Gustavo Dudamel

Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez (born January 26, 1981, Barquisimeto, Venezuela) is a Venezuelan conductor and violinist. He is currently the Conductor and Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Los Angeles, California. [...]



Gustavo Dudamel, violin

GUSTAVO DUDAMEL - official site

[Pic via]


60 Minutes biography
"The music saved me. I'm sure of this."

VENEZUELA

El Sistema, Venezuela's 34-year-old music tuition program

Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra

Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel performs with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra during a free concert at the low-income neighborhood of La Vega in Caracas - 08/02/09 [Images.Google.com]

[Daylife.com]

[Daylife.com]



LONDON
Proms Go Caracas for Venezuelan Musicians
This week's world-class line-up will have to work overtime if it wants anything like the ecstatic reception received by the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra.
[EXCERPT]
NONTHELESS, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra - the culmination of hundreds of years of musical tradition - is going to have to work overtime if they want anything like the ecstatic reception that greeted the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela last night. Under their magnetic chief conductor Gustavo Dudamel - himself just 26-years-old - this 200-strong band of young musicians from Latin America perfectly illustrated Henry Wood's ideal of "democratising the message of music and making its beneficent effect universal".

That these outstanding young performers should be appearing at the Proms at all is nothing short of miraculous, the result of an overwhelmingly successful programme - El Sistema - designed to turn around the lives of Venezuela's young people through the power of music. In a country where 38% of the population is officially below the breadline, it is astonishing to think that the number of orchestras has rocketed from two to over 200 in the last few decades, with more than a quarter of a million children now taking part in this incredible social experiment.

The Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra is the culmination of this initiative, and they are truly a force to be reckoned with. Their slogan is "Play and fight!" and, in Shostakovich's 10th Symphony last night, that's exactly what they did. More than any other group of musicians I've seen, these guys played as though their lives depended on it. Perhaps, in some ways, they did. END

COMMENTS
[Guardian.co.uk]
WHAT a cruel and tragic youth scheme. Taking a group of young people from the poverty line and indoctrinating them in classical music where they will discover it's just about the toughest, most competitive, and most unfair profession in the world which does not seem to be able to escape from its terminal global decline.
The idea that classical music will positively transform their lives is a naive illusion. Young people should be discouraged from classical music if we genuinely care for their best interests. One or two might just be talented and lucky enough to develop a career from this scheme, but for most it will lead to nothing but frustration. -Outbrow

OUTBROW- Though you evidently write from long, bitter experience, I would submit to you that a "career" in classical music is rather besides the point for these kids.
Have a look at Lisa Blackmore's article in the independent about El Sistema: Redemption Songs (08/17/07). I think the opening anecdote about Legner, the 13-year-old gun-toting crack dealer who reinvented himself as a clarinet teacher after four years in the programme, speaks volumes. "If music had not arrived, I wouldn't be here today," he says. I'd say just one success story like that vindicates El Sistema's existence.
I'd also be interested to know, however, exactly what happens to these kids once they "graduate". Presumably they can't be in a youth orchestra forever. Several have obviously gone on to international careers, and there is apparently a very large audience for classical music in Venezuela, but you're right: there will never be enough long-term career paths open to El Sistema's 270,000 alumni.

OUTBROW does have a point, if narrowly cynical, about all those Venezuelan kids going into music and what they'll do afterwards. From a narrow, profession-driven viewpoint, that is a valid concern. I would submit, however, that teaching kids the skills, intellectual and social, that are needed to work in an orchestra can apply to many other fields outside of music as well, like business or medicine. Ideally, at least from this side of the pond, the vision is to have music as integral a part of children's upbringing as sport and athletics.

BBC Proms 2007: Why I'm Worried About Gustavo
[Telegraph.co.uk - 08/16/07]
Young conductor Gustavo Dudamel has had a dizzying ascent to fame, but Geoffrey Norris warns that his talent needs careful nurturing

Gustavo Dudamel is a musician of precious and precocious talents. At the age of only 26, he has already conquered the hearts of concert-goers worldwide.

Two years ago, he made his London debut at the BBC Proms, deputising for the indisposed Neeme Järvi with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra snapped him up as its principal conductor, a post he assumes next month.

In the last season alone, he has appeared with such VIP orchestras as the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, the Czech Philharmonic and the Philharmonia in London, as well as conducting Don Giovanni at La Scala in Milan. New York, San Francisco and Berlin beckon.

He reappears at the Proms this weekend with his Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra from Venezuela. And in two years' time he will take over from Esa-Pekka Salonen in charge of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Can this be a healthy way to carry on? Let me say at the outset that I am not by nature a doomsayer. Quite the reverse, in fact; but I am certainly one to urge caution when a rise to stardom has been so quick and so prodigious. In this celebrity-driven age, the temptation to go for a quick fix is very real, particularly when a musician is so personable and newsworthy.
His is admittedly an extraordinary story of success through the humanitarian campaign known as El Sistema, established in Venezuela by José Antonio Abreu with the aim of involving youngsters from poor families in the playing of music, and giving them something to aspire to in a climate where drugs, disillusionment and crime are rampant.

The Simón Bolívar Orchestra is itself a manifestation of Abreu's dream; one of its double bass players, Edicson Ruiz, is now in the Berlin Philharmonic; and Dudamel travels the globe as an ambassador for the principle that triumph can be wrested from adversity.

The danger creeps in when his achievements are sensationalised, or when the mass of publicity outstrips his actual attainment. Not everything he does is flawless. Nor would you expect it to be in one so young, and the more circumspect reviews of his concerts have balanced praise with the pointing out of failings.

Guest-conducting here, there and everywhere might be useful in getting your name known, but it can also feed the media frenzy and does not necessarily contribute to the consolidation or broadening of technique and repertoire.

From that point of view, the Gothenburg appointment seemed an astute move, giving him a base from which to develop his craft with a strong management team prepared to nurture rather than exploit his gifts.

The high-octane Los Angeles job seemed on the face of it to overstep the mark, until it is remembered that Salonen was only 34 when he went there and that the city's 50 per cent Latino population will give Dudamel a link with potential audiences.
The crucial thing is for Dudamel to be given time to mature naturally. He is a realist and knows that he is still - and will be for decades to come - on a learning curve. We as music-lovers must respect the fact that, however excited we might be by his infectious bonhomie on stage and his undoubted rapport with orchestras, he has not attained his full heights at the age of 26.

He has been wielding a baton since he was 14, and has had invaluable mentors in Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim and Simon Rattle. But he has a future over and above the here and now.

There are encouraging signs that this is appreciated where it matters. His agent and his colleagues in Gothenburg, Los Angeles and Caracas are keen not to play up to celebrity culture.

Whereas in years gone by the media hype was in a state of tumult, nowadays his publicity is under the watchful eye of the New York-based Mary Lou Falcone. Every week, her office is inundated with requests for interviews or profiles, but the answer is generally a polite "Not yet."

This is all to the good. Rather than seeing a talent prematurely burnt out through over-exposure, we ought to have the chance in 40 years' time of relishing a conductor at his peak. END


Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra at the BBC Proms

NEW YORK
Gustavo Dudamel and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall [NewYorkSocialDiary.com]

Gustavo Dudamel during a rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic. Mr. Dudamel, 26, will be the guest conductor of the Philharmonic in concerts through Tuesday at Avery Fisher Hall.

The Kid's Got Energy. Now Watch Him Conduct.
AND NOW, the real debut.

