Currentzis ‘is a perverted trapeze act’, says top German composer

The Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, who takes subsidies from Gazprom and other frontline fighters on Puti9n’s war, has come under fire from the influential German composer Moritz Eggert. Currentzis has swapped his ‘Eterna’ orchestra for another called ‘Utopia’, but his bookings are dying up.

Vienna’s Konzerthaus has shut its doors and Der Standard reports that his only dates next season are in Brescia and Antwerp, hardly the summits of the music world. Currentzis, who remains aligned with Putin’s view of reality, clings to a post at Southwestgerman Radio (SWR).

Here’s what Eggert tells him this morning:

This can’t go on. What you are doing is a perverted trapeze act, juggling several champagne glasses while balancing on a tightrope and performing the German and Russian national anthems at the same time (don’t ask me how, but it takes an artist to do that).

It’s a tragic trapeze act by a perplexed (or rather restless) performer in the circus dome. How much longer can this go on? How much longer can you dance at all weddings, shake hands with the henchmen and have medals of honour hung around one’s shoulders and then deny them, go on the road with musicians who demand the extermination of the “Ukrainian Nazis” and promote the destruction of the German economy…and at the same time conduct with a clear conscience in, for example, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie Britten’s “War Requiem” or Shostakovich’s 13th symphony, the latter with a soloist who posted Russian flags immediately after the destruction of the Mariupol theatre, contradicting pretty much everything Shostakovich and Britten wanted their music to express?

How long will that be fine, Teodor Currentzis? Is it really enough, instead of talking nonsense, to look mystically into the camera and utter some babbling and deeply ridiculous generalities about the mystical power of classical music, which is then absorbed by fans, who are happy to be blinded? How much longer can you jet back and forth between Russia and Western Europe, getting finance from lenders that we sanction with good reason? And at the same time making your few remaining loyal supporters, such as the Elbphilharmonie, the Salzburg Festival and above all the SWR, a kind of laughing stock?…

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