Please, please, please, please, please excuse me if I bring back non-musical, non-beethoven issues, but I was looking for some record references on the internet and came across this article (simply typing Barenboim and Wagner at google). I'm quite critical with Barenboim as a pianist, less critical as director. Having said that I find his activism for peace and his opinions quite interesting. Perhaps I'm lucky enough to try and achieve to erase other images or facts when listening to Wagner's music and I guess the following article (from jewish journal Haaretz) demonstrates that there's other people who does the same exercise.
(link http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/914009.html )
Barenboim: New Wagner staging would make Hitler 'turn in grave'
By The Associated Press
An opera by Richard Wagner - whose music and anti-Semitic writings influenced Adolf Hitler - will be performed at an open-air theater built under the Nazi regime by an orchestra made up of Israeli and Arab musicians and conducted by a Jew.
Star conductor Daniel Barenboim told Germany's Die Zeit newspaper that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he co-founded, plans next year to perform the first act of Wagner's Die Walkuere at Berlin's Waldbuehne - an arena built as part of the complex for the 1936 Olympics by the Nazis.
"Can you imagine that?" Barenboim was quoted as saying in the interview, released Wednesday. "The Waldbuehne was built by Hitler. The music is Wagner. Played by us! Hitler and Wagner would turn in their graves."
Barenboim said the Divan Orchestra, made up of young musicians from Israel, the Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab countries, is clearly the most important musical project of his life.
He and the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said founded the group in 1999 in a gesture for peaceful coexistence in the Middle East.
"I had long pondered how it was possible that such gruesome despots like Hitler and Stalin could be such huge lovers of music," he said. My explanation: "For them the music was a kind of secret garden, their own realm, that had nothing to do with real life."
Barenboim, who was born in Argentina and holds Israeli citizenship, has been known to make provocative musical selections in the past.
In 2001 he caused an uproar in Israel when he broke the country's unofficial ban on Wagner and led the Berlin Staatskapelle Orchestra in a performance of part of the opera Tristan und Isolde.
He said the Divan Orchestra has also played the opera and that it was the Israeli musicians who chose it - for the pure instrumental reason that it gave the brass section a lot to play.
"It had purely musical reasoning," he told Die Zeit. "With Wagner it is never about the politics or Wagner the person, but about his great music."
END OF ARTICLE
--> P.D.: Bruckner 4th 1874? Telarc, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra / Jesus Lopez Cobos. To stick to the topic a little bit at least
(link http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/914009.html )
Barenboim: New Wagner staging would make Hitler 'turn in grave'
By The Associated Press
An opera by Richard Wagner - whose music and anti-Semitic writings influenced Adolf Hitler - will be performed at an open-air theater built under the Nazi regime by an orchestra made up of Israeli and Arab musicians and conducted by a Jew.
Star conductor Daniel Barenboim told Germany's Die Zeit newspaper that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he co-founded, plans next year to perform the first act of Wagner's Die Walkuere at Berlin's Waldbuehne - an arena built as part of the complex for the 1936 Olympics by the Nazis.
"Can you imagine that?" Barenboim was quoted as saying in the interview, released Wednesday. "The Waldbuehne was built by Hitler. The music is Wagner. Played by us! Hitler and Wagner would turn in their graves."
Barenboim said the Divan Orchestra, made up of young musicians from Israel, the Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab countries, is clearly the most important musical project of his life.
He and the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said founded the group in 1999 in a gesture for peaceful coexistence in the Middle East.
"I had long pondered how it was possible that such gruesome despots like Hitler and Stalin could be such huge lovers of music," he said. My explanation: "For them the music was a kind of secret garden, their own realm, that had nothing to do with real life."
Barenboim, who was born in Argentina and holds Israeli citizenship, has been known to make provocative musical selections in the past.
In 2001 he caused an uproar in Israel when he broke the country's unofficial ban on Wagner and led the Berlin Staatskapelle Orchestra in a performance of part of the opera Tristan und Isolde.
He said the Divan Orchestra has also played the opera and that it was the Israeli musicians who chose it - for the pure instrumental reason that it gave the brass section a lot to play.
"It had purely musical reasoning," he told Die Zeit. "With Wagner it is never about the politics or Wagner the person, but about his great music."
END OF ARTICLE
--> P.D.: Bruckner 4th 1874? Telarc, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra / Jesus Lopez Cobos. To stick to the topic a little bit at least
Just bought the Karajan Symphony Edition ( DG) for £28 on Amazon. Has his 70's Beethoven set, as well as complete cycles of Brahms, Schummann, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky and Haydn's London and Paris symphonies and the later Mozart symphonies - all recorded in the 70's and 80's. 38 CD's in all. Incredible bargain considering that HMV were selling just the Bruckner's from this set for £40 last time i was in. Wonderful music making whatever you think of the man. Only wish they'd found room for his Mahler.....
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