When European orchestras tour in Asia, their social media teams usually go into overdrive. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram fill up with photos of basses on buses and musicians enjoying local delicacies. This content faces homeward. Fans, funders, donors, and the competition see the international prestige of the group reflected in its dispatches from the road. […]
Author Archives: Hartmut Welscher
... earned degrees in development studies, Asian studies, and cultural anthropology from universities in Berlin, Seoul, Edinburgh, and London. He is a founder of VAN, where he serves as publisher and editor-in-chief.
Posted inInterview
Holding the Center
In 2018, outgoing Berlin Philharmonic music director Simon Rattle told the orchestra’s in-house magazine, 128, “You probably need to be 90 to conduct this orchestra correctly.” Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt, age 95, proved the truth to this remark in a concert with the orchestra at the end of September. The Berlin Philharmonic is known for […]
Posted inBreaking
The Ground Shifting Beneath Teodor Currentzis
In war, truth is the first casualty, as the saying goes. Maybe the second or third casualty is a sense of perspective about what happens on war’s periphery. When the world is divided into friend and foe, it’s hard to find space for the in-between. But that’s where the truth is usually found. Greek-Russian conductor […]
Posted inInterview
“I’m Just Not a Star”
For over 30 years, Frank Peter Zimmermann has been one of the best and most successful German violinists on the international concert circus. Now seemed like a good time to take stock and look both backward and forward. I reached the 57-year-old on FaceTime from his house in Cologne. He apologized for canceling an interview […]
Posted inBreaking
In Between Worlds
“I don’t know if there is a creator, but if he exists, all I could do is tip my hat to him and say, ‘Thank you,’” pianist and conductor Lars Vogt told me in May 2021, when we spoke shortly after his cancer diagnosis. Vogt died on Monday in a hospital in Erlangen, Germany, surrounded […]
Posted inReport
With Friends Like These
Last week, multiple Argentine newspapers broke the story of Plácido Domingo’s alleged connections to four members of a criminal cult called Escuela de Yoga de Buenos Aires, or the Buenos Aires Yoga School. Sources close to the investigation told the media that Domingo has known these alleged cult members for 26 years. Two of the […]
Posted inInterview
Pact with the Dictator
In the summer of 2009, Valery Gergiev organized an exhibition in St. Petersburg called “Wilhelm Furtwängler: Maestro, Man, and Myth” as part of the White Nights Festival. At the opening, Gergiev gave a speech noting that Furtwängler had been attacked all his life because of his biography, yet “he served a great cause with all […]
Posted inInterview
The Danger of Silence
This month, conductor Vitali Alekseenok was slated to conduct concerts in Lviv, Dnipro, and Kyiv, as well as open the Kharkiv Music Festival as its new artistic director. Instead, four days after the beginning of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, he and his girlfriend drove two trucks full of aid supplies eight and a half hours […]
Posted inOpinion
Taking Gergiev at His Word
Last week, Dieter Reiter, the mayor of Munich, sent an open letter to Valery Gergiev, the chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic. Reiter told Gergiev he had until February 28 to distance himself from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If Gergiev declined, his contract with the orchestra would be terminated. Some commentators, on social media […]
Posted inInterview
“It’s a Constant State of Stress”
“I’m sorry, things are pretty dramatic here and all I can focus on right now is saving my family. I’ll write you next week.” That was how Anna Stavychenko, artistic director of the Open Music City Festival and executive director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, replied to me when I contacted her for an interview […]