Just in: Concertgebouw grabs London artistic director
OrchestrasAmsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra has recruited its next artistic director from the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Elena Dubinets, 55, joined the LPO four years ago from the Atlanta Symphony, after a formative spell with thee Seattle Symphony. She is the author of an academic study titled ‘Russian Composers Abroad: How They Left, Stayed, Returned’.
Moascow born,, she left Russia in 1996.
My guess is they will be playing more Russian rep now. Dubinets is hardly shy and retiring type, a shameless social media self-promoter.
ED spoke as the keynote at a conference recently on Russian minimalist composers. This is not her specialism. At the conference was a world authority on Russian minimalist music; a British musicologist who had done her PhD specifically on these composers – and who had very clearly been muscled out of the way by ED and her friends. She graciously stepped aside and let ED deliver the keynote but it was clear that nepotism and muscle had put the wrong scholar on the stand.
There are Russian minimalists? Don’t we have enough American minimalists? How minimal can you get?
Russian minimalist music is culturally very different to American minimalist music. Look it up and listen before commenting: Vladimir Martynov, Alexander Knaifel, Nikolai Korndorf, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky…
Interesting. I never came across these names.
Ms. Dubinets is a terrific choice here for the RCO. The combination of rigorous scholarship, decades of experience with artists and managers, and most importantly a unique creative perspective on what a symphony orchestra can offer to its constituents, makes her a very special leader. Dominik and company have made a wise and strategic decision.
Unfortunately she is not a decent or creative AD by any means, but enjoys leaping on hype trains, is easily swayed by others, and has very few original opinions and ideas of her own – except for an eye to her own success.
I agree with you, just look at Her LPO programming, not much creativity there. RCO will just continue their conservative path, even with the young Finn in charge soon.
Since nobody here seems to take the trouble to look who this lady actually is and what she does:
https://lpo.org.uk/people/elena-dubinets/
Word salat. You should rather look at the season program: average/alibi programming, overture (same contemporary composer names) concerto & symphony in one continuous stream with no original ideas. But this is same as RCO, so no change there.
What does ‘alibi’ mean in this context?
DEI based and not artistic excellency based programming. Flavour of the week composers and artists, pushed by publishers and managers. No independent or creative decisions made by the AD, as seen in Atalanta and Seattle before.
I thought salad is with a d. But I also make that mistake often. Best is to consider it a personal spelling interpretation.
Sally
Sorry for the German spelling, you get the point.
Oh what a terrible choice this is except for one thing — now the LPO might go back to days of genuinely good programming! She was a disaster there and did a pretty good job only of alienating many artists.