Gustavo Dudamel, classical music’s hottest young podium property, conducted several weeks ago at Carnegie Hall with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, his first appearance in New York.

This week he embarked on his maiden voyage with the New York Philharmonic, one of the oldest professional orchestras in the world.

How would this sometimes demanding bunch take to the tender 26-year-old Mr. Dudamel, who leaves a plume of hype behind him? How would this boyish, hyperenthusiastic wunderkind approach these musicians? Some are old enough to be his grandparents and have been in the Philharmonic as far back as the days of Bruno Walter, Dimitri Mitropoulos and Leonard Bernstein.

Answers came in a visit to rehearsals this week at Avery Fisher Hall before yesterday’s opening concert and performances tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday. [...]

And how did the players react?

Of a dozen interviewed, including some of the oldest and most recent members, the reaction was unanimously positive. But several said that Mr. Dudamel’s inexperience showed and expressed the caveat that an ultimate judgment would have to await his conducting of other composers such as Mozart and Haydn.

“He’s tremendously talented,” said Glenn Dicterow, the concertmaster. “He knows what he wants and is not afraid to ask for it.”

The musicians praised his energy and charisma, his authentic musicality and his capacity to listen carefully to what the orchestra was producing.

“Above all, I see a great joy in what he does,” said Mr. Drucker, the clarinetist. He and several others compared him to a young Bernstein.

The bass clarinetist, Stephen Freeman, said, “I see some of Lenny in him, just the exuberance, the abandon.”

Daniel Druckman, a percussionist, said of Mr. Dudamel: “He certainly hears everything, and he seems to have really good ideas. I think he’s terrific.”

Newton Mansfield, a violinist with the orchestra since 1961, said that more seasoning with high-caliber orchestras might allow Mr. Dudamel to talk less in rehearsal, communicate more with gestures and learn when to relax some of the tension in the musical line. But Mr. Mansfield added that Mr. Dudamel has “absolutely no problem getting the orchestra to respond to what he’s doing, and that’s a very important point.” END

Gustavo Dudamel: Passing the Baton to the Next Wunderkind
When conductor Gustavo Dudamel mounted the podium in his debut with the New York Philharmonic in November, he was carrying something special. Moments before he went onstage for the first of four concerts, the orchestra's archivist went to his dressing room to lend him a baton used by Leonard Bernstein. "I could not speak," says Dudamel. And he was speechless again, near the end of his last concert, when the baton suddenly snapped in two. But it wasn't a bad omen—even without that talisman, the comparisons to Bernstein (who broke plenty of batons himself) were starting to stick. [...]

WASHINGTON
Gustavo Dudamel, Better Than the Hype
Yes, Virginia, there is a Gustavo Dudamel. There has been so much hype around the 27-year-old Venezuelan conductor that you may well have had reason to wonder. But Dudamel is the real thing -- as Virginia, and Washington, got to see when he led the Israel Philharmonic at the Kennedy Center, courtesy of the Washington Performing Arts Society, on Tuesday night.

Dudamel is a wild child of music. The advance billing portrays him as a natural talent brimming over with musical understanding untrammeled by a big ego, and onstage, that's just about what you get. The cushion of springy curls bobbing over the emphatic movements of his arms as he gestures and leaps and exhorts certainly project a state-of-nature exuberance.

But engaging though all this be, the really good news is that he goes beyond it. On Tuesday, for all the rough edges -- and there are rough edges -- he conducted with tremendous emotional specificity. He brought to the music an eye for detail that may have overlooked technical niceties, but could find strikingly nuanced things to do with a single phrase: pausing for a microsecond to give a percussive chord an element of surprise, or unleashing the orchestra's forces only to pull them back again to round out a musical statement with unexpected elegance. [...]

Dudamel appears to deal with the hype by trying to spread the praise to his players. He did not even take a solo bow, but stood, instead, among the orchestra to receive what by now has become his expected due of thunderous applause. END

Linda Ronstadt Hails Gustavo Dudamel in Testimony on Capitol Hill
In a remarkable testimony by Linda Ronstadt to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment & Related Agencies Tuesday, the pop singer made an impassioned plea for government support of the arts. And Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's soon-to-be music director, was her poster boy. [...]

In the United States, we spend millions on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music together does all this and more. [...]

LOS ANGELES

GUSTAVO DUDAMEL - LA Phil microsite
Bravo Gustavo! (game)
Ready to test your conducting skills? Use your keyboard to guide Gustavo as he conducts each section of the orchestra. Can you achieve the level of super maestro?

Walt Disney Concert Hall prepares for Gustavo's arrival


Welcome to Los Angeles, Gustavo!

Venezuelan Conductor Gives Lessons in Geography
On his first day as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel gave a lesson in geography, namely what constitutes America.

A reporter asked the 28-year-old classical music sensation what he had on his iPod, to which Dudamel answered that he loved Latin music and was listening to the likes of Venezuelan salsa star Oscar D’Leon and Dominican crooner Juan Luis Guerra.

And then the reporter said: “You are in America now, what Americans?” Dudamel didn’t miss a beat and shot back ”I am talking about Americans!” — to which the room packed with journalists erupted in laughter and clapping.

That Latin America is indeed part of America is something that Dudamel brings up often, but always with good humor and patience. At his news conference he reiterated that America is one — Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, the United States, all included. That message is likely to resound in Los Angeles, a city that is half Hispanic and home to millions who migrated from southern portions of the Americas. END

Gustavo Dudamel Webisode #1
A behind the scenes look at Gustavo's first days as LA Phil's Music Director.
The word on the street is this guy is kind of a rocker in the world of conductors. -Jack Black

Panorama: On the Red Carpet at Walt Disney Concert Hall
Eloisa Maturen, wife of Gustavo Dudamel, arrives to photographers' flashes for Dudamel's inaugural performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall as the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director.

Right up top! Right up top!
Second row, right here!
To your right, please!
Eloise!
Way up high!
Excuse me, can you look right back here?!
Over the shoulder! To your left!
Let's see those earrings!

Panorama: Taking in the Dudamel Concert from Out of Doors
A crowd in the Music Center plaza watches Gustavo Dudamel on a giant plasma screen as he conducts his first formal concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall across the street.

Dudamel Wows 'Em on Opening Night
[LATimes.com - 10/08/09]
THURSDAY night was a win-win for Los Angeles.

A dressed-to-the-nines audience, dappled with civic movers and shakers, eschewed the Dodgers' thrilling conclusion and instead experienced Gustavo Dudamel’s thrilling beginning at Walt Disney Concert Hall as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Both, as it turned out, were celebratory moments to savor.

At 7:18 p.m. the 28-year old Venezuelan launched into City Noir, John Adams’ filmic, jazz-inflected 35-minute paean to Los Angeles commissioned by the Philharmonic.

The bright, sensual presentation of the piece drew a sustained standing ovation, not always the treatment audiences afford contemporary classical music. It also earned Dudamel an embrace and several hugs from composer Adams, who seemed very pleased with his work’s world premiere performance.

After the intermission, Dudamel dipped into Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. The orchestra rendered a stately, burnished reading that again brought listeners to their feet after the final crescendo sounded at 9:18 p.m. Dudamel came out for five bows, which he took not from the podium but among his orchestra. Under a cascading shower of magenta and silver foil confetti, he then made the universal signal for “Let’s go get a drink,” and the evening morphed into a party outside on a closed-down Grand Avenue.

