All shall have prizes: Kent Nagano wins Brahms
OrchestrasThe US conductor, in his closing season as GMD in Hamburg, has been awarded the city’s Brahms prize.
It’s worth ten thousand Euros.
Worth turning up for?
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I just watched Die Walkure conducted by him in Holland. To be honest, the orchestra part was very mediocre.
It’s because he’s doing the Ring operas in the ‘authentic period style’ (lower pitch, less vibrato, etc.) in collaboration of his team of Wagner scholars and researchers, or some nonsense like that.
Unless it’s Renaissance music, period instruments sounds like a bad orchestra. I doubt there is that much difference between Wagner’s orchestra and what we hear today. Improvement to musical instruments come VERY slowly. Making one easier and more efficient to play is seen as cheating. That’s one reason violins have never changed and soloist are playing 400 year old straps. Wagner invented a particular tuba. As far as I know, all other tubas have remained the same. I’m not familiar enough with Naganos work but my initial impression is he is better than average but without real interpretive ideas and little nuance.
Jef, you are very incorrect on most everything you wrote.
No, it wasn’t. A briljant performance.
Our record collection are full of excellent recordings…at least he tries something…I remember him picking first editions in Bruckner symphonies,he did a very decent job there … but his Alpine symphony is absolutely boring… which seems impossible in this work….it seems the maestro s inspiration and mood is changing a lot
Worth turning up for, in order to donate it for a good cause. But why don’t institutions bypass the laureates and make the donation directly instead?
To catch attention by name dropping?
I am going to create a prize.
The Royal Imperial Bach-Beethoven-Brahms-Boulez Intergalactic Prize.
The winner will be bestowed the hereditary title of Your Royal Imperial BBBB Intergalacticness.
The award ceremony will be dinner with me.
The first winner will be Yuja Wang.
Gentlemen Prefer Brahms.
“All shall have prizes”.
Somehow, I am not part of “all”. 🙂
“all” these days connotes non-whites and a different sex than ‘assigned’ at birth.
Eh, I’m all for woke-bashing, but prize winners still seem to be remarkably good musicians; if there is any bias, it comes from teachers of students that influence juries.
So – in this case – the antiwoke outrage seems unjustified.
Do continue to rage, however: there is plenty of DEI nonsense to stay fuming!
I suspect the reasoning behind the prize is “thank you for not fucking up Brahms like you have every other composer you’ve performed.”
Messiaen, Poulenc, and Canteloube would beg to differ, I suspect.
Isn’t Nagano the opposite of Brahms?
This is really gonna establish his career.
Nagano doesn’t believe opera should have rubato …although I direly needed the money at the time, it was torturous to play Puccini with him.
I have to admit, my only experience with him live was seeing him conduct SFS in Boulez and Prokofiev (plus something else?).
I was extremely underwhelmed. I genuinely love his Messiaen, Canteloube, and Poulenc recordings, so maybe I’ll get around to hearing some of his other stuff.