Posts Tagged ‘Vladimir Putin’

MPhil Bosses Want Continuity

Wednesday, January 31st, 2018

Valery Gergiev and Munich Philharmonic Intendant Paul Müller in 2017

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: January 31, 2018

MUNICH — Contrary to a London blog report yesterday, nothing has been “locked down” with regard to a contract extension for Valery Gergiev at the Munich Philharmonic, though things are indeed moving in that direction, for practical more than artistic reasons.

What has happened is that Hans-Georg Küppers, Kulturreferent of the City of Munich, which operates the orchestra, has gone public with his resolve to recommend a full five-year renewal for the Russian maestro to the city council at its scheduled Feb. 21 meeting. Any contract-signing would naturally take place later.

Küppers, MPhil Intendant Paul Müller (pictured last year with Gergiev), and Munich Bürgermeister Dieter Reiter are all inclined on continuity because 2020, when the present contract expires, heralds the lengthy and probably tortuous closure of the MPhil’s Gasteig home for gutting — at which time the musicians must decamp for a temporary wooden hall next to a power plant up the Isar River.

Gergiev has been no more of a musical success here than anyone predicted, but the high tensions around his friendship with Vladimir Putin — at fever pitch in 2013 when he was hired — have abated, and artistic decision-making since he began his tenure 29 months ago has gone smoothly.


Regarding other jobs around town, rumors persist that Vladimir Jurowski has joined Andris Nelsons im Gespräch for Kirill Petrenko’s position as Generalmusikdirektor at Bavarian State Opera. Petrenko steps down in fall 2020 after an unprecedented single season as head both of Germany’s largest opera company and of the Berlin Philharmonic. No rumors are yet floating about a successor to, or a renewal for, Mariss Jansons, whose contract at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is up one year after Gergiev’s.

Photo © Florian Emanuel Schwarz

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Earful of Joy for Trump

Friday, June 23rd, 2017

The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 23, 2017

MUNICH — Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, complete, is slated for President Trump’s second orchestra concert on the job, to take place, like the first, in Europe, specifically at Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie. Details of the July 7 event, part of the 12th G20 Summit, were announced Wednesday by a spokesman for Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel. A classical-music fan and the summit’s host, Merkel reportedly chose the program herself. Among summit attendees known to enjoy good music: French president Emmanuel Macron and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Christiane Karg, Okka von der Damerau, Klaus Florian Vogt, Franz-Josef Selig and the Hamburg State Opera Chorus will sing Schiller’s words; the Philharmonic State Orchestra Hamburg will be led by Kent Nagano. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” theme, without the words, is the official anthem of the European Union; in the “universal language of music,” the anthem expresses “European ideals of freedom, peace and solidarity.” An on-site dinner is scheduled before the performance.

Starting the day before, the Elbphilharmonie will become a Sicherheitszone, or security area — as will the full local width of the Elbe River, three adjacent quays, the airspace, and much of central Hamburg — to prepare for the concert venue’s role as an “official meeting place for the heads of state and government” taking part in the summit. Hamburg police expect “around 8,000 violent demonstrators.” G20 delegations are due to arrive that day; Trump and Putin will be meeting for the first time.

The G20, or Group of Twenty, comprises 19 countries plus the E.U. It accounts for 80% of global economic output in terms of GDP, adjusted for purchasing-power parity. In 2015, China’s GDP was around 19.7 billion “international dollars,” so adjusted, making it the largest economy in the world, followed by the United States, India and Japan. Germany was in fifth place, at 3.9 billion international dollars.

Photo © Maxim Schulz

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Gergiev, Munich’s Mistake

Wednesday, April 9th, 2014

Valery Gergiev signs contract at Astana Opera in April 2014

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 9, 2014

MUNICH — Not a week goes by here now without media mention of Valery Gergiev. The musical friend of Vladimir Putin and, more to the point, high-profile employee-to-be of the City of Munich inspires comment even in modest suburban newspapers. Many want his alarmingly long contract (2015–20) shredded.

But the Russian maestro was already a rotten choice as Chefdirigent of the tax-payer-funded, city-run Munich Philharmonic before Putin upset Pink List politicians over human rights and the Green Party over Crimea.

His repertory limitations, his work habits and his first loyalties all portend a discordant, creatively stunted tenure during which Munich, despite its €800,000-a-year* wage, has no hope of being the artist’s top priority. If not shredded, the contract of Feb. 2013 should certainly be adjusted.

Gergiev is globally known from his base at St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, where he operates a network of répétiteurs and conducting assistants who extend brand “Gergiev” beyond the physical and temporal limits of one person.

Seven days ago, for instance, he entered a principal guest conductor agreement (pictured) with Astana Opera, the expensively housed company of Nursultan Nazarbayev in the flat and flashy Kazakh capital.

