Hey, what? This maestro needs a new website
mainClemens Schuldt is described by his agent as ‘one of the most exciting young conductors emerging from Germany’.
After that, his official website bio goes into gobbledygook.
– Hey what the assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra for one year…
– He is Conducting investigation orchestras as the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin…
– Born in Bremen, Clemens Schuldt of studied violin at the Robert Schumann Hochschule…
Oh, dear. They ust assume no-one reads the rubbish that agents put out.
Read here.
UPDATE: The maestro got one. We’ve heard from KDSchmid, who have updated Clemens’s site. They suggest it might have been hacked. New, cleaned-up site here.
Google Translate clearly had a night on the town before dealing with that text but I’ve seen much worse. There’s no excuse, really; pretty much anyone in the business should be able to drum up the help of an articulate native English speaker. Their problem, though.
Can someone tell me when a conductor becomes “exciting”?
At the point where the conductor begins to believe his own publicity?
…just before they become ‘One of the most dynamic conductors/sopranos/baritones/shop assistants/bus drivers of their generation’.
Many SD readers wouldn’t believe how frequently really badly constructed biographies are sent out by managements to the people who employ their artists: the concert halls, festivals, orchestras and so on. We reckon to rewrite, totally, over half the biographies we receive, often re-spelling names of composers, giving works their actual titles (often from a muddle of languages), correcting names of conductors, orchestras and opera companies – and that’s before we start to make the biography consistent in style throughout.
Biographies often appear to have been handed for completion to the most junior employee, or a work experience trainee, yet a biography is one of the most important selling tools for an artist management. It’s not as if it’s so difficult to check a spelling, provided you have an internet connection (or New Grove) and 30 seconds to spare.
Perhaps SD could run a competition to award a wooden spoon to the most unhelpful biog that a promoter has recently received. You may be inundated with entries…
We’re up for it. Send in your worst artist biographies….
Game on!
My two cents: every artist should know how to create, edit and update their bios.
It’s odd because this conductor’s spoken English is flawless. Absolutely perfect British English with a slight trace of a German accent. This mess cannot be his doing. He probably trusted some lame publicist who did the hack job we’re seeing. He’s a young maestro, just starting out, and it probably never ocurred to him to question what his publicist is putting out there.
I would be really really angry if I were this conductor. He should fire whoever did this and out him ASAP so it doesn’t happen to anyone else.
I am reminded of a Romanian music festival whose blurb stated: “We are ravished to have four of the most notorious European conductors at our festival”.
Hilarious…. It is not only in music life that English gets off the rails. A musician friend of mine encountered this notice on an elevator in Japan: ‘In case of repair you become unbearable.’
Like the one with a French widow in every bedroom, courtesy of Gerard Hoffnung.
The notice in a recent hotel room translated “Estamos a su servicio” as
“We are at your mercy”
A sign in a French clothes shop in English: “Women can have a fit upstairs”.
Hilarious indeed, but this was case of bad translation or a non-native speaking.
Even when reasonably well-written and accurate as to detail, the bios sent out by managements are almost always appalligly boring — a list of works the artist has performed and where, sometimes with adjectives drawn from reviews. Why not something about the interests of the performer aside from music–something that would tend to make him or her appear to be a more fully rounded human being?
Translations in CD booklets are a rich source of similar material.