Vienna Philharmonic musicians go clubbing
mainWe hear that some musicians from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, directly after their Gewandhaus concert with Daniel Barenboim this Friday, will be heading down into KLASSIK underground in the Moritzbastei Club, playing it again with a light and video installation.
How times are changing.
Check here.
So glad I’m not going to it.
Everyone is glad you are not going to it.
Er, do I know you?
“[…] playing it again with a light and video installation.”
They’re not playing the concert ‘again’. They’re playing Mahler 7 at the Gewandhaus and after that, members of the orchestra will be playing chamber music by Ravel and Beethoven at the Moritzbastei.
It reads like suppressed victorians, coming-up for air after their church service.
Food for anthropologists: classical musicians leaving their ‘comfort zone’ (i.e. the normal environmental conditions of their profession) to explore adventure in the field of techno, pop etc. etc., suggesting that thier artistic endeavors are experienced as a prison camp where they labour on some unmodern, authoritarian tradition against their will.
… or are they visiting the prisons and labour camps of techno to bring a ray of light to the drab and wretched lives of DJs?
🙂
Several years ago, the VPO did in fact play a concert in the Mauthuasen concentration camp that some felt had PR tones that were distasteful:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/posts/summary.htm
In the pop world, and is classical music always that far behind? fusion is now the name of the game in art, music, cuisine. Remember the controversy caused in the eighties over that pop hit, I forget the exact title ,but it was parts of Beethoven’s Fifth superimposed on a disco beat?
Someone did something similar in the 1970s with Mozart’s 40th. The Eighties thing started with an RPO album called Hooked on Classics or some such, featuring undemandingly short passages from popular classical works with a disco beat underlay. The best of the lot was the Portsmouth Sinfonia’s Classical Muddly.
I phoned my auntie Gertrud in Vienna about this and she answered:
“I will only begin to enjoy classical music in the Musikverein again when the performance is combined with a public cooking session on the platform with the newest Spanish-version Beuschel dish.”
Sally
I vividly remember such an arrangement of the Beethoven Fifth from the mid-70s. Was not the only one.
Also in the 70s, Vladimir Horowitz celebrated a birthday at New York’s then trendy Studio 54. He was wearing ear plugs though.
https://goo.gl/d8ETb8
Times may be changing, but not necessarily as much as they seem.
If you don’t put the conservatory trained musician in a place where that ability is fully realized – then it just becomes overpriced and not really valued. Selling tickets is important, but if the difference between a top salary and lower salaried player isn’t really noticeable (because of programming or environment), then it’s not helping the case for having a top orchestra.
Maybe they just have fun doing this!
Agree.
A grubby little relative of that fungus, the Deutsche Grammophon Yellow Lounge.
Is that still going? I went to one out of curiosity, and it only confirmed (if confirmation were needed) that the venue wasn’t right for the music.
Limelight at the 100 Club was better.
And the OAE’s Night Shift series is excellent.
Ausverkauft.
Mind your language.
You must be fun at parties
They should play Maxwell Davies’s St Thomas Wake Foxtrot for orchestra.