“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 […]
Tag: Conductors
Posted inInterview
How You Say The Thing
The Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi is among the most active and interesting conductors of his generation. His work is characterized by a constant curiosity and a sensitive yet revealing approach to the music, with a refreshing combination of intellect and—in the case of Gustav Mahler—explosive spontaneity. He also stands publicly in opposition to the Russian […]
Posted inInterview
“To Be a Musician Is to Desire a Piece of Music”
Last week at the Philharmonie in Berlin, the ensemble Pygmalion under conductor Raphaël Pichon performed a concert of sacred music from during and after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). It was a brutally destructive conflict that by some estimates decimated the German population by half. And though religious tensions were among the causes for the […]
Posted inInterview
Crossing the Line
On September 11, the Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov gave an emotional speech following a concert with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall in London, decrying the carnage inflicted on Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli government under Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces. “I know that many of us feel […]
Posted inOpinion
A Stale Start
Since last week, the conclusion has come to seem inescapable: By sticking with its new chief conductor François-Xavier Roth despite allegations of sexual harassment surfacing against him last year, the SWR Symphonieorchester—the renowned Stuttgart-based radio orchestra with a particularly strong contemporary-music reputation—has lost its way. Cancelling his contract following the allegations might well have led […]
Posted inBreaking
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 […]
Posted inInterview
Specialities
Phoning in from Frankfurt—he’s there getting a visa ahead of his conducting debut at La Scala—Kazuki Yamada radiates positivity down the Zoom call. An extremely popular conductor in Birmingham, where he is currently City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s music director and artistic advisor, it was recently announced that Yamada would succeed Robin Ticciati as the […]
Posted inHistory
Bernardino Molinari’s Fifth Season
In his memoir Overtures and Beginners, the English conductor Eugene Goossens described Bernardino Molinari, long-standing music director of Rome’s Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, as “the most ridiculously hot-tempered of all maestri… Stories of his stick-breaking, desk-biting, and watch-smashing exploits have long since passed into the realm of legend.” Both Goossens and Molinari had […]
Posted inInterview
Breathing Room
The 24-year-old conductor Aurel Dawidiuk is Associate Conductor with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Recently, I spoke with him about the right repertoire at the right time, facing your insecurities in front of an orchestra, and why he didn’t become a soccer goalkeeper. VAN: I read that you’ve wanted to be a conductor since […]
Posted inInterview
“You Have to Be Relentless”
To look at his schedule or to watch him huff, stomp and jab with his hands—without a baton, always—at the podium, Antonio Pappano would seem to be one of the hardest-working conductors in the classical music business. For much of the past two decades, he has led Italy’s finest symphony orchestra, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale […]