Fever, developer of the Candlelight Concert series, is one of the most prominent voices in our space. With 8.2 million followers on Instagram, the Candlelight Concert series is also a dominant force in classical digital marketing. Even if you’ve not attended one of their many concerts, you’ll know what they look like: a quartet of […]
Category: Breaking
Posted inBreaking
Exclusive: Study Estimates Cost of Berlin Philharmonie Closure: €1.15 Billion
In 2032, the Philharmonie, the home of the Berlin Philharmonic, will close for major renovations—the year of the orchestra’s 150th anniversary. The project raises thorny questions: Where will the Berlin Philharmonic play in the interim? Given broad cuts to the city’s culture budget, how much will the renovations cost? How long will they take? A […]
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The Eternal Hunting Grounds
On April 24, Günter Pichler, a founding member and the first violinist of the Alban Berg Quartet, died at the age of 85. Here, Krzysztof Chorzelski, the violist of the Belcea Quartet, remembers the great musician who was his mentor. When I was a teenager living in Poland, I discovered the Alban Berg Quartet’s recording […]
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“All you had to do was go on Google”
Before conductor Frédéric Chaslin asked her if she would be interested in meeting Jeffrey Epstein, the former French philosophy student, who was 21 at the time, had only exchanged a handful of messages on Facebook with him. One day in 2013, Chaslin asked the student, who requested anonymity, if she would like to interpret for […]
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Emails Raise Questions About Conductor’s Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
“I found a great girl for your next stay in Paris,” the conductor Frédéric Chaslin wrote to Jeffrey Epstein in September 2013. Chaslin told the financier, who first pleaded guilty of solicitation of prostitution and of solicitation of prostitution with a minor in 2008, that the girl was a 21-year-old philosophy student who spoke three […]
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The Paternal Presence
The last time I saw Christoph von Dohnányi was at a lovely dinner at his apartment in Munich this last June. We were celebrating a positive health report his wife Barbara had just received and the mood was easy, relaxed, and convivial. The conversation with CvD covered enormous ground, as it always did—he spoke with […]
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Gagged!
Contracts seen by VAN show that the management of Northern Ballet has inserted a confidentiality clause into the agreements for its freelance musicians. In this agreement, which VAN understands has been in place since the start of the year, the artist “shall make no adverse or derogatory comment or announcement to the public press, social […]
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A Question of Endorsement
On May 26, Art Not Arms posted an open letter to Kings Place, the London classical music venue and conference center, that called for the cancellation of the upcoming Defence in Space Conference in October. This conference is sponsored by arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin. The open letter noted that Lockheed Martin is involved in the […]
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A Freedom to Dream
Few classical music organizations in the United States are as vulnerable to the new “patriotic” diktats of President Donald Trump’s arts policy as White Snake Projects. Founded in 2018 by Cerise Lim Jacobs, a retired lawyer turned librettist, the Boston-based indie opera company’s mission is explicitly activist, with a longstanding emphasis on racial and cultural […]
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ENO Confirms This Season’s Designs Use “AI-Enhanced” Artwork
There’s something rather odd about ENO’s current season, and it’s not that it’s excessively short. As VAN has reported on previously, and others have recently noted online, there’s the strong whiff of unattributed AI involved in their work. First, it was in their website copy, which, for a time, claimed that Benjamin Britten was still […]