BACKThe 16th International Tchaikovsky Competition announces the results
A 22-year-old French musician triumphs in the piano category
The 16th International Tchaikovsky Competition concluded last night, naming the winners across its six categories. In the customarily much-followed piano category the Gold Medal went to the 22-year-old French pianist Alexandre Kantorow (the only finalist to opt for Tchaikovsky’s Second, rather than First, Piano Concerto). Kantorow recently released a much-praised album of Saint-Saëns piano concertos for BIS, a label that showed considerable foresight in starting to record with him five years ago.
Bow explosion: the hilarious moment a cellist stops mid-performance
Cellist Zoë Martlew had a sudden surprise when her cello bow exploded mid-performance (she jokingly blamed it on ‘too much contemporary music’).
Zoë Martlew, a composer and cello virtuoso, had an unfortunate incident with her bow during a concert at the Dark Music Days festival in Reykjavik, Iceland. The cellist was performing contemporary composer Juliana Hodkinson’s ‘amazing noise piece’ Scrape for cello and metal plate, when the hair attached to her bow pinged off after a dramatic up-bow.
Die Entdeckung der Individualität
In der Klavierindustrie hat ein Wandel eingesetzt – eine Bestandsaufnahme im Jahr 2019
Es ist gar nicht lange her, da steckte die Klavierindustrie in einer der schwersten Krisen ihrer Geschichte. Der Absatz war zwar schon seit zig Jahren rückläufig gewesen – vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg bauten deutsche Firmen noch 200.000 Klaviere im Jahr, 1994 waren es nur noch 40.000 –, doch die Finanzkrise von 2008 traf die Hersteller existenziell. Nicht nur kleinere Fabriken wie die Leipziger Pianoforte verschwanden vom Markt, auch Deutschlands größter Klavierhersteller Schimmel meldete Planinsolvenz an und entließ Mitarbeiter. Selbst der Umsatz des profitabelsten Klavier- und Flügelbauers der Welt, Steinway, brach zwischen 2007 und 2012 um 13 Prozent ein. Im Jahr 2009 wurden in Deutschland nur noch etwa 11.000 Instrumente gebaut.
A change has set in the piano industry – an inventory in 2019
It wasn’t long ago that the piano industry was in one of the most serious crises in its history. Although sales had been declining for many years – before the First World War German companies built 200,000 pianos a year, in 1994 it was only 40,000 – the financial crisis of 2008 hit the manufacturers hard. Not only smaller factories such as the Leipziger Pianoforte disappeared from the market, Germany’s largest piano manufacturer Schimmel also filed for plan insolvency and laid off employees. Even the turnover of Steinway, the most profitable piano and grand piano manufacturer in the world, collapsed by 13 percent between 2007 and 2012. In 2009, only around 11,000 instruments were built in Germany.