Salzburg Festival is challenged over dirty Russian money
NewsSalzburg’s artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser is gravely concerned about funding for this summer’s project with the Russian-based Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis and his ensemble MusicAeterna, which is financed by the sanctioned state bank VTB.
Currentzis was due to lead Bartok’s Bluebeard Castle, paired with Carl Orff’s De temporum fine comoedia.
Hinterhäuser tells the local newspaper: ‘There isn’t much time left. Teodor Currentzis has now made a major program change for his concert tour with the SWR Orchestra. He has included an important work by a Ukrainian composer in the program. The fact that he, who lives, works and grew up in Russia, is doing something like this is a sign that shouldn’t just be taken for granted. One should respect it.’
The SN reporter reminds him that the Currentzis-Romeo Castellucci (pictured) double-bill is backed by an oligarch foundation that runs Moscow’s GES-2 cultural centre.
Hinterhäuser: ‘I was there myself when this cultural center was still under construction. The plan was to build a cosmopolitan art and culture center that would transcend all borders. It didn’t meet with much approval, neither from Putin nor from the general public. The director, an Italian, has since been deposed. It was also she who offered us financial support for productions by Romeo Castellucci. That was the case with “Salome” and this support also applies to this summer’s Bartok/Orff production. Will that actually happen? I don’t know.’
He adds: ‘Not everyone with a Russian passport is a Putin troll.’
Tricky.
Full interview here.
Rublewashing ….nothing more nothing less.
Is there any field in which this kind of russian money isn t involved? But it also says a lot about the wilingness of people in the west to enjoy this money… untill now…..london for example seemed to love and appreciate those oligarchs money very , very much untiĺl now….
After sucking on the tit of Russian oligarchs for decades, we’re now supposed to applaud Currentzis because he programmed music by a Ukrainian composer? Uh, no.
Currentzis is the perfect conductor for the modern narcissistic zeitgeist; all about look-at-me shallowness. Where’s the surprise that this kind of culture spawns these types of people?
It is with total disbelief that I am reading this shallow attempt to shield Theodore Currentzis from the questions that are becoming increasingly loud…! Both the Salzburg Festival and Mr. Hinterhäuser himself, the management of the SWR Orchestra Stuttgart and an array of leading European concert halls and promoters need to be publicly shamed now and without delay for their tremendous hypocrisy in this instance!
Mr. Currentzis IS one of the Putin‘s trolls and until he makes his position publicly clear and articulated there is no doubt about such fact! There is no courage displayed in programming the work of the Ukrainian composer for the concerts in Germany and around Europe and on top of everything withe German orchestra.
How long is it going to be overlooked that he and his orchestra (Musica Aeterna) are sponsored by the organizations and personalities closest to Putin? At the same time he is engaged by the German orchestra and is paid from the German taxpayers money! How ist this different from Gergiev, Netrebko, Matsuev?
Money does not smell, they say, but the Russian Banks money are soaked in blood!
Can you condemn him for not having a spine? He is just a dreamer, he will say, who only cares about music. But no. Will you bite the hand that gives?
I don’t find these comments terribly relevant (yet…) but if anybody knows anything about out getting support for artistic activities in Russia and and whether that inevitably means that one is intertwined with the regime, that would be useful. I guess that’s where Gergiev started his days, making sure that the funding to the Mariinsky continued to flow, in the 1990s.
Correntzis is corrupt up to his ears.
It is pathetic to see any Austrian organisation allowing him in the door, but hey Netrebko has an Austrian passport too, as did another famous figure from the past, who had a funny moustache..
We will never forget this awful pseudo artist in Perm who managed to produce 1/10 of the actual opera output per year of the excellent conductors that preceded his rape of the local city budget.
100x the money for 1/10 of the work.
I don’t understand even why this Correntzis is not wearing a “Z” T shirt, like the Gnessin idiot.
(Perhaps he is, but it’s hiding under the as ever crappy black, grungy occult, styling?)
Only one way here..Revoke all MusicAeterna Russian musician visas.
Send them all back across the border on a one way ticket, -buses & trains, so they can experience the same paranoiac “Z” themselves and wear the same black shirts.