Vienna Phil switches concertmaster
OrchestrasContrary to advance publicity, it was Rainer Honeck who stepped up to lead the Vienna Philharmonic this morning.
The intended concertmaster was Albena Danailova, the first woman to preside on New Year’s Day.
What happened? A failure of collective will?
Or maybe they were just testing to see if we were watching.
No, you just reported false news. It was always meant to be Mr Honeck and he lead all the rehearsals
Untrue. It was announced in the NYTimes as Albena, then quietly changed to Honeck at the weekend. If it had always been Honeck, they would never have got the NYT splash. This starts to look like an act of deception.
Oh for God’s sake just enjoy the music and give theories conspiracy theories a rest.
Like the NYT has never got it wrong before.
Reiner Honeck and Albena are a married couple.
Sorry, neither the NYT nor the Vienna Philharmonic announced any such thing. The actual sentence reads:
“Next Saturday to Monday, she will take the stage of the Musikverein for performances of the annual New Year’s Concert, which will be conducted by Christian Thielemann.”
Nothing says she would be THE concertmaster leading those concerts.
Unless she wasn’t even on stage, you read too much into a simple declarative sentence.
Yes, but there’s a strong implication that if an article is about a concertmaster, and it says she’ll “take the stage,” then we’ll see her in the concertmaster position.
Unless she was demoted in the days since this article ran (and anything is possible with the Vienna Phil)…
Yes, it’s a strong implication…if you lack rudimentary skills in comprehension and critical thinking.
Well, clearly you know nothing about how orchestras work if you think a concertmaster can simply move to another position in an orchestra with the drop of a hat. This whole page is full if mindless arguments though.
Another thing ‘clear’ to you which is plain wrong. Actually I’ve played in orchestras over 40 years and seen both concertmasters sit together many times. I can also read and understand what is written without making mindless assumptions.
I’m sorry but you need to work on critical reading skills. NY Times article is indeed misleading, or at the very least, deliberately unclear. It is bad journalism since it implies that her “taking the stage” is directly related to the previous sentence regarding her being the first female concertmaster, and the next sentences discuss gender parity and the role of concertmaster. The person to critique here is not Christoph, but the journalist who wrote the article. This is pretty basic literary criticism, and anyone who has studied journalism would agree.
They have three concertmasters. She’s one of them.
@Christoph, “She will take the stage” means she will be performing in stage.
Everyone performing at that concert “takes the stage.”
Take the stage (phrase): go onto the stage and start to perform
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/take-the-stage
No, the 12/23 NY Times article did not say she would be Concertmaster at the New Year’s concerts, only that she would be playing.
“Next Saturday to Monday, she will take the stage of the Musikverein for performances of the annual New Year’s Concert, which will be conducted by Christian Thielemann.”
When did you start giving credit to anything coming out of New York?
There was no “announcement” and there was no “change”. It was pointed out to you when you posted your earlier piece that the article didn’t support your claim. Instead you are doubling down, making broad-brush assertions that are simply wrong. The only story here is SD making a mistake and trying to create a faux controversy over it.
It is an elementary piece of knowledge for observers of the Wiener Philharmoniker that the orchestra has a seniority system among their concertmasters. That is not some esoteric inside knowledge: even a person who just watches them from time to time in concert could infer it. SD made a sloppy mistake while trying to paint itself as being more “in the know” than it really is.
Actually the NY Times article doesn´t say this. it says only she will be onstage.
This is not false news, the article in the NY Times dates from Dec 23 : https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/arts/music/vienna-philharmonic-concertmaster.html
Check your facts and Happy New Year.
In the NYT article there’s no mention that she would lead the new year concert 2024.
Again too much noise for nothing…
Well then the NYT got it wrong. There are two concertmasters who take turn at the New Year’s Concert and they are the two “oldest” in terms of seniority in the orchestra (currently Rainer Honeck and Volkhard Steude). Mrs Danailova will be the leader of the New Year’s Concert when Mr Honeck retires (which should come quite soon) and when she thus becomes the second in line.
Simple.
Exactly. In fact Mr Honeck himself did not lead a New Year’s concert until Werner Hink retired. Only at that time he became Sr. concertmaster. Before that you could see him next to either Mr. Hink or to Rainer Küchl.
Patience. In time, Ms Danailova will lead a New Year’s concert.
Wrong. Rainer Honeck was scheduled to play the concerts and the rehearsals. However, she played already several New Years concerts in the past.
The audience look as happy as ever and is that Thielemann wearing make-up and getting angry with the front desk violins again!
Happy New Year
Thielemann led a majestic Blue Danube and an excellent concert overall, easily the best in at least the last 5 years, drawing out a great range of palette from the orchestra. The audience responded knowingly.
Yes, he does have this thing of waving his forearm in front of the faces of the first desk violins, but the funny thing is, no one knows what he means, because the violins are already playing super soft, and when he does his waving thing, the violins don’t change one bit of their playing.
It’s like the Kleiber grimace: at some point he always grimaces at the violins like he just heard the toilet flushing or something. And again, no one knows what he’s grimacing at, the violins continue to play as nothing happened.
I feel Mr. Thielemann was too micromanagement in this situation. Nobody needs his conducting in this occasion. They can play these pieces with all eyes closed. He only needs to control the rhythm, phrases, and overall presentation, etc, which I don’t think he did a good job to let the music flow naturally, especially the Blue Danube. It was too analytical to my taste.
