“Alan Gilbert has chosen to celebrate the close of his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic on a political note, with a program called ‘A Concert for Unity,’ ” writes Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in Thursday’s (6/8) New York Times. “By inviting musicians from countries including Iran and Israel to join Philharmonic members on the stage of David Geffen Hall on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Mr. Gilbert is … inserting himself into a tradition of bridge-building musical events that reach back to the aftermath of World War II.” Wollheim cites several other “memorable moments of musical diplomacy,” including Van Cliburn’s “Cold War-thawing victory at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958”; the 1962 premiere of Britten’s War Requiem, a “powerful indictment of battle”; Leonard Bernstein’s conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin “just weeks after the fall of the wall there in 1989”; a performance in Granada, Spain by the East-West Divan Orchestra “when the Israeli-Lebanese War was raging”; and the Silk Road Ensemble’s recording of Silent City “by the Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, in commemoration of an Iraqi Kurdish village that was the site of a devastating chemical-weapons attack.”
Posted June 9, 2017
