last of these when he was not yet old enough to vote.
A popular speaker, lecturer, and moderator, he has appeared at all of Chicago’s major cultural institutions, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he is a regular pre-concert speaker and interviewer, Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago Opera Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Chicago Historical Society, The University of Chicago, Ravinia Festival, the Chicago Public Library/Harold Washington Library Center, Printers Row Book Fair, and the Chicago Cultural Center. He also is a frequent speaker, panelist, or master of ceremonies for charitable, educational, and fraternal organizations including Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education, Rotary International, Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, and many area churches and synagogues. He lectures on modern and contemporary music each year at the Ris Ìr Chamber Music Festival in RisÌr, Norway, and has lectured in Weimar, Germany, and other cities in Central and Eastern Europe, on architecture, emigration, and Jewish life. He is currently working on a book on five historians and writers on the Holocaust.
In Salzburg, 2011, with pal
The rediscovery of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, the Moscow composer closest to Shostakovich, has been a slow, often frustrating process over the past two decades. It has involved scholars and performers in Sweden, Britain, Germany, Russia – a line of exploration across northern Europe that, for some reason, bypassed Poland.
Weinberg was Polish. Born in Warsaw, he fled to Russia when the Germans invaded in 1939. Most of his family perished in the Nazi Holocaust.
Now, at last, the Warsaw Philharmonic and their artistic director Jacek Kaspzyk have taken up the music in what promises to be an outstanding series on Warner Classics – the first such exposure on a ‘major’ label.
The opening release, out this month, contains the G-minor violin concerto, exquisitely played by Ilya Gringolts, and the breakthrough fourth symphony. Together, they were the first of Weinberg’s orchestral score to receive a public performance, by Kirill Kondrashin in 1961. The solo lines of the symphony express a heart-rending social isolation. To hear them played by soloists in a Warsaw orchestra sounds somehow more authentic than any I have yet experienced. The record arrived yesterday and I have already played it three times.
Paul Jacobs, chair of the organ department at Juilliard and a Grammy-winning Mesiaenist, takes a broad view of faith and the act of performance. But he believes that listening to Messiaen could change your mind about the big questions of life and death.
Messiaen’s own beliefs are grounded in a collective worldview that has endured for 2,000 years, inspiring some of our greatest art, literature, and music. Of course, one doesn’t have to accept this worldview, but perhaps it shouldn’t be dismissed as inconsequential to us, either. It might serve as a critical gateway to a deeper understanding of the human condition….
It would be shortsighted to value Messiaen’s music merely for its aesthetic appeal. After all, his professed objective was much grander than this. He longed “to express the inexpressible,” “to touch upon all subjects, without ceasing to touch upon God,” and, by extension, to inspire us to do the same. Messiaen’s message is delivered with a crushing majesty, much like Bernini conveyed in his sculpture, The Ecstacy of St. Theresa.
Our plight is that the hectic, noisy pace of contemporary life drowns out the silences of Heaven. We’re addicted to technological contraptions, enslaved by hyper-busy lifestyles, and endlessly pursue mindless diversions and entertainment, all of which numb us from reflecting upon the most marvelous things. But, just maybe, the shimmering light of Messiaen’s music could move a person enough to investigate the Numinous.
Fascinating interview in San Francisco by our friend, Elijah Ho. Click here for more.
He’s called Jared Cassidy and he has won a Grammy. Students call him the Energiser Bunny.
Our colleague Lotta Emanuelsson of YLE has come across this scarce 90th birthday biography of Jean Sibelius.
It is the work of René Leibowitz (1913-1972), Warsaw born and student of Webern, who converted post-War Paris to the creed of serialism. His star pupil was Pierre Boulez.
We have recoiled before at the annual junket by Israel Opera to Masada, a desert mountaintop where defeated Jewish warriors in the first century chose martyrdom rather than Roman enslavement.
It is regarded by many Jews as a holy burial site, unfit for public entertainment.
The Israel Opera has performed at the foot of the mountain for the past four years – insensitively, in our view.
Today it has announced a staging of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, Nazi Germany’s first musical masterpiece, a work riddled with pagan mythology and moral nihilism – ”the kind of clear, stormy, and yet always disciplined music that our time requires’, according to Josef Goebbels.
It is perfectly legitimate for Orff’s work to be performed in Israel. But not at Masada, a massacre site reminiscent of Nazi violations.
The Israel Opera has a cloth ear for audience and artist sensitivities. It does not respond to reasoned objection.
So now is the time to make your protest known.
Share this post if you agree that Masada is the last place to hear Nazi rhythms.
Ulrich Wilhelm, director of Bayerische Rundfunk, has delivered a stinging response to the state and city’s decision not to build a new concert hall. ‘It’s a severe blow to Bavarian’s world-famous orchestral culture,’ he says. ‘The development of classical culture in Bavaria will be greatly weakened. I am extremely disappointed with this outcome of a ten-year debate.’
Die Entscheidung, auf einen zusätzlichen Konzertsaal für München zu verzichten und stattdessen auf eine aufwändige Sanierung der bestehenden Säle zu setzen, ist ein schwerer Schlag für die weltweit berühmte Orchesterkultur Bayerns und eine folgenschwere Entscheidung. Wir haben schon heute zu wenig Kapazität für große Orchestermusik in München, die Umbauzeit wird eine zusätzliche Lücke ins Konzertleben reißen. Die Klangkörper des Bayerischen Rundfunks, die seit Jahrzehnten mit großem Einsatz das Klassikleben in Bayern stärken, werden dadurch in ihren Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten genauso geschwächt, wie alle anderen Orchester und privaten Veranstalter. Ich bin sehr enttäuscht über dieses Ergebnis einer zehnjährigen intensiven Debatte.
The American-Italian pianist and conductor Jo Alfidi has died in Belgium, aged 64.
Jo conducted the Miami Symphony Orchestra at six years old and appeared at Carnegie Hall a year later.
The Queen of Belgium, a fan, paid for his piano studies in her country. In 1972, he came third in the Reine Elisabeth competition. His DG recording of the Rachmaninov D minor concerto impressed Arthur Rubinstein, who became an important mentor, sharing a TV documentary, Arthur Rubinstein and the Young – Joe Alfidi & Arthur Rubinstein.
But the public career fizzled out and he wound up as a professor at the Conservatoire in Liège.
The soprano Anita Darian, who was cast by Bernstein in Fidelio for a CBS-TV performance from Lincoln Center on Beethoven’s 150th anniversary, has died at the age of 87.
Endowed with a four-octave range, Anita achieved greatest exposure with her (anonymous) swooping vocals on the global hit ‘Wimaweh – The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.
Born Anita Esgandarian in Detroit on April 26, 1927, of Armenian parents, she studied at Curtis and Juilliard and sang in numerous roles on Broadway and at City Opera, notably in The King and I and The Student Prince. She went on to record John Corigliano’s esoteric rock opera, The Naked Carmen.
