Dutch cancel January
NewsMessage received from Dutch National Opera:
Le lacrime di Eros
With this email we would like to inform you that after thoroughly assessing the current Covid situation and analysing the various restrictions, the decision has been made to postpone the production of Le lacrime di Eros to a future season. Creators Raphaël Pichon and Romeo Castellucci and Dutch National Opera’s director Sophie de Lint have discussed this decision with a heavy heart but are convinced that such a special, beautiful and artistically challenging project needs different times to be created. The world premiere of Le lacrime di Eros had been planned for 20 January 2022.
Salome
DNO has made another difficult decision together with our partner the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and their chief conductor Lahav Shani, which is to cancel Ivo van Hove’s Salome due to the many uncertainties around the current Covid restrictions. It doesn’t feel right to ask the artists to travel to Amsterdam at the very beginning of January to start rehearsing while we have no guarantee to perform in front of a live audience. The revival of Salome was supposed to premiere on 29 January 2022.
In other news, Belgium has suspended all performances indefinitely.
The Dutch are always doing that, next they’ll be asking the US for money to the moon ladder, which they could guild……
Would you care to re-write that in English?
Dutch cancel January.
I’ve been wishing Canada would do that for years!
It’s a 17C custom, when Dutch winters were sometimes unbearable. When it got too cold, they cancelled a couple of months so that the trading over the rivers could continue. But the population dearly missed the pleasures of skating, hence the rising popularity of paintings with this winter pastime, as nostalgic memories of colder times.
All these cancellations are fine and ok as long as the artists involved are being looked after by either their employers or governments or both. These are extraordinary times. Safety first. Everything else next.
It appears that artists are NOT being looked after if they are ‘freelance’, they are left to sink. Only (some) institutions are (modestly) protected.
The recent support the government has given to the culture sector is supposed to also pay the freelance musicians. The government has stressed that that should happen, so the ensembles and orchestras should pay them.
Let’s hope so, but I have grave doubts.
Did you mean the Netherlands…Dutch Opera… Amsterdam… 🙂
The Amsterdam opera is often referred to as the ‘music denture’ because of the design and colours:
https://www.hollandluchtfoto.nl/media/808ef4cc-24d7-4a60-b270-763e74472d50-amsterdam-luchtfoto-stopera