The British musician who is still conducting in Moscow
NewsWe have received a flyer for a performance of Mahler’s second symphony next month in Moscow.
The conductor is Jan-Latham Koenig, 70, music director of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. Koenig has also been artistic director of the Novaya Opera in Moscow. In Queen Elizabeth’s 2020 Birthday Honours list he was appointed OBE ‘for services to music and UK/Russia cultural relations’.
Since then, those relations have been frozen by Putin’s illegal war on Ukraine. Koenig, however, just carries on beating time.
He conducted a British-Russian orchestra for students which has quietly disappeared since the start of the war. Now he conducts a British-French student orchestra as a replacement for the old one, though interesting to see he hasn’t dropped all of his eastern ties…
Well, man needs to earn money. Unless you want to live off other people’s work, which for most people fortunately is not option.
well, he is a conductor, so…
Musicians need music like scuba divers need oxygen tanks. Its not complicated.
Do remember Furtwaengler, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic throughout the period of Hilter’s war on Europe, and Mehta and Barenboim similarly performing during the Palestine-Israel conflict. Their’s humantistic conception of the role of music was to bring solace to the people, transcending the difficult moral and human tragedies brought on by the political situation. They were attempting to bring art to the people when they most needed the solace of its spiritual qualities.
Let us be open-minded.
Hmm – if only.
Illegal in your opinion but not in mine. You’re just a fall guy for American propaganda – a bit like the UK.
Not so much a has-been, more a never-was.