The concert was broadcast live on KUSC-FM and simulcast on video screens to hundreds who had spread picnic blankets throughout the Music Center plaza and took seats inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The concert will be shown Oct. 21 on PBS' Great Performances. END

Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic: The Inaugural Concert
(PBS preview)
He's the hottest young conductor on the scene today - "The Dude" - Gustavo Dudamel...

Gustavo Dudamel Lights Up LA
The arrival of the world’s hottest young maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic caused a sensation
[EXCERPT]
DEBORAH BORDA (chief executive of the orchestra) denies that Dudamel’s ability to reach the Latino part of Los Angeles influenced her decision. But, given that 48 per cent of the Los Angeles population is of Latino origin, that has to be a plus. More important to her is his connection with El Sistema, which the LA Phil has seized on as a model for its own project. It has already set up the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA), and it was this orchestra that formed the centrepiece of Dudamel’s debut at the Hollywood Bowl the previous Saturday.

“It was such a moving experience, to see 18,000 people there,” says Borda. “It was like a picture postcard of Los Angeles’s cultural diversity, and the other great thing was that it was all about the youth of this city. We had jazz bands, we had gospel choirs, and then finally Gustavo came on stage with all these little seven- and eight-year-olds of YOLA, with all their moms and dads in the audience.”

This is all fine and dandy, but can a man born and raised so far from the nerve centres of the classical tradition and who never attended an élite conservatoire really compare with the older maestros that head other American orchestras – Michael Tilson Thomas in San Francisco, Riccardo Muti in Chicago, Charles Dutoit in Philadelphia?

The people who can answer that question best are, of course, the players. “There are lots of conductors out there who have great ideas, but when they get up on the podium they seem total idiots,” says the LA Phil’s concertmaster, Martin Chalifour. “But the great thing about Gustavo is that he has a great technique; he’s very clear with the baton. And he’s absolutely driven to find the emotional heart of the music.”

I see evidence of that myself at the rehearsal. “No, you should start later, and wait more at the top,” Dudamel says of a particular sliding phrase in Mahler’s First Symphony, whose tendency to sentimentality he clearly wants to nip in the bud. It takes several goes and more fine-tuning to get it right, but when he’s satisfied he jumps up and says “Good!” with such unbuttoned joy that the players can’t help laughing.

The next day, at the concert, that tremendous energy and joy carried all before it. The entire be-furred and tuxedoed audience hollered and rose to its feet, and a rain of glitter came down from the ceiling. LA has a new star, and it’s clearly going to make the most of him. END

Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic Inaugural Gala (pics)

Gustavo Dudamel Concert Gala (pics)

Dudamel's Great, But He's Not the Whole Show
IT'S NOT unusual for a global city to recruit an international talent like Gustavo Dudamel to conduct its symphony orchestra. (Alan Gilbert, the new conductor of the New York Philharmonic, is the first native New Yorker to hold the post since the institution was founded in 1842.) What is unusual is how the Los Angeles orchestra is using the high-culture, Venezuelan-born wunderkind to build a rapport with this city's native-born Latino masses. Gauging from the widespread, deliriously upbeat hoopla -- and taking into account Dudamel's exceptional qualities and charisma -- maybe it'll even work.

But L.A.'s cultural elite shouldn't mistake the Dudamel phenomenon for a solid strategy to reverse its historic negligence toward the city's Latinos. [...]

The philharmonic leadership knows that it -- as with all major local cultural institutions -- must engage more Latinos if it is to survive in the future. The initiative is as much about building audiences as it is about producing musicians, and the big public push behind such an ambitious, long-term program is long overdue. Which brings us back to the issue of historical negligence.

Will the elites' latest, brightest foreign hire undo a tradition of local cultural neglect? Dudamel's star quality and his own proclivities could go a long way in that direction. But he would be the exception that proves the rule. Other institutions seeking to connect with an ever more diverse and ever more Latino city can't rely on finding their own perfect Dudamel. So if they want to diversify their staffs and their audiences, they should start looking in their own backyards. END

COMMENT
[LATimes.com]
Fantastic. One of the brightest points on this locality (LA Phil) manages to capture one of the most promising talents, in an era of declining donations and support from the "elite" - and you put it all down to race. Nice. Just once, Mr. Rodriguez - try to understand that music can transcend all of the categorization you refer to - Venezuela has proven that - and that Mr. Dudamel's enthusiasm and remarkable music maturity can only enhance a world class orchestra for all of us.

Gustavo's Recording of Mahler Symphony No. 1 Tops Billboard Classical Charts
[GustavoDudamel.com - 11/04/09]
GUSTAVO DUDAMEL’s latest recording, Mahler: Symphony No. 1 From The Inaugural Concert with Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic, has debuted in the number one spot on Billboard’s Classical Traditional and Classical Overall charts. The album is available exclusively through iTunes on the DG Concerts label. END

THIS WEEK IN CLASSICAL MUSIC
[KBAQ.org - 05/03/09]
New Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel is a believer in music education—so much so that the Philharmonic is announcing a new fellowship program proposed by the 28-year-old conductor that would allow the four fellows to spend six weeks with Dudamel, the Philharmonic, and guest conductors. They will assume responsibilities normally given to an assistant conductor—like subbing for Dudamel if he gets sick—the fellows also will lead the orchestra’s youth symphonies and possibly community concerts. The first four winners have been named—they are: Diego Matheuz, Concertmaster of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Christian Velasquez, Music Director of Venezuela’s Aragua Juvenile Symphony Orchestra, David Afkham, Assistant conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Perry So, the Assistant conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic. END

LINKS
Gustavo Dudamel - The 2009 TIME 100
With what appears to be unlimited talent and charisma, Gustavo Dudamel has invigorated the sometimes staid world of classical music. His performances are ecstatic affairs, with musicians and audiences unable to resist his infectious joy. His concerts often end with his hugging each member of the orchestra.

Edinburgh Festival 2008: Gustavo Dudamel, the Man Who Made the Swedes Swing
You can be the best musician in the world, but the instinct to keep the attention of hundreds of people is impossible to learn. It's something natural. I think this is the secret of a good conductor.

Blazing Trip to a Scaffold with Dudamel
The Gothenburg musicians clearly adore their young conductor, who takes up the post of Chief Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic next year. They play with zest rather than finesse, at their best in exciting fortissimo gusts and storms that made up for some poor woodwind intonation and less than tip-top ensemble throughout.

How YOLA is Changing Lives
Last Saturday in Los Angeles, conductor Gustavo Dudamel made his debut with a new orchestra. Not some chamber-scale off-shoot of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he takes up the music directorship in a few months, but a group of about a hundred children, aged from 7-14, who play with YOLA, the Youth Orchestra of LA.

Gustavo Dudamel: A Maestro and His Magic Simón Bolívar Orchestra
He was sitting, half-sitting, standing, bouncing on both feet, goading, correcting and running up the aisle of the Royal Festival Hall to conduct behind the front stalls. If it was no ordinary orchestra rehearsal, then that was because he is no ordinary conductor.

Gustav Dudamel: The Natural
So what makes Dudamel so special? The role of a conductor is at once comprehensible and untranslatable. The task is dauntingly clear: to mold about 100 anarchic artists into his own, singular vision. To do so, he must use only visible cues with musical players necessarily attuned to the aural — a sort of sign language not for the hearing impaired, but the hearing enhanced.

