Six contestants have reached the final of Hannover’s self-styled biggest-prize violin competition.
They are:
Rennosuke Fukuda
Cosima Soulez Larivière
Timothy Chooi
Youjin Lee
Leonard Fu
Dmytro Udovychenko
For reasons that may become apparent, the French finalist is the one to watch.
The doyenne is in sparkling form in this new Polish documentary.
A student of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and a much loved broadcaster on Kol Hamusica, Zamira Lutzki died this morning aged 72.
She was the founder of the annual festival of Israeli (mostly new) music that takes place every autumn.
This might be the easiest, least contentious list of the three:
1 Nathan Milstein
2 Jascha Heifetz
(Heard him once, Jerusalem, 1971)
3 David Oistrakh
4 Ida Haendel
5 Yehudi Menuhin
6 Itzhak Perlman
7 Gidon Kremer
8 Ivry Gitlis
9 Midori
10 Patricia Kopatchinskaya
See also: The pianists that really matter
The Emerson Quartet have made a little film.
Over nearly 40 years of writing about music I have learned that one subject will bring readers clamouring for my head.
Wilhelm Furtwängler is the touchiest subject in classical music.
Not because there is any doubt about his status – he was one of the most interesting and important conductors of all time – but because of his role in Nazi Germany, a role over which he played dumb, or maybe genuinely failed to understand.
Furtwängler, as has been shown time and again, was in denial about Hitler and the Nazis.
He claimed to serve the German nation while he was actually boosting the prestige of the Nazi regime.
His moral stance was, at best, ambivalent. His fans, however, can see only whiter than white.
That perceptual difference will never be resolved, but it will not stop me commenting when new evidence arrives of the conductor’s uniquely compromised situation.
