![]() As a result, I ask for your understanding that I will be giving up this role as from 31 January 2023.” He said he had asked Berlin’s senator for culture to release him from his contract.It’s a New Year’s Eve tradition that won’t put too big of a dent in the budget or leave you searching for the aspirin the next morning. I can no longer achieve the level of performance which is rightly required of a general music director. In his statement on Friday, he said: “Unfortunately the state of my health has worsened considerably in the past year. ![]() Last October Barenboim announced he was stepping back from performing after a diagnosis of the neurological condition vasculitis, a term for rheumatic conditions that cause painful inflammation of the blood vessels. In 1988 Barenboim married the Russian pianist Elena Bashkirova. Du Pré died from multiple sclerosis in 1987 aged 42. In 1966 he married the British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, in what was one of the most celebrated unions in the classical music world. ![]() He was also behind the creation of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, a foundation to promote cooperation among up and coming musicians from Middle Eastern and north African countries and championed an orchestra for young Arab and Israeli musicians.īarenboim, who was the first person to hold both Israeli and Palestinian passports, has long been a vocal critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.īorn in Buenos Aires to Jewish professional piano players, he gave his first public appearance at the age of seven, his first international performance aged 10, and went on to have a glittering career, first as a pianist, then as a conductor, beginning in London at the South Bank in 1968. More recently he secured the political backing for the construction of Berlin’s first recital venue, the Pierre Boulez Saal, which opened in 2017. ![]() In an interview with the Guardian in 2000, an incandescent Barenboim said politicians who backed the merger were carrying out nothing less than a “western takeover” of the Staatsoper, one of east Germany’s most valuable cultural assets, in the same way western Germans had taken over companies, universities and almost every other aspect of the former German Democratic Republic. He described that sound as being “based on a set of values that have gone slightly out of fashion today … of harmony legato, over the values of brilliance … a more spiritual and less athletic way of playing.” Barenboim said the move would “not destroy the building … but the people inside”, as well as the Staatskapelle’s unique sound developed under its former artistic director Richard Strauss. He also built a reputation as a staunch defender of culture in Germany, fighting politicians tooth and nail on many occasions – most notably opposing a threat to merge the Staatsoper in the east of Berlin with the Deutsche Oper in the west. He took it to new artistic heights and international prominence after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is credited with reviving the Staatskapelle, the orchestra of the opera house on the Unter den Linden boulevard in former East Berlin, which had sunk into relative obscurity under communism.
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