German airport loses a star’s cello

German airport loses a star’s cello

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norman lebrecht

September 23, 2017

The vastly successful cellist Zoe Keating has just tweeted:

 


That’s Düsseldorf Airport. We’re trying to ascertain details.

 

UPDATE: Next morning’s tweet from Zoe:

 

UPDATE2: It’s not over yet….

 

More updates:

 

The concert, at King’s Place, is sold out.

Comments

  • Jeffrey E. Salzberg says:

    Unless the Germans do things *very* different from the way the US does things, the instrument was lost by one of the airlines (or a contractor used by them). The airport would have had nothing to do with it.

  • Thank you for sharing this news. Got your message: musicians should boycott Düsseldorf airport, just like all the other airlines on the “blacklist”.

    • Jeffrey E. Salzberg says:

      It’s highly unlikely that the airport had anything to do with losing the instrument. That responsibility belongs with the airlines.

      • I’m afraid you totally failed to realize how serious this incident was. I’m sorry, but we are not talking about an ordinary citizen here. She is a musician, a very famous one, although maybe most of us haven’t even heard of her name before. How dared the airport let such a scandal happen in their holy territory? That’s totally unacceptable. Düsseldorf has a long tradition of mishandling musicians. It was the city that drove R.Sch mad.

        • Jeffrey E. Salzberg says:

          Airports don’t handle baggage. Airlines do. Unless you’re saying that airport staff deliberately tracked down the instrument and forcibly wrested it from the hands of the airlines’ baggage handlers, the airport had nothing to do with losing it.

        • Anon says:

          No, it MUST have been Germany, the evil country, altogether, that drove Robert Schumann mad. We thank the blog owner one more time, to never get tired of the most sensible habit to point out the MOST relevant attribute to anything and anyone in the world, the nationality.

          • John Borstlap says:

            But the Germans have a reputation to uphold of being gründlich, very thorough. And they are. When things go well, they are superb, and when they go wrong, they go superbly wrong – doing everything in a professional way. Compare that with the French, who do everything in a most stylish and brilliant way, but when they do things wrong they loose their grip and take to the wine. (Source: “The Abyssmal Lexicon of Entirely Misleading but Helpful Generalizations”, The Proxy Press, London 1940).

  • Yolanda Salapata says:

    Somehow I have this weird feeling that someone wanted this instrument badly and found a way to obtain it free..or at low cost..

  • Brinton Smith says:

    I don’t in any way mean to be unsympathetic, but why on earth would any successful cellist be checking a cello as baggage? An extra ticket is simply part of the cost of doing business for all of us. It would be a lovely world if airlines didn’t lose luggage, but in this world, checking a cello will bring trouble, sooner or later

  • Also the way how she tried to solve the problem clearly shows that she isn’t a joke, but a hardcore professional. Only superstar knows to ask the airport to find her lost luggage in Twitter.

    • Jeffrey E. Salzberg says:

      I’m guessing that action was taken out of desperation, after, or in addition to, exhausting all other options.

    • bratschegirl says:

      Twitter is often the platform which gets the swiftest response from any corporate entity such as an airline. Phone calls to “customer service” may only reach the lowest-level staff in whichever country it is to which the call center has been outsourced this month. Individual blogs and Facebook pages only reach the already connected audience. A company’s Twitter account, on the other hand, may indeed be monitored by staff at a high enough level of authority to actually get something done, because unflattering news posted there can spread and become very damaging very rapidly.

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  • MaxFr says:

    Believe me, I mean no offense, but: in what sense is Zoe Keating “vastly successful”? And if she is, what in the world would Yo-Yo Ma be?

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