This Week in Classical Music 9/28/08


It’s “This Week in Classical Music”, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world, I’m Randy Kinkel.

Violinist Leila Josefowicz is one of the 25 winners of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” grants. The $500,000 fellowship grants were announced recently in Chicago. The 30-year-old soloist, who made her Carnegie Hall debut at 16, is based in New York and travels around the world playing with orchestras and conductors. Of particular interest to her is seeking out and playing pieces from Modern composers. Josefowicz said, “I’ll Spend more time studying and listening out there and choosing the composer I want to work with. I’m so grateful to work with composers to bring more concertos to the violin repertoire.”

Christoph Eschenbach will be the new Music Director of the National Symphony orchestra. The 68-year-old former conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra will begin his job in the 2010 season. Eschenbach also will have another title, Music Director of the Kennedy center, where he will l work closely with the center's president and programmers on the kinds of interdisciplinary, themed festivals and projects that have become a Kennedy Center hallmark.

Sixteen violins used by Jewish victims of the Holocaust were played last week in concert in Jerusalem. 69-year-old violin maker Amnon Weinstein and his son have spent more than a decade restoring the instruments, which were collected from all across Europe. The violins were heard together for the first time in a concert called “Violins of Hope” before an audience of thousands gathered under the spot-lit walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Schlomo Mintz played “Our Father, Our King”, a central prayer from the Jewish day of penitence. One of the violins, called “Motele’s violin, belonged to a 12 year-old boy who was assigned to play for Nazi soldiers each night in their compound. After each performance, Motele hid his violin in the building and left with an empty case. He would then return with a violin case full of explosives, stuffing them into cracks in the walls, eventually setting them off. Helen Livnat, one of the donors of a violin that her father used to earn food for the family in the Ukraine ghetto, said, “It’s an honor knowing the violins that were once played in a time of hunger and suffering will be heard again with pride in a country we love.”

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org; be listening each week at this time for another update, and join me at noon every weekday for The Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries. I’m Randy Kinkel, for “This Week in Classical Music” on 89-five KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

Permanent link | Comment on Story

---

Linking Policy

We encourage you to link to this page using the following format:

This Week in Classical Music-September 28, 2008 by Randy Kinkel courtesy of KBAQ.

Attribution Information

Title: This Week in Classical Music-September 28, 2008
Author: Randy Kinkel
Publisher: KBAQ 89.5
Link to Content: URL

License Information

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

---