On August 30, the morning after a concert with the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, we met the Austrian conductor and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra music director Manfred Honeck for an interview. It was a typical program for Honeck, who has made his reputation as a vital interpreter of what can only […]
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
Not Only Art, But a Human Right
Under Taliban rule (1996-2001), instrumental music and public performance in Afghanistan were almost totally banned. Instruments that were discovered by the Taliban’s morality police were destroyed; sometimes publicly burned or “hanged” along with confiscated audio and video cassettes, televisions, and camcorders. Only the singing of certain religious songs and unaccompanied hymns of praise to the […]
Posted inInterview
Objective and Inner Realities
Last August, conductor Vitali Alekseenok flew from his home in Germany (where he divides his time between Weimar and Munich) to his native Belarus. There, he took part in both the national elections and the subsequent protests against the government of Alexander G. Lukashenko. Despite the brutal police violence he witnessed, Alekseenok wrote in an […]
Posted inInterview
The Time Remaining
On March 25, pianist Lars Vogt wrote on Twitter: “Today: fight against cancer, round 2 (chemo). Keep your fingers crossed for me…” A month and a half later, he’s made it to the cusp of round five. “Another six months like this, until October, 12 rounds in total, as long as my body holds up. […]
Posted inReport
The Elephant in the Room
Update: February 25, 2022 Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, mayor of Munich Dieter Reiter issued the following statement: “I made my position clear to Valery Gergiev and asked him to also clearly and unequivocally distance himself from the Russian invasion to distance ourselves from the brutal war of aggression that Putin […]
Posted inInterview
Input
Look through older interviews with violinist Julia Fischer, and you’ll find a disturbing mix of chauvinism and sleaze: “A desirable German export with doe eyes and blond, angelic hair”; “young, sexy, and classical”; “ready for the runway.” One television anchor says she has the “looks, talent, and intelligence of a superwoman,” only to ask her […]
Posted inInterview
Fighting Windmills
The doors of the Berlin Philharmonic closed to the public on March 11, 2020. They won’t open again this season, making the coronavirus closure the Berlin Philharmonic’s longest break in its 138-year history. Instead of the musicians, it’s the construction workers who now have the run of the house, with improvements taking place on the […]
Posted inOpinion
19 COVID Theses
Not long after the last global pandemic, in which some 50 million people died from Spanish flu, a social change began to take place in living rooms across the world. With the dawn of radio, and later television, the parlor gatherings and upright pianos that had once been the focus of evening entertainment were gradually […]
Posted inOpinion
Winner Takes All
A bit of Beethoven here, a recital there—that doesn’t interest me,” the pianist Igor Levit said five years ago. Instead he wanted to become a thought leader, like Bob Dylan. Levit was reading Greil Marcus’s Like a Rolling Stone. “People like [Dylan] didn’t see music as a separate reality,” Levit told me. “They arrived on […]
Posted inReport
Conductivity
Around 11:20 on the morning of Saturday March 17, 2018, Laura Eisen, the orchestral manager of the Staatskapelle Berlin, visited Daniel Barenboim in his dressing room, which looks out onto the imposing Bebelplatz. She planned to discuss a personnel change, in the flutes, for an upcoming rehearsal of Verdi’s opera “Falstaff.” According to a statement […]