Philharmonia Orchestra: The Sound Exchange: Gustavo Dudamel
Videos: Conductor's Academy (We join Gustavo Dudamel as he works with three young conductors), Interview 08 and Interview 06

The New York Times: Gustavo Dudamel
NYT articles, photos, audio and video.

Daylife.com: Gustavo Dudamel
Articles, photos, video and tweets.

MORE
Growing up in Barquisimeto, Venezuela [LAPhil.com/Gustavo]

The maestro at work

[LATimes.com]

The Promise of Music
OVERVIEW
The Promise of Music is a full-length feature film about the story of Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. The film documents Dudamel preparing his orchestra in Caracas for their upcoming concert at the Beethovenfest in Bonn, 2007. Following different young musicians in their day-to-day lives, the film shows how classical music has the capability of changing both the individual and their environment.

REVIEW
I will be forever thankful to Mr Sanchez and Gustavo Dudamel for this beautiful picture of my country and its people. This DVD shows what Venezuelans are capable of if only they are allowed to develop their potential. Besides this, the Bonn Concert is just fabulous. The Eroica performance can be rated with those of the great orchestras of the world. I had listened to some previous recordings of the Simon Bolivar Orchestra and Mr Dudamel and thought they were OK, but this one changed my mind completely. From now on I will get any future recordings from these young and amazing people.

Gustavo Dudamel: Discoveries
REVIEW
IF YOU are looking for a gift for someone beginning their odyssey into classical music, you could do worse than send them the latest DGG sampler release of repertoire standards spiced with two dances by the Mexican composer Arturo Márquez. Why? The conductor is Gustavo Dudamel, product of Venezuela’s world-famous El Sistema who has just taken over the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The orchestra is the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and except for two or three instances of strange horn sounds, you’d be unlikely to detect that the players are anything less than first-class. [...]

El Sistema: Music to Change Life
REVIEW
AS I AM in the music field in Mexico,trying with others to make the same project work here, I was able to see this extraordinary documentary several months ago. It was a private showing, and almost the entire audience, friends,maestros, musicians, were weeping through it - deeply moved and filled with hope.
They'd already seen or owned "Tocar y Luchar", the first beautiful film on El Sistema, but now Maria Stodtmeier and Paul Smaczny have gone deeper, and have captured what is beyond words. Their general response of unmitigated admiration for El Sistema's founder, José Antonio Abreu whom Claudio Abbado calls "a saint".
And now, when you see what musicians, such as the true ambassador Gustavo Dudamel,the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, to mention just a few, have emerged from the project,you'll marvel at why it took more than thirty years for us in North America to catch on.

El Sistema has expanded since the first film exposure, and to me, part of the miracle is how children play as if they were adults - no passage of time seems present. Their dedication - theirs and that of the teachers and staff who work with Abreu - is almost surreal. Where did all these old souls in children's bodies come from? Is this what happens when they're given a chance to experience classical music? When you listen to their wisdom, so beautifully reflected in the many levels of the project, you'll probably be speechless. And hopeful.

There's a great deal more to say about this remarkable documentary which I hope anyone with the least interest in changing the world, orders sight unseen. Paul Smaczny of EuroArts, who has produced the world's finest concert films on DVD, together with the brilliantly sensitive Maria Stodmeier, have done us all a great favour.
I thank them a thousand times over...and when you see some of the little touches - such as a hawk slowly hovering over dense and sprawling Caracas, free and soaring on the wind - you'll understand the spiritual message of the film far beyond words.

El Sistema (trailer)
It was my first day in the chamber orchestra so I wanted to be early, but I got shot in the leg so I couldn't go...


Salzburg, 2008

QUOTE

Where love is lacking, power fills the vacuum. -Carl Jung

Herbert von Karajan

Herbert von Karajan (5 April 1908 – 16 July 1989) was an Austrian orchestra and opera conductor and one of the most renowned conductors in music history. His obituary in The New York Times described him as "probably the world's best-known conductor and one of the most powerful figures in classical music." Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for thirty-five years. He is the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, with record sales estimated at 200 million. [...]

Karajan's membership of the Nazi Party and increasingly prominent career in Germany from 1933 to 1945 cast him in an uncomplimentary light after the war. While Karajan's defenders have argued that he joined the Nazis only to advance his own career, critics such as Jim Svejda have pointed out that other prominent conductors, such as Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini, fled from fascist Europe at the time. However, British music critic Richard Osborne argues that among the many well-known conductors who worked in Germany throughout the war years—a list that includes Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ernest Ansermet, Carl Schuricht, Karl Böhm, Hans Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss and Karl Elmendorff—Karajan was in fact one of the youngest and least advanced in his career. [...]

QUOTES
Those who have achieved all their aims probably set them too low.

I don’t just want it to sound beautiful, I want it to look beautiful as well - for music is an embodiment of beauty.

Explaining why he preferred conducting the Berlin Philharmonic to the Vienna Philharmonic: If I tell the Berliners to step forward, they do it. If I tell the Viennese to step forward, they do it. But then they ask why.

Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music (Hardcover)
REVIEWS
VON KARAJAN (1908-1989), an Austrian-born conductor who was a controversial figure because of his membership in the Nazi party at an early stage of his career and because of his lifelong autocratic behavior, receives an exhaustive, penetrating biography. Music critic Richard Osborne, who published Conversations with von Karajan shortly before the conductor's death, has drawn on a huge number of sources to create a notably balanced account of a career that still divides many music lovers into energetic pro and con parties. Von Karajan spent his early years as a provincial opera conductor and orchestra builder in Aachen (where he joined the Nazis as a career move in 1933), then endured years of struggle during the war--when, Osborne convincingly demonstrates, his career was in fact held back rather than encouraged by the Nazis because his wife was partly Jewish. It was not until after the war, when British record producer Walter Legge hired him for a series of recordings with his new Philharmonia Orchestra, that von Karajan began to build an international reputation. After a drawn-out struggle with Wilhelm Furtwangler, von Karajan took the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic. This, combined with his vastly successful recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, finally established the conductor as a world figure whose wide-ranging recordings sold at almost pop-star levels. Osborne is particularly good at showing the wide swings in the quality of von Karajan's performances, from the totally committed to the polished but banal; his material on the conductor's now largely forgotten efforts (to which he devoted large sums of his own money) to immortalize his performances on videotape is riveting. Beautifully written, eminently fair-minded and full of enthralling anecdotes, this book will be catnip to any serious music lover. Photos. [Publishers Weekly]

THIS IS probably the ultimate biography of a complex and controversial personality in recent musical history. The book is conventionally structured: it is based on a detailed chronology supported by a rich factual database on Karajan's accomplishments as an orchestra builder and manager, recording artist and film maker. Stretching to more than 700 pages, the rich detail of Osborne's account certainly is one of the main attractions of this book. We learn a tremendous amount about Karajan's working methods, contract negotiations, concert tours, recording schedules, casting policy, press reviews, etc. As the story progresses Osborne branches out in all kinds of directions, gradually weaving more and more threads into the basic narrative. Given the quality of Osborne's prose this never becomes tedious. And it really does teach us something substantial about the breathtaking speed, economy, tenacity and versatility of the Karajanesque genius. There is no doubt that the book as a whole transcends the merely anecdotal. What emerges is a rich, multifaceted, holographic image of a great artist. What is even more impressive about Osborne's book is that it gives us an idea of what constitutes the essence of great conductorship. Instead of being confronted with woolly and simplistic generalizations about a certain 'Factor X' that allows an individual to coax exactly the right sound from a full symphony orchestra, we see the conceptual foundations of this most elusive of disciplines emerge in all its technical, psychological and somatic richness. Therefore, this book is definitely a must-read for any classical music lover, irrespective of personal predilections with respect to the man himself.

