Conductor quits Berlin ‘for family reasons’
OrchestrasThe Scottish condductor Sir Donald Runnicles is leaving his post at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper a year early, it was announced this weekend.
Runnicles, 68, says he will stay until 2026 to see in new intendant Aviel Cahn, but then wants to centre his activity on the US, where he is music director of the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming.
He has led the Deutsche Oper since 2009.
The Grand Teton Festival is 8 weeks mostly during the summer festival season. Presumably there must be other reasons the more so given his professed love for Germany, perhaps family or an upcoming appointment. After his long associations with the San Francisco Opera, the Atlanta Symphony and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, there should be much demand for his services.
“Family” is usually spelled “Money”.
He will also be 72 years old by then. Nothing shocking about wanting to settle on one side of the Atlantic. Even in business class and chauffeured cars I wouldn’t want to spend my time on transatlantic airplanes.
The Grand Teton Festival isn’t going tits up, is it?
Didn’t he say he would leave the US if Bush were reelected?’
That is a friendly jibe — in general I respect his work.
Would love to see Runnicles come back to the UK for keeps asap!
Sir Donald is surely a shining example of the value of being at a school which had a vibrant music education department. He has often said that it was when his music teacher took him and a few other pupils from their Edinburgh base across to Glasgow to see Scottish Opera’s 1971 Ring cycle that he not only developed a passion for music and for Germany but his interest in being more intimately involved as a conductor. What the west has lost as music education in schools has been so regularly cut back is surely incalculable.
Aviel Cahn arrives – and mot only Donald Runnicles, also the exceeding competent and respected, much loved opera director Christoph Seuferle leave. It’s always the same pattern: wherever Aviel Cahn treads, people who can afford to (or who understand that life is too short to be wasted for certain people) flee.
What pathetic nonsense. I have seen Cahn at work in Opera Flanders. In the space of a decade he transformed a rather insignificant opera house into a vibrant space, where I have seen some of the most impressive (and some of the most irritating) productions in almost forty years as an opera buff, and which has accumulated nominations and prizes from the International Opera Awards and Opernwelt.
Since Flanders, his only post was in Geneva. And I don’t know of any controversy around his leadership there. So please, can you elucidate what you are talking about?
No-one will miss Seuferle.
All things being equal, I’d take Germany over Wyoming any day culture wise!
To each his own. I’ve attended the GTMF for 40 years and have never had a bad experience. In fact, some of the most thrilling concerts I’ve ever heard were there in the Walk Concert Hall. A stunning Mahler 3 with Mehta. A deeply stirring Brahms 1 where the finale was accompanied by a terrific thunder storm. So many great memories. Hiking, fishing by day, great restaurants and bars by night. And oh, the cowboys! You don’t find them in Berlin or Leipzig.
Have you ever been there? The vastness of the land is difficult for the human mind to even perceive. Yes, I was there.
I had the good fortune of attending his MET Walküre in the early 2000s (he did one of the run, otherwise under Lorin Maazel.) Really outstanding in every way.
Actually 2008 and he was vastly superior to the always overrated Maazel. Poorly cast performance however i.e. Lisa Gasteen (should be “Lisa Ghastly”), Voigt just after the surgery that ruined her voice and James Morris at the very end of his Wotan years.
Runnicles´Ring was 200 times than Maazel´s shapeless,dull,ridiculously slow,sluggish performance.
Some people simply get tired of the BS.
Let’s hope this means we may see him more often in the UK as a guest conductor. Has he ever conducted anything at ROH or Scottish Opera? Can we hope that Pappano or Hrusa might be gracious enough to let us hear him in Wagner at Covent Garden? And I trust that the BBCSSO would welcome him back to conduct Bruckner any time he feels like it?
Aviel Kahn’s presence is a reason enough for anyone to flee. Even someone as experienced as Donald Runnicles, know it. Kahn might have done a good artistic job in Antwerpen, but having to deal with this man and his devious horrendous and malicious personality …… says pretty much all you there is to know …
San Francisco should offer him a guest conducting position. Respectfully said, the experiment of offering the musical direction of the theatre to Eun Sun Kim, has been a failure. She’s not yet up to the importan of an important, yet today inexplicably devalued opera house… Lofti Mansouri, Pamela Rosenberg, David Gockley your presence is really missed!!!
Kindly explain “failure.” How many operas have you attended where her considerable talent left you unimpressed.