All shall have prizes: Dutch love Jaap
OrchestrasThe Concertgebouw Prize is to be awarded on april 18 to conductor Jaap van Zweden ‘for his exceptional contribution to the artistic profile of The Concertgebouw. Van Zweden is presently departing as music director of the New York Philharmonic.
At age 19 he was the youngest ever concertmaster of the Concertgebouw orchestra, before taking up the baton. He says: ‘The Concertgebouw is my frame of reference against which I compare every concert hall in the world. The sound, the atmosphere, the history: this is a unique place in the world that the Netherlands should cherish.’
Congratulation Jaap! Important to don’t forget the fantastic and audacius professional career of this great musician. Yes, as conductor he will never be Haitink but he deserves a big respect and many critics about him were not justified or were truely exaggerated. And when he’s coming in town I will continue to see concerts of him.
Hear hear – as I’ve said before, he’s done a lot of very good work here in Hong Kong, I’m a convert to everything he does these days
Hear, hear, but let’s be very precise here, critics in Dallas, Chicago, Cleveland, Vienna, Amsterdam gave van Zweden favorable reviews, sometimes very favorable reviews, it was the small band of critics at the New York Times and the New Yorker who absolutely hated him to the point of revealing their agenda: they wanted a celebrity conductor like The Dude to head up their hometown orchestra, and these critics were going to trash van Zweden for it, and because the local critics also happen to be working for the only international paper in town, their criticism was amplified beyond the reality of van Zweden’s actual merits.
Van Zwede continues to have a strong relationship with Chicago and the Concertgebouw no matter what the NYT classical music desk thinks. The NY Phil would do well to do the same.
They can keep him….
I believe it was Alex Ross who called him the “Millard Fillmore of music directors.”
The man who couldn’t find a way to get along with the members of The York Philharmonic is receiving an award? A man who could not maintain a ten year, $50 million contract and left the Dallas Symphony where they were glad to see him go? Swing wide the gates to all the insane asylums and give all those there residing an award. They are all kinder and more trustworthy than this man.
Talk is cheap. How much money is attached to the prize?
He should have stayed there, a very good concertmaster against an average conductor….
What a claque!
Pity this amount of attention to Jaap and so little nowadays to Edo de Waart.
Edo “was” somebody (maybe) years ago, but always just a medium level conductor, and lately, a very bad conductor…