Downfall - and the Mystery of Karajan's Personal Photographer
I worked at EMI in the 1970s when Karajan was one of our artists and I was fascinated by the 'court' that surrounded him and was intrigued by their background. It is documented that Karajan joined the Nazi Party on April 8th 1933 in Salzburg, two months after Hitler came to power. He was cleared by an Austrian Governement denazification tribunal in February 1946 which concluded that Karajan was not involved in any illegal activity between 1933 and 1938. A transcript of the tribunal is given in Richard Osborne's Karajan - A Life in Music. The following exchange is taken from that transcript:

Dr Zellweker, Deputy Chairman of Tribunal: Surely you must have had some thoughts about (politics), and then there you were in 1935 joining the Party.

Karajan: I'm prepared to admit that it was an error, but we artists live in another world, a self-contained one. Otherwise it would be impossible to play music properly, and music is the highest and only thing for me. [...]

Herbert von Karajan: Save Us From the Resurrection of That Old Devil
Ivan Hewett hopes that the return of conductor Herbert von Karajan is only temporary

Something creepy is happening in the world of classical music.

It started a few months ago, when a long-forgotten face started to appear on posters in record shops. Soon it spread to billboards and magazines. Suddenly, those rapturously closed eyes, those springing grey locks and that clenched jaw seemed to be everywhere.

It seemed as if Herbert von Karajan, one-time Nazi, the most tyrannical, reviled, and lavishly rewarded conductor in history, had returned from the dead.

Frankly, I wouldn't put it past the old devil. Before his death in 1989, Karajan talked of having himself cryogenically preserved so that he could be resurrected at some future date, and this was a man who always got what he wanted.

Fortunately, it's only an illusion, brought on by the determination of the music industry to make the most of the 100th anniversary of Karajan's birth, which falls next month. [...]

In Praise of Herbert von Karajan, with a Selective Critical Discography
My immediate reaction to Michael Miller's commentary on the Karajan centenary [Oh No! He’s Not Back Again, is He? - May 2, 2008] was rather choleric, but I've settled down a bit since then and can write this from a relatively balanced perspective.

I bought those 1962-63 Beethoven symphonies, too, which by the way are in such bad sound that three remasterings later, including the most recent in SACD, they remain boomy and muddy. I'm not sure where you heard them praised. But Karajan's quasi-hypnotizing style didn't appeal to me back then. I dropped out until the mid-80s. Since then -- don't be shocked -- I've bought his entire EMI output from 1947 until the early Eighties, all his Decca recordings (which are relatively few), a huge chunk of his DG catalogue, and many highlights from the historical archives. As a result, I incline toward his English biographer, Richard Osborne, in believing that Karajan was among the greatest conductors of the century. And not just in the Fifties, that canard notwithstanding.

Since a reverential regard for Karajan was common in his heyday but sneered at now -- not by you but by taste-benumbed pygmies like Norman Lebrecht -- I won't fight upstream. Time levels out these matters. Sheerly in the interest of offering your readers access to less well known great recordings, along with many that belong on every serious collector's shelf, here's a long list of my favorites. Its length may convince you that I suffer from Karajan monomania. Not at all. I rarely turn to Karajan's Mozart, Haydn, Handel, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Bartók, or Stravinsky (with a few exceptions like his wonderful Haydn Creation). I'm distressed by his later Beethoven cycles from the 70s and 80s, which as you point out sound slick and bored. I'm not often convinced by Karajan as accompanist for Mutter, Weissenberg, Anda, Ferras, Kremer, Kissin, and other soloists he favored (again, with some outstanding exceptions like the Beethoven Triple Concerto with three great Russians).

Carlos Kleiber used to get enraged when he heard anyone disparage "the Karajan sound," insisting that such a profound musical mind had to be judged one performance at a time. I beg of you and other detractors to stop branding Karajan as at best a careerist and at worst a semi-charlatan. Subordinate your prejudices to the high opinion that you have of Kleiber, a vast admirer of the older master. (One could also fill a volume of encomiums from all the great singers who considered Karajan the pre-eminent opera conductor of his generation.)

Now to the list. It's not an olla podrida. I've limited it to Karajan's very best -- in my opinion, of course. [...]

Herbert von Karajan's Richard Strauss Recordings
I have been listening to classical music virtually my whole life. At around thirteen, I dove in head deep and started buying CDs like mad until I had a collection of over 500 classical and opera CDs. If one were to browse this collection it would be immediately apparent that I have more Herbert von Karajan recordings than I do of any other conductor. I suppose I just dig his style. There are many detractors to Herbert von Karajan's style, apparently. Most of the criticisms I've read pertain to the orchestral sound being too glossy or lethargic, for Karajan had a prediliction for perfection from his players and typically employed broad and expansive tempi that in some cases could drag the music down. These criticisms are valid to some degree with certain recordings, but on the whole I believe Karajan created a wonderful catalog of his own, offering most of what comprises the standard repertoire, with good to excellent performances and generally excellent sound quality. There are some true gems in Karajan's catalog, and I think most of his recordings of Richard Strauss's works with the Berlin Philharmonic are among them.

Karajan and Strauss, a Shared History
Herbert von Karajan was an up-and-coming young celebrity when he first met Richard Strauss in 1940, nine years before the composer's death. He looked up to Strauss very much, already a great admirer of his music. Strass was attending a performance of his own opera Elektra, conducted by Karajan. Strauss later told him it was the best performance of the opera he had ever heard, and was even more impressed that Karajan could conduct the entire score from memory, without the assistance of the score in front of him during the performance. Karajan had occasion to meet Strauss later and received a few pearls of wisdom regarding music and conducting that he later admitted had an influence on his own approach to conducting.

Karajan and Strauss also shared another similarity in their personal histories: they were both involved with the Nazi party in Germany. Richard Stauss served for a time as the President of the Music division of the Reichskammerkultur, a branch of the Nazi government tasked with identifying what was to be considered "degenerate art" in Nazi Germany. At first, Strauss accepted this position in an effort to reign in the growing atonal movement, due to the backlash against Romantic music it had created. Strauss was never an actual member of the Nazi party, and he did not last long in the position of president, due to the fact that he continued to collaborate with Jewish artists during his tenure. Considering Strauss's own wife was also Jewish, it seems clear that he did not buy into some of the Nazi party's more nefarious ideals, but simply felt a duty to his country to oversee the quality of music that was to be played in Germany. He became disenchanted with the Nazi party, but managed to survive the war years with his family intact.

Karajan joined the Nazi party in the early 1930s, presumably in order to remain in Germany under Nazi leadership and continue to further his ambitions. While he conducted several concerts for Nazi politicians and added the requisite fanfares to the beginning of concerts, there is little indication that Karajan had any real political aspirations. Furthermore, his wife at the time was of partial Jewish descent, and in fact he later became unpopular amongst the higher echelon of Nazi power players. This may have been influential in his decision to spend a few years in England developing his craft with the newly formed Philharmonia Orchestra, before ultimately taking over the directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1955, a post he was to hold until 1989.

