As medici.tv’s Chief Content Officer I spend a lot of time thinking about classical music—and a lot of time on the internet. Here’s my selection of the top five news items you need to see this week if you want to stay in the know.
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La Fenice’s new music director met with vocal critics and backlash (The Guardian)
Venice’s La Fenice opera house is facing backlash after appointing Beatrice Venezi as its new music director. Critics argue that Venezi, 35, lacks sufficient experience for the role and was selected due to her ties to Italy’s far-right government: Venezi is a “musical advisor” for the Italian Ministry of Culture and her father is affiliated with the neofascist Forza Nuova party. La Fenice’s orchestra musicians have been vocal against Venezi’s appointment as well, publishing a letter in the Italian press questioning her credentials and threatening to strike “to defend the professionalism” of the institution.
Garrick Ohlsson aces the Beethoven Challenge (Instagram)
This video of Garrick Ohlsson performing an absolutely jaw-dropping feat has been making the rounds in the medici.tv team Slack this week: pianist and content creator Ben Laude challenged Ohlsson to play the opening notes of all 32 Beethoven sonatas in order, from memory, in under 60 seconds… And he did it 🤯
A rare interview with Evgeny Kissin (OperaPlus)
Superstar pianist Evgeny Kissin spoke candidly to Czech site OperaPlus about managing pressure as a young prodigy (and as a seasoned headliner!), life in Prague, and how he sees his career evolving—including his multi-decade long-term plan: “I have had a fixed plan since my youth, extending to 2050. I have a list of what I want to learn, though sometimes I must revise it. Now I know that certain pieces must be learned while I still have strength, because later it will no longer be possible.”
I wonder if setting a record at the BBC Proms was on the agenda? Nearly all of Kissin’s performances are treats but this legendary 1997 set of encores is my favorite: Kissin had been invited to perform the first-ever solo recital in Proms history, which he did before the biggest audience ever at the time, and he capped it off with the longest set of encores ever for good measure.
Can music save us from overstimulation? (NYT)
Lots of food for thought in this think piece by Jonathan Biss in the New York Times on the importance of giving in to the “complete immersion” of a musical experience. Like many these days, Biss laments the increasingly-fragmented attention spans that seem to be a hallmark of the twenty-first century existence, and he points to music as a uniquely capable “antidote to this avalanche of stimulus… A great performance of a great piece of music simultaneously takes us out of our heads and puts us in touch with our deepest, most inaccessible selves. That is the magic of music.”
Cellist Joshua Roman on how long covid changed his relationship to music (NPR)
I enjoyed listening to this NPR profile on Joshua Roman, an American cello prodigy whose early successes—including becoming the youngest principal cellist ever at the Seattle Symphony at 22, and making his Lincoln Center solo debut at 24—were abruptly derailed in 2021 by a case of long COVID. The diagnosis led to a profound shift in how Roman thinks about music and approaches playing: “practice cannot only be about getting better or honing technical skills; joy must also play a role.”
