Vienna Philharmonic votes for no change
mainDaniel Froschauer (pic) and Michael Bladerer were reconfirmed for a second term at yesterday’s general meeting. They will serve as chairman and managing director for the next three years.
No surprise here. The duo have negotiated smoothly with the incoming regime at the Vienna State Opera and are looking ahead to regime change at Salzburg. The orchestra is the central unchanging factor in these upheavals.
Never change a running system!
Things are not changing in Vienna? What a surprize!
Yes, it’s new.
What should change?
Change for the sake of change?
That‘s so 1990s McKinsey.
Yes they are – and not in an insignificant way in my opinion:
https://www.ft.com/content/7bf1083e-2b21-11ea-bc77-65e4aa615551
Daniel Froschauer, the orchestra’s chairman who attended the Julliard School where he was a student of Dorothy DeLay, should be applauded for having these changes made as part of the New Year’s Day Concert 2020.
Here’s what the article says, in part:
“When the Vienna Philharmonic embarks on its annual rendition of the Radetzky March at its New Year’s Day concert, a connoisseur of the music of Johann Strauss Sr may notice something slightly different.
Alerted to the Nazi connections of the arrangement of the piece the orchestra has played for decades, the philharmonic will this year play a new version for this year’s concert at Vienna’s storied Musikverein, which will be broadcast live to 92 countries.
The old version was arranged by Austrian-born Leopold Weninger, a former member of the Nazi party who also made popular arrangements of the party’s anthem, the Horst-Wessel-Lied.
The orchestra’s decision to ditch the old version underscores the legacy of Austria’s Nazi past and, 75 years after the end of WWII, the country’s slow reckoning with it…spokeswoman Claudia Kapsamer…said Weninger’s version of the Radetzky March had been the only one in existence for a large orchestra because the original arrangement had been for fewer musicians.
She said the new arrangement had evolved over decades, with handwritten changes passed down by generations of musicians. Daniel Froschauer, the philharmonic’s chairman, asked that these changes be incorporated into the orchestra’s own edition of the score for 2020.
Boring orchestra with a boring repertoire.
Boring??? Name one orchestra that can play Bruckner better.
Halle in Manchester with sir Mark Elder is one, and women in the orchestra too even as brass players!!
By “boring repertoire”, you mean Beethoven, Mozart , Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Bruckner, Mahler, etc. You are bored by some of the greatest music written in human history performed by one of the world’s greatest orchestras?
Not true.
They just played a symphony by a modern composer by the name of Brahms from Hamburg.
I heard it was well received.
Oh, it wasn’t Brahms from Hamburg.
It was Williams from Flushing, Queens, New York City.
I disagree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v3loEr2g6c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMWVW4xtwI