Berlin Philharmonic is Shanghaied

Berlin Philharmonic is Shanghaied

Orchestras

norman lebrecht

June 23, 2024

The orchestra takes up a six-day residency this week with chief conductor Kirill Petrenko and pianist Yuja Wang.

The residency includes four orchestra concerts at the Shanghai Grand Theatre with works by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Modest Mussorgsky, Maurice Ravel and Richard Wagner as part of the China Shanghai International Arts Festival. Yuja Wang will be the soloist in Sergei Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. There are also seven chamber concerts throughout the city with various Philharmoniker ensembles, ranging from string quartets to brass ensembles.

 

 

pictured: Petrenko with Shenzen pal in 2015

Comments

  • zandonai says:

    Yuja plays Beethoven?? ::Laughing Out Loud:::

    • Frank says:

      Another bad take from a racist opera fan that thinks SF Opera has a better orchestra than SFS

      • zandonai says:

        Let me be Frank with you… you can’t be racist if you are of the same general ethnic group, or can you?

        I maintain that SF Opera Orchestra has a singing quality unmatched by SFS, particularly the winds. Overall I enjoy SFO Orchestra far more than SFS and I have been hearing them since a kid for 20+ years.

  • Nick2 says:

    Yet another example of the amount of money flowing in Shanghai to invite some of the finest conductors, solists and orchestras of our day. The one pity perhaps is that the residency will be in the multi-purpose Shanghai Grand Theatre In People’s Square rather than the acoustically more satisfying Oriental Arts Centre in Pudong – in which the BPO gave the opening concert in 2005. It also has 300 more seats.

    • NoFan says:

      Wow you said it really well! The choice of Shanghai Grand Theatre is bizzare and many locals were curious about it. The chamber concerts are surely nice.

  • Grabenassel says:

    Geld stinkt nicht.

  • Johannes says:

    and the concerts are arranged by the same person who is very close to Gergiev and presents him regularly in China… go figure for an institution that claims to support Ukraine

  • Emil says:

    I hope they enjoyed the travel – they were playing at the Waldbühne in Berlin on Saturday evening. So flight on Sunday arriving Monday morning we presume, 6 hours time difference, first concerts on Tuesday. Rough schedule to be at peak performance. Unless, of course, they split the orchestra in two, with half playing Berlin and the other going on tour – they’d have the numbers.

    Incidentally, 4 of those 7 chamber concerts are occurring simultaneously on Tuesday evening.

    • Player says:

      This is the usual MO for a world class orchestra. BPO. LSO. Philharmonia. Concerteboew. Money is tight!

  • PJ says:

    Just money rules, that’s truly the only principle and not those UNICEF ribbons. China, that country…

  • Brandon says:

    Lovely to link an offensive likely racist term with a classical music tour, for no reason other than that you have no filter

  • Robert says:

    Good for them.

    I was so worried that they weren’t finding paying gigs.

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