Schiff, Kirill Petrenko, Martha, Perahia, Vanska – which orchestra?
mainLahav Shani introduces Zubin’s last season and his first with the Israel Philharmonic.
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It’s Lahav Shani, not Ilan Volkov.
Shani becomes IPO musical director only in 202021 season, not the next one.
The repertoire of next season is the most conservative, mainstream and inspirationless that we have seen for years – even in the mainstream standards of the IPO. A huge disappointment from Lahav Shani which will certainly reverse the trend of recent years whereby younger audiences started attending the IPO concerts. Anyway, Lahav Shani would never consider planning such season in his Roterdam orchestra.
I simply do not understand why you believe young people will only attend if the orchestra play unusual repertoire. This gets endlessly repeated despite the fact that there is no evidence to support this claim.
To be clear, orchestras largely play the music they believe the audience will want to come and hear. [Or at least, the music they believe those who pay for the orchestra want them to play.]
Lahav is going to make a great success of this and he’s a great pianist of course.
I’ve long read about the conservatism of the Israel Philharmonic, I guess playing to an aging audience of Central European refugees (and by now their children and grandchilden) fond of the standard canon.
Given how Israel (rightly) works to preserve memory of the Holocaust and counter Nazi destruction of Jewish society and culture, it would be nice to see the IPO on the forefront of championing music the Nazis tried to suppress. Goldschmidt, Kurt Weill, Hans Krasa, Zemlinsky and others (maybe Weinberg and other Jewish composers suppressed by the Soviets). Take them around the world, a way of saying “You tried to wipe us and our music out, but here we are!” It’s great that they can play Beethoven and Mahler, but that doesn’t really make them stand out from the crowd.