To this day, much has been said of Karajan and Strauss's involvement with the Nazis. Several famous musical figures, such as Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern, refused to work with Karajan throughout his life as a result of his Nazi membership. Despite the moral judgments people make decades after the fact, it seems clear to me that both Strauss and Karajan were men of their time; they loved Germany and they loved music. While many conductors and composers fled Germany in protest of Nazi leadership, for better or worse, these men stayed and continued to make music. Whatever one may say about them as men, I for one can enjoy the music as the gift they gave the world despite their human flaws. [...]


Herbert von Karajan conducts A Hero's Life by Richard Strauss

Gross Misconduct? The Centenary of Herbert von Karajan
[Neil Fisher - TimesOnline.co.uk - 06/28/08]
Herbert von Karajan was a maestro whose monstrous life has obscured his musical genius

For many it is the stuff of pure nightmare. The old enemy back from the dead – on posters, on websites, even on coins. For it’s the centenary of Herbert von Karajan, and, 19 years after his death, the maestro with most recordings to his name, the man who led the Berlin Philharmonic for an astonishing 34 years, is being fêted again.

Forget Liverpool ’08 – in Germany and Austria it is definitely Karajan 2008, with a celebratory website (Karajan.org), a commemorative €5 coin, a sprawl of tribute concerts and a tonne of repackagings of some of his crucial cuts on Deutsche Grammophon. Next Saturday Radio 3 joins the party, with a Karajan Week devoted to picking through the conductor’s discography, and including a detailed documentary on his life and times.

No other conductor could possibly inspire all that – and no other conductor could possibly have prompted such a backlash in response. The party year dawned with a flurry of anti-Karajan polemics. He was, we were told, a bully. A barely repentant fascist. A self-publicist. And, worst of all, his music-making was facile: seductive, perhaps, and certainly disciplined, but empty of meaning.

It’s a tempting narrative – indeed, it’s a story that’s been given so much airtime that it is practically canonical. Growing up without any direct experience of the man, my first impressions were only the slurs: it was his great rival, Leonard Bernstein, who seized the imagination, even to the point of claiming Karajan’s home ground for his epochal performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at the recently fallen Berlin Wall.

Perhaps the most interesting release this year from Karajan’s record label is Robert Dornhelm’s biopic, Herbert von Karajan – or Beauty as I See it, a revealing clutch of interviews with those who knew the man. Fast forward through the toadying montages and you hit some fascinating observations.

The soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf recalls his instructions to one hapless cast: “And if any of you are unwilling I’ll twist the screws so tight that every one of you comes crawling to me on your stomachs.” That’s a story that sounds dramatic until you hear that at Karajan’s very first orchestra his sacked concert-master turned up to rehearsals with a loaded pistol in his pocket – such was his hatred of the jumped-up twentysomething who had the arrogance to dismiss him.

That this maestro took no prisoners isn’t up for debate: no, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to have a pint with him. But what emerges most strongly from the film is his artistic credo, indivisible from his personality: the pursuit of total perfection. He had an unflinching desire to control every aspect of music production, even including directing Wagner on stage at the Salzburg Festival (badly) to masterminding the bizarrely dated tableaux of his filmed concerts.

The error is to mistake this musical authoritarianism for the political kind. It’s a terrible and dangerous diversion to align Karajan’s moral cowardice (like many of the artistic community in 1930s Germany, he never considered exile and joined the Nazi party to further his ambition) with that artistic vision. To crave total power on the podium is not some warped adaptation of Nazi doctrine: he simply accepted no other authority. Or as the soprano Gundula Janowitz puts it on film: “he was the locomotive, we were the carriages.”

What were Karajan’s real crimes? He deliberately cultivated an image of cool self-control during performances. He shaped the craggiest of the Romantic repertoire into cogent, seamless wholes. And he believed that everything was subservient to music. One astute observer in the film points out that: “Politics came to art rather than vice versa.” No, Karajan didn’t do outreach.

All that clashes with our image of the perfect 21st-century maestro. We want him sweating like Valery Gergiev, or warmly beatific like Simon Rattle: we want to feel what they feel. The period movement has wiped out our image of rhapsodic Beethoven or Brahms, who now sound fitter, leaner, and meaner. And no maestro would ever dare to demand that politics serve art. Music rests uneasily within culture’s service industry: we hope this will do you some good – please don’t be intimidated.

Much of that may be for the better. But the biggest tragedy of Karajan year would be dismissing his masterworks: that never so-silky Rosenkavalier, the riveting Tchaikovsky symphonies, a Mahler Ninth brimming with tears and anguish. To call any of those empty, fascist or facile is simply giving in to the dogmas of today rather than fairly judging the dogmas of yesteryear. So, roll on Karajan Week: hold your nose, perhaps, but don’t shut your ears. END

Karajan - A Film by Robert Dornhelm
REVIEW
This documentary is a masterpiece - a classic - the gold standard by which all film biographies of musicians will be measured in future. It's editorially balanced, showing Karajan's faults as well as his strengths.

It's also wonderfully crafted, effortlessly blending modern interviews and archive material - black and white and colour. The editing is so subtle you hardly notice it at first viewing. You just concentrate on the content which is riveting. But repeated viewing shows master-craftsmen at work. All the clips are cut back to sound bites so the film moves at a cracking pace, but never too fast. Underneath the clips are long lines of music - scrupulously chosen. These punctuate the comments and are brought up at strategic moments for a few seconds to illustrate the words, often with dramatic effect.

This film explains conducting better than any I've seen. It should intrigue musicians. It's also an object lesson in how to make a documentary with class and style - a must-see for anyone interested in the art of film-making.

Having read these rave comments you may ask if I'm a friend of the director, or linked to Deutsche Grammophon? No! But I am a professional broadcaster and appreciate a good documentary when I see it. This is a real life-enhancer. I watched it four times in three days and am still getting a lot out of it. The film is densely packed with information and wonderful images. Above all it's intelligent. You'll want to become a conductor - or film-maker - after watching this documentary.

Karajan Revealed (vids)
STEP ASIDE BBC and your poxy Maestrocam. Here's how you make a film about a conductor. Via YouTube - Robert Dornhelm’s 2008 biopic, Herbert von Karajan – or Beauty as I See it, attempts to decipher Karajan's dark art with the aid of archive footage and interviews with the likes of Christa Ludwig, Mariss Jansons and Gundula Janowitz.

He emerges, unsurprisingly, as a bullying perfectionist, ruthlessly dedicated as the film's title suggests to the pursuit of beauty. Watch the Berlin Phil take it on the chin as Karajan berates them as "brainless". Hear the tale of the sacked concertmaster who snuck a loaded pistol into rehearsal with the intention of taking out the maestro right there on the podium. Shield your eyes from Simon Rattle's retina-searing HvK tribute pullover.

As Karajan himself says in the film, when you have a hundred and twenty people acting as one, conducting is just an exercise of the mind.

Fascinating whether you're a Karajan fan or not.

Herbert von Karajan - or Beauty As I See it (TRAILER)


Herbert von Karajan - or Beauty As I See it (Part 1)

Karajan, centerstage, in Salzburg at a Götterdämmerung rehearsal

Masterpiece Theater
During his long career, Herbert von Karajan amassed a formidable recorded legacy. As the music world marks the conductor's centennial year, Peter G. Davis determines which Karajan records have stood the test time — and which ones haven't.

NO IMPORTANT conductor of his generation was busier in the recording studios than Herbert von Karajan, a musician fascinated by the media technologies of his time and how they could best be put to use. Karajan made his first recording — of the overture to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte — in 1938 and his last fifty years later, with a performance of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera completed just a few months before he died. In between came hundreds of other recordings, a discography that could easily fill a small book.