Munich’s old and Astana’s new money follows Gergiev earnings at the London Symphony Orchestra, where his stint as principal conductor (2007–15) resembles good preparation for the job here.

But London’s one-night, one-program pattern suits the Russian’s lickety-split scheduling better than Munich’s (American-style) weekly program iterations. Example: he is this week able to dart to New York for a Strauss concert between two different LSO Scriabin programs three days apart.

As one MPhil insider earnestly phrased it last December, peripatetic Gergiev “must reinvent himself” so that he can stay in one place, with one program and one group of musicians, for a whole workweek, build partnerships through rehearsals he himself leads, and mine the interpretive depths.

Good luck with that. And the reinventing would need to extend to repertory: Munich concertgoers enjoy their Slavic diversions but expect passionate leadership in Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner. Alas, in 25 years as a star, Gergiev has acquired no reputation in these composers. Ditto for Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn.

“It’s political,” everyone says, when asked why Gergiev was chosen. They mean he was chosen by city politicians — not friends of Putin, of course, but people whose collective knowledge and consensus thinking permit little beyond the purchase of a big name, which Gergiev undeniably is.

In their wisdom, in 2009, they “lost” the MPhil’s hot-property Generalmusikdirektor Christian Thielemann, and followed up in 2010 by replacing him with the jaded Lorin Maazel (for 2012–15). Decline has followed.

The politicians do not decide unaided, however. A consulting board called the Philharmonische Rat liaises between the orchestra’s Intendant Paul Müller and Munich’s city council, which approves budgets and major contracts. The Rat includes councilors, orchestra members, Müller, and Hans-Georg Küppers, the city’s Kulturreferent. If nothing else, processes are peaceful. The recent difficulties in Minneapolis and San Diego cannot be imagined here.

Ironically, while Rat members can speak freely, Gergiev is expected to constrain his speech — not weigh in on matters like Crimea that needn’t concern a Moscow-born Ossetian based in St Petersburg — and acquire the diplomatic tact of a City of Munich employee, a world-roaming cultural ambassador whose every move and view will reflect on Munich, Bavaria and Germany.

Predictably he hasn’t. By hailing the Crimea change, even in his current status as an MPhil guest, he may have done more to curtail his Munich future than any problem of scheduling or repertory weakness could have.

The Green Party on Mar. 27 forced instructions to Küppers and Müller: chat with the maestro during his next visit, bitte, and illuminate the boundary between free speech and employee discretion.

They can try. Gergiev is in town next month with his beloved Mariinsky Orchestra. More productive, though, would be a chat that dilutes the publicly signed Chefdirigent deal into a guesting plan like Astana’s. Time remains on Maazel’s contract to research and court a more suitable replacement, allowing Gergiev to remain Gergiev, and Munich to savor the scores he leads best. Without the negative attention.

[*The salary reportedly paid to Christian Thielemann, whose title indicated a slightly loftier position. The incumbent, Lorin Maazel, is Chefdirigent, as was James Levine before Thielemann.]

Photo © Astana Opera

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Stravinsky On Autopilot

Thursday, March 27th, 2014

Members of the Munich Philharmonic at work

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: March 27, 2014

MUNICH — In eight days in May 2004, as a kind of audition for the post of principal conductor, Valery Gergiev drove the London Symphony Orchestra brilliantly, if roughly, through recorded concerts of all of Prokofiev’s symphonies. Acclaim ensued, he got the job, and two years later the hasty, also electrifying and poignant, cycle rolled out on Philips CDs.

Now that Gergiev is headed here as Chefdirigent of the Munich Philharmonic, his attention is on Stravinsky. Only this time he already has the job, from Sept. 2015. And while Gergiev can be effective in this composer’s music too, he isn’t always, as Sedgwick Clark recently noted.

Munich’s Stravinsky cycle, if that is what it turns out to be, got off to a sad start Dec. 18. On the program, at the orchestra’s crooked Gasteig home, four French-name works: L’oiseau de feu (1910), Symphonies d’instruments à vent (1920), and the cantatas Le roi des étoiles (1912) and Les noces (1923).

Technically it was a good night. The orchestra and the pianists played well, the singing had discipline. Microphones presumably were turned on.

Artistically, though, nothing much happened, above all in the popular ballet score, which coasted vacantly and sounded headless, as if the orchestra members had crafted an interpretation by themselves.

The inspired Les noces should have been a treat, with four Mariinsky singers on hand (soprano Irina Vasilieva, mezzo-soprano Olga Savova, tenor Alexander Timchenko and bass Ilya Bannik), but Gergiev operated merely as traffic cop. Visceral bite in the score counted for little, despite robust contributions from Vasilieva and Savova and the energy of pianists Sergei Babayan, Dmitri Levkovich, Marina Radiushina and Andrius Zlabys, plus able percussionists. Adding to the woe, the cantata’s torrent of words blurred in the wide, fan-shaped auditorium.

