Author: admin-andreasrichter

Christmas is here and the best part is the good cheer,

Everyone will understand the music gets loud in the car,

This is the only time to hit it hard with good beer,

But be careful not to end up in cheesy bar.

Everything that happens, all credit Santa gets,

And when they ask for your Christmas spirit,

It’s okay to show them the liquor cabinets,

After all its Christmas and there is no limit.

(unknown)

2017 comes to a close. To us, it has been an exciting year with lots of concerts each as joyful and sucessful across the whole of Europe, with new ensembles on our list and new colleagues in the team. We added the dance division to our list and welcomed Eifman Ballett St. Petersburg as well as the Perm Ballett. And last but not least, we offer the evidence that classical music is not a monopoly of the western world by collaborating with the Aga Khan Music Initiative.

We open 2018 with René Jacobs and B’Rock in Frankfurt, with Il Giardino Armonico, Giovanni Antonini and Anna Prohaska at Heidelberger Frühling, with musicAeterna, Teodor Currentzis and Alexander Melnikov  appearing  across varoius European concert halls. Later that year projects with the  Freiburger Barockorchester will lead us to Asia. Please find more information about the projects of our ensembels and partners on our website, in our newsletters and in the social media.

For now we take some days off: our office is closed between 22nd December 2017 and 3rd January 2018. In urgent cases, please contact us by email at info@andreasrichter.berlin.

We wish you all a wonderful christmas, relaxing holidays and a healthy start into a happy and successful  New Year! See you in 2018!

With their recording “Telemann”, Il Giardino Armonico and Giovanni Antonini spent tribune to the 250th anniversary of the death of Georg Philipp Telemann. Giovanni Antonini not only directed the ensemble, but also played the recorder, performing the Suite in A minor, the Concerto in C major and the Concerto da camera in G minor. Also to discover is a curiosity, a sonata for chalumeaux. The recording was highly acclaimed by public and press and was honoured with several renowned prizes as Diapason d’or, Le choix de France musique and Choc Classica. In November 2017 Giovanni Antonini received in person the ECHO KLASSIK 2017 (category: Concerto Recording – Music up to and including 18th century) at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, where the official award ceremony took place.

Journalist Axel Brüggemann spoke to Giovanni Antonini during the event: “crescendo trifft“

Teodor Currentzis, the “revolutionary” among his generation of conductors (Die Zeit, 2016) and musicAeterna are returning to Western Europe for a four-week tour featuring three different programs. With them will be the extraordinary violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, who collaborated with Currentzis and this ensemble in the spring of 2016 for a highly praised Tchaikovsky recording. According to Deutschlandfunk, “The result is high voltage from the loudspeakers.”

The tour will also pay tribute to two of the most important musical innovators of the twentieth century with performances of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, contrasting the contemplative “Memory of an Angel” with the visionary furor of a restless creative spirit.

“Salutations de Vienne à France” could serve as theme of the second program, which will present two masterpieces from the golden age of Viennese classicism. Mozart said of his Violin Concerto in D major that it flowed like “oil” from his fingers. The work, which Mozart called his “Strasbourg Concerto,” is strongly influenced by French traditions. The same is true of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, in which the composer’s initial enthusiasm for Napoleon was reflected in his use of musical motifs from the French Revolution. In the concert on 10 April in the Teatro Comunale, the audience will hear Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in G minor performed by Alexander Melnikov.

Finally, the Easter season will be celebrated with two monumental works of sacred music, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ (in the version for orchestra). The soloists will be the Spanish soprano Nuria Rial and the Irish mezzosoprano Paula Murrihy.

The concert dates can be found here.

On September 5, Radialsystem celebrated its 10th anniversary. And nothing less than the future of culture itself was on the agenda, in the form of 10 challenges – one for each year that this cultural center in a former pump station on the River Spree has existed. It is typical of the founders and artistic directors Jochen Sandig and Folkert Uhde that they used the happy occasion not only to celebrate, but also to continue their ongoing discussion of the difficulties facing art and culture in a rapidly changing city.

