Breaking: Top Russian conductor walks out on Bolshoi
mainChaos again at the flagship theatre.
The veteran Vladimir Fedoseev has walked out after one rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, saying the place is not functioning properly.
Anton Grishanin has been summoned as his replacement.
Say what you like about Gergiev, but this does not happen at the Mariinsky.
source: ClassicalMusicNews.Ru
UPDATE: He’s coming back.
Yup, ol’ VG makes the trains run on time. So to speak.
This is a top Russian conductor now, rather than a talentless hack who was conductor of the USSR folk orchestra until he married a daughter of an important Soviet politician?
New rules.
No-one has called him a ‘top conductor’, it’s purely relative… he is just better than the other twits at the Bolshoi, that’s al.
Of course, if the Bolshoi had replaced their last MD (who didn’t even reside in Russia, and flew in by the hour to rehearse his own shows only) with a full-timer who knows the Russian and international repertoires, things (as VG does), things would be different. Instead they appointed someone with no reputation, who lives in Britain, and jets in for his rehearsals as Sinaisky did. Training of the orchestra, solo rehearsals with singers, auditions for players and singers, deciding the artistic and musical policies of the theatre…these are all dumped on functionaries (as usual at the Bolshoi, which has a burgeoning army of functionaries, who have kept it going for decades).
To call the Bolshoi Theatre dysfunctional is no understatement. It fails to function at every level. Even the lifts don’t work. When the theatre was rebuilt (conveniently without an AD to insist on things) half the budget was stolen in fraudulent deals, and a fire faked for insurance purposes. Six large lifts were installed. None of them have ever worked.During shows the chorus have to use the Fire Stairs, because teams of burly stage-hands are hauling the scenery up the main backstage stairs from the scenery dock…by hand :((
I’m seeing Tugan tonight and will pass on your comments.
Tugan is nobody in the Bolshoi. Vladimir Urin is the one who decides.
Worth adding that the Bolshoi does have a team of excellent staff conductors… who have to conduct rehearsals for which the bosses cannot be bothered to turn up, and revivals of 40-year-old productions which should have been put out to pasture long ago (in any serious theatre, I mean). But these young conductors (Granowsky, Bogorad) are only trusted with musical dogsbodying – and not with new productions like Iolanta.
If these staff conductors are so great, why don’t they go somewhere else?
One could put the same question to you.
Amen.
I saw Fedoseyev conduct a good number of concerts when I lived in Moscow a decade ago. He never struck me as a hack, and his orchestra, the БОЛЬШОЙ СИМФОНИЧЕСКИЙ ОРКЕСТР им. П.И. ЧАЙКОВСКО (Tchaikovsky SO for short) was in my view surpassed only by the Russian National Orchestra.