Although perfectly intoned, the Symphonies suffered from blunting of essential rhythmic impulses. Only the brief King of the Stars (Звездоликий, actually Star Face) brought satisfaction, its alien harmonies and odd temporal properties carefully managed.

But who knows? Recordings may paint a more enthralling, or at any rate clearer, picture of this first regular-program collaboration of the Munich Philharmonic and the boss-to-be since the January 2013 announcement of his hire. And there is always hope for the cycle’s second installment.

The concert, not incidentally, was beset by unnerving circumstance. A testy news conference the previous afternoon (Dec. 17); a human rights protest in the form of a Putin-Gergiev pantomime on the Gasteig’s forecourt, watched by hundreds of arriving concertgoers; the unrealized menace of heckling during the music; daytime pressure from City of Munich politicians; and, not least, a week of frenzy for the maestro before he even landed here — all amount to another discussion.

Photo © Wild und Leise

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To Russia with Love

Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid

Vladimir Putin has given the western world much reason for protest over the past year. There is the law banning homosexual “propaganda.” Two members of Pussy Riot still sit behind bars. According to some residents (and ex-residents) of the former Soviet Union, Russia is reverting to a full-blown totalitarian dictatorship. The businessman Michail Chodorkowski still sits in jail on dubious charges. Just last week, the government charged a Greenpeace ship crew with piracy following protests over an oil rig. Freedom of speech is not a given even on the internet.

Gidon Kremer, with his concert To Russia with Love at the Philharmonie yesterday—exactly seven years after the murder of journalist Anna Politkowskaja—set out to raise general awareness of the declining state for human rights. The foyer was lined with the stands of NGOs and non-profits: Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, Osteuropa. A giant canvas hung for visitors to sign their name to the cause. But Kremer’s main motivation behind the concert, as he explains in an online video, was to counter the notion of music as entertainment. “Music should serve as a vehicle for expanding our emotions and confirming our ethics,” he says. He brought together coveted soloists with his ensemble Kremerata Baltica for a beautifully curated program that was streamed live on Arte .

It almost felt like a guilty pleasure to enjoy the artists under the circumstances. As Emmanuel Pahud and Khatia Buniatishvili performed a transcription of Lenski’s famous aria from Eugen Onegin, the flute’s luxurious tone bordered on the overly sentimental. Buniatishvili, in a floor-length, low back gown, also gave a virtuosic if flashy account of the agitated final movement from Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No.7. But, following the impassioned speech of human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, the music served a clear dramaturgical purpose. The concert opened with a poem by Herta Müller which resembled more of an informative speech: “Putin thinks he is the law…intimidation is daily fare.” Kremer led a soulful reading of the third movement from Mieczysław Weinberg’s Sinfonietta Nr.2 which gave way without a pause to an eerily hushed Allemande from J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite Nr. 2 with Nicolas Altsteadt as soloist.

The cellist immediately switched to a bold, insistent tone for the last movement of Gubaidulina’s Seven Last Words, joined by bayan soloist Elsbeth Moser, who provided everything from atmospheric to ripping textures against glassy strings. The appearance of a Ukranian girls’ choir in traditional costume for Pärt’s Estonian Lullaby took on an appropriately ironic, if not tragic tone. It is worth noting that although the composer lives in Berlin, his work is rarely performed here.

Kremer’s lyrical taste in contemporary music found further expression in the premiere of Giya Kancheli’s Angels of Sorrow, dedicated to the 50th birthday of Chodorkowski. The Georgian composer blends solo violin, cello and piano into transcendent textures with choir, xylophone and string ensemble. When the approximately 20-minute piece breaks out into angry passages, they are quickly countered by celestial responses. A percussive melody to bass drum lends passages of the final section a Dies Irae quality, but the soothing choir and solo violin, even as it is reduced to wispy pizzicato, seem to reassure the listener that the heavens will have their way.

The second half of the program included moments of sardonic humor. Kremer, to impromptu accompaniment by Daniel Barenboim, took a deliberately modernist approach to the Rachmaninov/Kreisler Prayer which more often assumes the guise of feel-good film music. Martha Argerich brought playful energy to Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto alongside the ironic interjections of trumpeter Sergei Nakariakov. Music from Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov’s score to the film Target ended the evening on an upbeat note, from the free, tonal invention in Vivaldi’s January to the street scene of his Foxtrot.