Other than Kleiber (winner and forever champion) and Georges Pretre, I think Thielemann has been the best New Year’s conductor of recent decades, followed by FWM. I know a lot of people like to hate on them, but they get the repertory and style. Muti, Mehta, and Barenboim have usually struck me as rather dull.
Will they ever invite Manfred Honeck? A year or two ago he led a fabulous Vienna-ish New Years concert with the Czech Philharmonic (better in many respects than the Vienna show the same day, IMHO).
I’m still waiting for Sir Simon. Doesn’t seem a natural, but he would embrace it, and can you honestly say it wouldn’t be more interesting than most that we see?
Oh yes, on his “makeup”, glad to see Thielemann made some effort and put on a tailored morning coat (instead of his standard shapeless Mao suit), and used some hairspray to style his hair (rather than his usual flat bowl cut).
Mr. Lebrecht, please point to the exact sentence in NY Times article which states that Albena would be leading the orchestra on the New Year`s concert. Because I don`t see it. I understand that such a belated publicity can be misleading (she is an established concertmaster for 12 years already and never got this kind of attention), but let respect the facts and not jump to self-made assumptions.
Thielemann couldn’t have such a deep and meaningful with the leader (as he did today) with a woman sitting there?
Wasn’t she sitting on the front desk of the firsts with Honeck?
I started at the back of the second violins in the RLPO . Got to near the front and after 38 years decided to not return to the back .
I do miss Vivienne Westwood’s dancers costumes . The highlight of the show or me thinking of the second violins chugging along .
So now it’s the 21st century and a woman concert master has never led the New Year’s Concert in an orchestra which has never had a fully Asian member due to a long history of excluding them, and in an orchestra that was one of the principal propaganda organs of the Third Reich.
For context, it fits well with the postwar politics of Austria. I think of the prominent politician Jorg Haider who described the SS as heroes, referred to the concentration camps as punishment camps, and praised the economic policies of Hitler.
For further context, there was no political will in Austria to bring women into the orchestra. It only began admitting women after massive international protests outside of Austria. So while reading all the huffing indignity above by anonymous cowards we can remember that Ostreich bleibt Ostreich. Fits well with similar political situations in the USA, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, and which I suspect makes a number of the readers here quite happy.
There are a significant number of orchestras around the world that have never played any concert with a woman concertmaster.
But unlike the VPO, they do not have the lowest ratio of women members in the world.
Nor do those orchestras have a long history of categorically excluding people who are fully Asian. It’s interesting how the comments here saying absolutely nothing about that, as if overt racism were simply acceptable in classical music.
Well said, William. Even the NY Times egregiously lets the orchestra off the hook for its slow-walking change in the post-1997 era.
Vienna should be ostracized and excluded from every international venue and radio/TV broadcast outlet until they clean up their act. Enough’s enough.
And yet, 2 of VPO’s 3 tenured female wind players were in the spotlight & playing magnificently at yesterday’s concert. That’s better female representation than in many US orchestras.
Do you support sacking men from posts they’ve held for years in preference to other positions in order to make way for women and non-Austrians in prominent positions in the orchestra? Would you just chuck people out in order to satisfy your criteria? Do things like loyalty and long service not matter to you?
Also, what is Ostreich? Some kind of pun on ostrich? A local dialect of Österreich? Or simple ignorance?
The usual idiotically paranoid response claiming that men are to be fired to make way for women–the sort of ignorantly, mentally ill fear that is the very definition of misogyny.
I support blind auditions in all three rounds, not just the first two rounds as used in the VPO.
The reason the VPO still has so few women is that even though they agreed to admit women in 1997, they did not make a woman aside from harpists a member of the orchestra until 2007. Ten years wasted in the stupid, sexist belief that if they held out long enough, people would forget the agreement to admit women. Of course, that didn’t workout, and now the orchestra has to catch up.
When you pay for the running of the Vienna Philharmonic you can dictate the composition of its premier orchestra. Until then, just go away.
Why not write to the orchestra and ask? If they don’t give a straight answer, they’re probably hiding something.
Well, now I’m going to watch the telecast extra closely to see if she’s there. Sounds like just a misinterpretation of the NYT article….. which probably should have been clearer that she would be *playing* in the concert but not *leading* as concertmaster. ¯_(?)_/¯
To be verified in about 4 hours.
Extraneous Minor Quibble: Of course, for the 41st or 42nd year running, in the U.S. we will get only about 60% of the concert on PBS.
You’ll be lucky if you get any response. I have written several times without any success!!
I did notice all the women playing in the broadcast were wearing trousers and jackets to maintain uniformity of appearance for the cameras. Do they do the same for non-televised performances?
Yes, although not those specific outfits, which are only used for New Year’s (they would be too much of a hassle considering substitute players). In normal operations the women have some flexibility about what to wear under the jacket, but otherwise it’s uniform.
Before the orchestra agreed to admit women in 1997, they still had to use a woman harpist, Anna Lelkes, in a non-member associate status because a male harpist for her position could not be found. She was required to wear a black gown with a large white V down the front so that it would look similar to what the men wore. The orchestra also forbade cameras to show her during televised concerts. It was misogyny taken to lunatic levels, and yet no one in the entire classical music world said anything about the orchestra’s exclusion of women. Such silence still exists to this day regarding the orchestra’s lunatic exclusion of Asians, a kind of overt racism that only Austria could maintain in this day an age.
So much debate on something so unimportant.
I’m not following your story. First you say “Rainer Honeck stepped up to lead ..”. But then you say, “the intended concertmaster was Danilova”. The concertmaster is the first chair violinist, not the conductor (or leader), as you called him. Am I missing something?