Netrebko attends opening of envelope
NewsThe marginal Austrian Music Theatre Awards returned last night, in Grafenegg.
Anna Netrebko was awarded Best Female Leading Role as Lady Macbeth at Vienna State Opera. Its music director Philippe Jordan was awarded Best Musical Achievement.
pictured: Netrebko between VSO director Bogdan Roscic and conductor Karl-Michael Ebner
Do you really have to call the award “marginal” just because there’s someone you don’t like among the winners? Is that really fair? The list of previous winners includes Edita Gruberová, Grace Bumbry, Sir David Pountney CBE, Piotr Beczała and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. In other words, names that speak for themselves.
The award was long boycotted by the Staatsoper and other serious contenders.
The awards were created in 2012 by Karl Michael Ebner, a comprimario tenor at Volksoper (and certainly not a conductor!). Staatsoper, under Dominique Meyer, refused Staatsoper to participate in what is essentially a celebration of Austrian regional Landesthertern, plus Volksoper and Theater an der Wien.
Given the brief history of the “awards”, your contention that Edita Gruberová, Grace Bumbry, Sir David Pountney CBE, Piotr Beczała and Dmitri Hvorostovsky have been past winners seems highly unlikely.
The “awards” are not taken seriously, and are, indeed, “marginal” at best.
It is purely circular reasoning to list the names of winners to prove that an award is serious.
If I were to create an award tomorrow and handed it out to all prior Nobel Prize winners, that wouldn’t make my award serious, it would just make me look like a copycat opportunist.
It all depends on when an award was given in the life the recipient. If an award was given to all people at the very beginning of their careers, before anyone has heard of them, and they all turned out to be stars, then yes, that would be a serious award.
Not if the award is just heaping it on people who are already famous, which by the way, 99% of awards do in classical music.
At some point, one must simply acknowledge the obvious, the inescapable:
The Austrian elite, establishment, government, is pro-Putin.
Let me correct myself:
I did some research and the performers you mentioned have been given „Lifetime Achievement Awards“ and „International Media Awards“ but none of them were in competition. Just curious: why did you omit Plácido Domingo? In all, just another dust-catching knickknack for a bookcase.
You can find the complete list of winners since 2013 here:
https://www.musiktheaterpreis.at/preistraeger/
What a tasteless dress!
Wow, that is some dress Anna is wearing!