Those who heard Karajan conduct frequently in the opera house and concert hall might dispute how faithfully these documents reflect the true measure of his music-making, but the conductor himself — a man who usually got what he wanted — seemed more than satisfied with his recorded legacy. And, thanks to the celebratory nature of centenaries — Karajan was born on April 5, 1908 — virtually every disc he made has been reissued recently in one form or another. EMI has certainly done its part by cramming everything the conductor recorded for that company between 1946 and 1984 into two huge anniversary compilations: one set of eighty-eight CDs devoted to orchestral music and the other, seventy-two CDs, containing opera and vocal works. Karajan's other major recording affiliation — to an umbrella organization now called the Universal Music Group, which includes the Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips labels — has not been so ambitious, but most of his work for that conglomerate is also currently available. [...]

Generalized assessments of musicians as protean and prolific as Karajan can be dangerous, but I find some merit in the conventional wisdom that tells us early Karajan is generally better than late, or that his live performances often offer more gripping statements than the corresponding studio recordings. Certainly a strong argument can be made that the conductor's interpretations, while never less than cogently imagined and ravishingly played, tended to become increasingly mannered, aloof and self-consciously groomed as he aged, robbing the finished product of spontaneity and vitality. [...]

Rather than dwell on such still-hotly-disputed recordings, I've selected several Karajan opera sets that seem to me to represent him at his best. What better way to lead off than with the one that so vividly recalls the conductor of the Vienna Ring — his 1952 performance of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth, long available in the pirate underground but now released in optimum sound on the German Orfeo label and with the official blessing of the Wagner shrine. To say that this interpretation of Tristan is an incandescent reading of the score is to understate the case: it is positively radioactive. Karajan seems to release the music in one gigantic, unbroken breath that is even sustained through the intermissions. Other old-time German conductors schooled in Wagnerian performance practices could also pull off this feat, but few combined continuity and structural design with the sort of instrumental transparency, luminously observed detail, forward-moving drive and sheer lyrical expansiveness that Karajan achieves here. [...]

When examining Karajan's lifelong work in opera, even a work as central as Lucia seems like something of a detour for him. With very few exceptions, the conductor focused on the undisputed masterpieces of the opera repertory, rather than reviving worthy neglected works that fascinated other conductors, let alone seeking out and preparing new operas by prominent young composers. Even as an apprentice in the provincial opera houses of Ulm and Aachen, Karajan seldom wasted his time on passing novelties that were liable to have brief lives, although there are a few works that he puzzlingly set aside and never returned to once he could pretty much set his own agenda. [...]

Some of the stranger omissions in Karajan's performing repertory, both live and on disc, can surely be explained by circumstances, but on the whole he went where he felt the call, and his musical instincts seldom betrayed him. What he left us on records and video can be infuriatingly willful much of the time, but the results are never less than provocative, and when the elements were all in the right place, simpy miraculous. END


Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore (final scene)
With: Plácido Domingo et. al.
Conductor: Herbert von Karajan, Vienna, 1978

Karajan: Symphony Edition - box set
REVIEWS
ADMIRERS of Karajan will probably own most or all of these symphony cycles from what was probably the pinnacle of the conductor's prolific career. However, if you are unfamiliar with Karajan's work, or well enough acquainted with it to desire further exploration, then this amazingly inexpensive anthology can be enthusiastically recommended. [...]

VETERAN collectors will be disappointed to know that none of these recordings have been remastered, only repackaged. A great shame, since the Bruckner cycle, one of Karajan's great achievements, suffers from a poor digital transfer that is glaring, shallow, and afflicted with tape hiss left over from its LP incarnations. [...]

I AM stunned at what DG has put into one box here, and I have already recommended it to friends galore. We have in one box the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Bruckner, and a selection of the best of Haydn and Mozart. You can make a very convincing argument that the Beethoven, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, and Schumann sets in this box are the best complete sets ever recorded by anyone. And the remainder are never anything less than compelling. [...]

IN THE eyes of the world, the name Herbert von Karajan is inseparably connected with Salzburg. The conductor, born in Salzburg in 1908, shaped and dominated cultural life in Mozart's city for decades. [...]

The large building is the Hotel Sacher, one of the most expensive hotels in Austria (I learned). The white buidling on the left of the hotel was the home of Herbert von Karajan, the world famous conductor. [Flickr.com__EricB2005]

HvK's private residence (detail)__[Wikipedia]

The Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin-Tiergarten is one of the most important concert halls in Berlin. It is home to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. It was built by the architect Hans Scharoun in the years 1960–1963.

It is a singular building, asymmetrical and tentlike, with a main concert hall in the form of a pentagon. The seating offers excellent positions from which to view the stage through the irregularly increasing height of the benches. The stage is at the center of the hall, providing an extraordinary atmosphere for both the artists and the viewers. The acoustics are excellent.

The building is located on Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, named for the Philharmonic's longest-serving principal conductor. [Text: Flickr.com__*Checco*]
[Pic: Flickr.com__Umschauen]

IMAGE GALLERY
1966

1967

1969

1973

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1983

LINKS
Salzburg, 1978__[Flickr.com]

1. Herbert von Karajan Is Dead; Musical Perfectionist Was 81 (obit)
He also made more than 800 recordings, more than any other conductor. Deutsche Grammophon, the West German record company that shared him with EMI, an English label, said his albums sold "probably hundreds of millions" of copies. Der Spiegel, the West German newsweekly, reported that the conductor earned more than $6 million annually from record sales and conducting fees.
2. HvK Tribute site
3. Karajan on the Music of Today
As for myself, I can tolerate wrong notes, but I cannot stand unstable rhythm. Perhaps I was born in Africa in another existence. Once in Vienna after we had finished a recording session, I surprised everyone by telling them I was going to hear a Louis Armstrong concert. When they asked why? I told them that to go to a concert and know that for two hours the music would not get faster or slower was a great joy to me.

ROPE

Rope is a 1948 film based on the play Rope (1929) by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions. Starring James Stewart, John Dall and Farley Granger, it is the first of Hitchcock's Technicolor films, and is notable for taking place in real time and being edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot through the use of long takes.

The original play was said to be inspired by the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb who simply wanted to prove to themselves that they could commit a murder and get away with it. However, they were both arrested and received long prison terms. [...]

PLOT
Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger) are two young men who share a New York apartment. They consider themselves intellectually superior to their friend David Kentley and as a consequence decide to murder him. Together they strangle David with a rope and placing the body in an old chest, they proceed to hold a small party. The guests include David's father, his fiancée Janet and their old schoolteacher Rupert (James Stewart) from whom they mistakenly took their ideas. As Brandon becomes increasingly more daring, Rupert begins to suspect.

TAGLINE
The Guest Who's Dead on Time

COMMENT
[IMDb.com]
I just saw this movie for the first time this year. I was amazed. Alfred Hitchcock does an absolutely amazing job of making the audience cringe. I read reviews about this movie saying that it wasn't well accepted by the audience when it first came out. But that is understandable because a lot of great classics aren't accepted when first released. One big example is The Shawshank Redemption, which didn't do as well as it should have in the box office. That doesn't make the content or the worth of the film any less. Rope was the twisted story based on the real life murder case of Leopold-Loeb. Two college students commit the "perfect murder" and invite the friends and family of their victim over for dinner. The acting is superb, especially from everyone's favorite, James Stewart. The fear builds slowly as this movie keeps you interested by morbid discussion that everyone has thought at one time or another. This movie really did creep me out, and although it might not be as thrilling as Rear Window or North by Northwest, it will not disappoint. You will be biting your nails for sure waiting to see what happens to the seemingly "perfect murder". I would easily give this movie an 8 out of 10.