Barenboim and Argerich joined for an encore of Schubert’s Grand Rondo in A-major, having warmed up to an even more gentle performance than last month at the Musikfest. Perhaps audiences in Berlin are simply spoiled, but one couldn’t help but perceive the music as an empty crowd-pleaser. As the listeners rose in enthusiastic applause, the atmosphere was one of prosperity and pride—less self-reflection than self-congratulation. A journalist sitting next to me noted how poorly Berlin’s Russian community was represented in the audience. Even intentions as sincere and courageous as those of Kremer’s intentions cannot escape the bourgeois trappings of classical music consumption. But he might have taken a step toward forcing the world to listen with different ears.

rebeccaschmid.info

Bieito Hijacks Boris

Thursday, February 21st, 2013

Anatoli Kotcherga and Alexander Tsymbalyuk

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: February 21, 2013

MUNICH — As dramaturgy, Calixto Bieito’s new staging here of Mussorgsky’s seven‑scene 1869 Boris Godunov (heard and seen yesterday, Feb. 20) runs into trouble almost immediately.

Set in present‑day Russia — identifiable by the up‑to‑date, thug‑police gear and the wall map in Boris’s Terem (Scene V) — it seems to want to cast Vladimir Putin as the boyar turned czar (actual reign: 1598–1605). Indeed, Putin’s face is first, front, and center among placards displayed in Scene I, as the crowd is bullied into endorsement of a leadership change.

But that would entail the Russian president dropping dead on the stage of Munich’s nice theater, an outcome for which not even Bieito — born in Old Castile, Spain — would have the cojones, to say nothing of Bavarian State Opera management’s likely concerns.

So the thing gets diluted. Putin’s face is promptly surrounded by placards for sundry other politicians, to wit: Cameron, Hollande, Monti, and Rajoy, supplemented by the peacefully removed from office Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, and Sarkozy; the current German chancellor and U.S. president apparently do not merit inclusion, though someone resembling Leon Panetta does. And Boris emerges as a fill‑in‑the‑blank oligarch, schemer and poison victim. His death (Scene VII) occurs at an oligarch get‑together attended — in a feeble try at framing the concept — by present‑day, multinational finance ministers. Boyar, you see, equals oligarch, equals business leader; finance ministers are there to cater.

Still, Bieito shoots his interpretive load along the way with slices of supposed present‑day Russian life. People are shoved, choked and skull‑crushed by the police. Boris’s young daughter Xenia is a drunk. The Innkeeper (Scene IV) ruthlessly whips her own toddler while puffing a cigarette. The robbed Holy Fool is repeatedly stabbed by a little girl, and then shot in the head by her at close range under police cover.

Pimen the chronicler undoes history by ripping pages from a file. His student Grigory (a.k.a. False Dmitry I, czar in 1605–06) stabs a policeman, breaks the necks of the Nanny and Xenia, and suffocates Boris’s son Fyodor (historically czar in 1605). Boris’s own slow death, in context, doesn’t exactly ache in its poignancy.

For visual sustenance during the unbroken 135‑minute proceedings, we survey a cumbersome dark metallic unit shifting around the stage against an equally dark, smoky background. Technical staff here are proud of their mostly quiet hydraulics.

Last night’s performance (transmitted live on Mezzo TV) riveted attention through extraordinary singing. Alexander Tsymbalyuk’s stentorian bass voice in the title role brought eager expression to all lines of the anguished ruler. Secure from bottom to top, Tsymbalyuk sang with refined legato here, pointed declamation there. Now 36, this Ukrainian artist last year concluded a nine‑year affiliation with Staatsoper Hamburg; remember the not‑so‑easy name.

Veteran of the title role, and fellow Ukrainian, Anatoli Kotcherga (65) invested Bieito’s un‑chronicler with power, eloquence and welcome stature. Another sometime Boris, Vladimir Matorin (64) from Moscow, boomed with full‑voiced, undaunted lyricism as Varlaam, effective well beyond So It Was In the City of Kazan.

St Petersburg tenor Sergei Skorokhodov introduced a clarion, unstrained Grigory. Gerhard Siegel floated attractive tones in the oily duties of Basil Shuisky (future czar Basil IV, 1606–10), presenting the character as a credible advisor more than as a scorned stereotype. Company member Okka von der Damerau lent her vivid and plush mezzo to the hard‑put‑upon, abusive Innkeeper, and 23‑year company member Kevin Conners of East Rochester, NY, bellyached musically as the Holy Fool.

Advance hopes that Kent Nagano might bring some sweep, flair or insight to Mussorgsky’s graphic score — his last premiere as Bavarian State Opera Generalmusikdirektor — soon receded. His approach was plain, without feel for the Russian phrase. If he grasped the problems of balance caused by Mussorgsky’s intermittent misjudgment of orchestral weight, in this third performance of the run, he made no audible compensation for them. As usual he paced the music fittingly and coordinated well. Wind ensemble fell below par for the Bavarian State Orchestra; the chorus sang in unclear Russian, with greater musical discipline than usual. Disenchanted by Bieito’s whopping liberties with the colorful, pageant‑endowed story, but enthralled by the singing, the crowd applauded lightly.

Still image from video © Bayerische Staatsoper

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