I have been associated with Radialsystem for a long time, not only as a member of the audience on numerous occasions, but also as an organizer and producer of several “Radial Nights” with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and, more recently, two evenings with the musicAeterna ensemble from the Russian city of Perm. With The Sound of Light and Radiale Nacht Beethoven V, we attempted to place orchestral music in a new context using dance and innovative lighting and spatial concepts. So it was for me an honor to be asked to moderate one of the ten working groups, where we discussed ways to increase fairness and equality in the public sponsorship of cultural activities. This is a theme that is also regularly discussed at the “Forum Zukunft Kultur”, my working group at the “Stiftung Zukunft Berlin”.

It was interesting to compare the information presented by the two speakers. Dr. Winrich Nussbaummüller – Director of Cultural Activities for the state government of Vorarlberg in Austria – explained how a new cultural sponsorship law was passed, and how a fact-finding commission developed a cultural strategy for the future as well as binding criteria for the advancement of cultural activities. In contrast, Christophe Knoch – spokesperson for the Berliner Koalition der Freien Szene – described the complex processes that led to the founding of this coalition that attempted to define processes and criteria for the advancement of culture in Berlin as part of the discussions surrounding the “City Tax”.

In Berlin, the initial impulse and concrete proposals came out of the arts scene itself, from the potential recipients of the financial support; while in Vorarlberg the process was initiated by the administration, the providers of the support. Berlin and Vorarlberg are certainly not comparable in every aspect, but it was once again made discouragingly clear how inadequate Berlin’s official cultural policies remain, considering the demands of a growing metropolis and a rapidly changing cultural landscape.

And in the midst of all this, what has been done about equality?

Particularly interesting for me was the realization that the most important thing is not necessarily the specific amount of money given to the artists (or the differing requirements of various production processes), but the perception of fairness that arises when discussions and procedures dealing with financial support are transparent and dependable, when there are support structures appropriate to the needs of the different scenes involved, and when open communication and participation in jointly developed and managed procedures are guaranteed.

I feel these are laudably democratic and mature demands, and I hope there will finally be a positive response from the political authorities in the coming legislative period.

Radialsystem will document the outcome of these discussions. Here is an initial sampling of reporting on the matter:

VAN_07. September 2016

Here is an interesting interview with the two directors of Radialsystem V, Friederike Hofmeister and Janina Paul

The sunny Mediterranean is a fine place to begin the season! As Chairman of the Board of Advisors, Andreas Richter took part in the second Molyvos International Music Festival on the Greek island of Lesbos. It may seem surprising that a chamber music festival was founded here in the summer of 2015: in recent years, this island has achieved notoriety primarily as the destination of hundreds of thousands of refugees who survived dangerous journeys across the waters of the Mediterranean. Given Greece’s economic struggles even before the refugee crisis, this would not seem to be a promising location for a new music festival.

And yet this is exactly where a group of courageous individuals came together to risk such a new beginning: the founders were young people with excellent educational backgrounds who realized early in their lives that dialogue, exchange, and cooperation across borders are not only possible, but essential in our modern world. They proceeded to invite student artists and acclaimed professionals who feel at home throughout the world to take part in this new festival, emphasizing from the beginning networking and cooperation with other European cities and countries.

The founding of the Molyvos Festival brought with it enormous responsibilities, since tourism to Lesbos has been severely affected – far more than on other Greek islands – by the refugee crisis, and the island is in grave danger of being perceived as the epicenter of suffering and squalor in the Aegean. The establishment of a new and prestigious festival offered a chance to push back against this perception, and the local authorities quickly recognized the opportunity, offering generous support in spite of the island’s precarious financial situation. As a result, the people of Lesbos were able to see that they were not alone and would not be abandoned. Of course, in the long run, enthusiasm alone will not be enough to sustain the potential that the festival has already displayed. This will require the mobilization of support from all parts of Europe and a renewed awareness of the fundamental values that led to European unification.

You can find more information about this remarkable festival in the Special Projects section.

Rüdiger Schaper, journalist of the German Newspaper DER TAGESSPIEGEL visited the festival in 2016.

Interview with Danae and Kiveli Dörken on classicalnext.com