QUOTES
Brandon: We killed for the sake of danger and for the sake of killing. We're Alive. Truly and wonderfully alive.

Brandon: The power to kill is just as satisfying as the power to create.

Brandon: I'd hang all incompetents and fools in the world. There are far too many.

Brandon: Moral concepts of good and evil and right and wrong don't hold for the intellectually superior.

Phillip (to Brandon): You, perhaps. You frighten me. You always have. From the very first day in prep school. Part of your charm, I suppose.

Rupert (to Brandon): By what right do you dare to say that there's a superior few to which you belong? By what right did you decide that that boy in there was inferior and could be killed? Did you think you were God, Brandon? Is that what you thought when you choked the life out of him? Is that what you thought when you served food from his grave?! I don't know who you are but I know what you've done. You murdered! You choked the life out of a fellow human being who could live and love as you never could, and never will again!

[Via here & here]

THEMES
[Homoeroticism]
Rope may be considered a homoerotic movie, even though the film version never indicates that the two murderers in the film are having an affair, and Brandon says he was in a previous relationship with Janet, the girlfriend of the murdered man. However, there is no indication that the two men live apart; Phillip even has a key of his own for the Shaw apartment, and towards the end of the movie they discuss going away together for a holiday. At one point, when Janet asks where the telephone is, Brandon says "It's in the bedroom" — indicating there is only one bedroom — and she responds "How cozy!"

Even though homosexuality was a highly controversial theme for the 1940s, the movie made it past the Production Code censors; during the film's production those involved described homosexuality as "it". However, many towns chose to ban it independently, memories of Leopold and Loeb still being fresh in some people’s minds. Dall was actually gay in real life, as was screenwriter Arthur Laurents — even the piano score played by Granger (Mouvement Perpétuel No. 1 by Francis Poulenc) was the work of a gay composer. Granger, meanwhile, was bisexual. Granger’s role was first offered to another bisexual actor, Montgomery Clift, who turned the offer down, probably due to the risks of coming out in public. Cary Grant turned down the part of Rupert Cadell for similar reasons. [...]

In Hamilton’s play, the dialogue is much more homoerotic, as is the relationship between the students and their teacher. Many of these "risky" elements were removed from the script as the play was rewritten for the film. Despite this, Hitchcock managed to supply much subtext which made it past the rigorous tests of the censor.

One example is how Hitchcock makes plain the sexual nature of their relationship, as well as each character’s role, at the very start of the movie with the first lines of dialogue spoken. Directly after the murder, while both men are standing, Brandon wants to get moving to arrange the party — but Phillip, shocked and drained by what they have just done, asks if they can’t "stay this way for a minute". Brandon agrees, then lights a cigarette. This mirroring of post-coital dialog is immediately identifiable, and also indicates that Phillip’s role in the relationship is that of the submissive archetype, while Brandon’s is that of the dominant partner.

The fact that the two characters were inspired by Leopold and Loeb, who were themselves homosexual, only furthers the argument that Brandon and Philip were meant to be gay as well. [Wikipedia]

Rope - review by Roger Ebert
ALFRED HITCHCOCK called “Rope” an “experiment that didn’t work out,” and he was happy to see it kept out of release for most of three decades. He was correct that it didn’t work out, but “Rope” remains one of the most interesting experiments ever attempted by a major director working with big box-office names, and it’s worth seeing this week during its revival at the Fine Arts theaters. [...]

Hitchcock's 'Rope': A Stunt to Behold
ROPE is not exactly a picture to warm your heart, take your mom to or make out by. The Arthur Laurents screenplay, adapted from Patrick Hamilton's play, is full of the kind of self-conscious epigrams and breezy ripostes that once defined wit and decadence in the Broadway theater. "What would you say to some champagne?" Brandon asks one of his guests at the post-murder cocktail party he's giving. "Hello, champagne," says the guest.

The film is so chilly you could ice champagne in it or place it around a silver serving dish of fresh caviar. It really is the "stunt" that Hitchcock calls it in "Hitchcock," Francois Truffaut's series of interviews with him, but it looks far more interesting now than either Hitchcock or Truffaut thought 20 years ago. And, once you get in touch with its dated speech rhythms, even its archness is acceptable.

Rope is not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary. "I really don't know how I came to indulge in (Rope)," Hitchcock said almost apologetically to Truffaut, though he then went on to describe exactly why he did:

Hitchcock was interested in seeing whether he could find a cinematic equivalent to the play, which takes place in the actual length of time of the story. To do this, he decided to shoot it in what would appear to be one long, continuous "take," without cutaways or any other breaks in the action, though in fact there would have to be a disguised break every 10 minutes, which was as much film as the camera could contain.

These breaks he usually accomplishes by having the camera appear to pan across someone's back, during which dark close-ups the film reel is changed. Not all of these disguises are equally effective, as Hitchcock himself later realized. However, his obsession with telling a story without resorting to the usual methods of montage, and without cutting from one shot to another, results in a film of unusual, fascinating technical facility, whose chilliness almost perfectly suits the subject. [...]

When I saw the film last week at the Cinema Studio, the audience collapsed with laughter at Philip's tentative suggestion that the party might be a mistake, but this was, I think, the laughter of disorientation rather than derision. There are a lot of laughs in Rope but most of these are ghoulish ones, though Mr. Granger's Philip is so distraught right from the beginning that almost everything he says or does strikes the audience as comic.

The Granger role is impossible. However, Mr. Dall is exceptionally effective as the imperious, self-assured mastermind of the couple. It's another measure of Hitchcock's wiles that, though the film was made back in the days when any suggestion of homosexuality was supposedly taboo, Rope is immediately explicit without actually committing any offenses the Production Code people could object to. Constance Collier and Sir Cedric Hardwicke add a certain classy tone to the film as, respectively, the young victim's aunt and father, but Mr. Stewart is a problem.

This, I suspect, has something to do with the role, for which he is miscast. It's a smooth performance without being believable for a minute, possibly because it seems highly unlikely that the man we see on the screen could ever have spouted the nonsense attributed to him. He's also too down-to-earth and pragmatic ever to have been intrigued by the foppish manners and mini-intellect of the murderous Brandon.

That Rope does become emotionally involving has nothing to do with character identification and everything to do with watching a cinema master at work, as he denies himself the usual tools of his trade to find out just how effective the camera can be, working more or less on its own. It swoops and pries about the set, moving from close-ups to long shots to medium shots, with a kind of studied indifference. One high point: While the guests are discussing something of no great moment just off- screen, the camera, catlike, stares at the chest as the maid gets ready to put some books back into it, unaware, of course, that the chest is already fully occupied.

Hitchcock loved to put himself, as a filmmaker, into positions as impossible as those in which he placed his characters. In some ways Lifeboat is as much of a stunt as Rope, being set entirely in a tiny lifeboat. Having made Rope, however, he never indulged himself in this way again, though he did occasionally use the long, uninterrupted take in other films, most notably in the beautiful introductory sequence of Topaz.

Rope is not an unrecognized Hitchcock masterpiece, but one cannot understand the truly bold originality of the man without seeing it. END