Bach in Dubrovnik

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Austrian, Dieter Flury, Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik Summer Festival, flauto traverso, flute, György Ligeti, harpsichord, Herbert Willi, Hungarian, Paganini, piano, Piece for Flute Solo, Rector's Palace, Sonata for Cello, Sonatas for Flute and Basso Continuo, Stefan Gottfried, Tamás Varga, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna State Opera

Atrium of the Rector’s Palace, Dubrovnik

Flutist Dieter Flury enjoys a high reputation with music critics due to his subtle sound, perfect technique and musical intelligence. Often referred to as the “Paganini of the flute,” thanks to his “phenomenal finger and breathing techniques,” he has served as solo flutist of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra since 1981 and its general director since 2005.

Flury has achieved a career of a versatile instrumental soloist, chamber musician, music pedagogue and orchestra conductor, and numerous contemporary composers have composed works for him. Tamás Varga, first cellist of the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera, and Stefan Gottfried of the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, who has achieved a successful international music career as harpsichordist and pianist, performed alongside Flury at the Rector’s Palace on 6 August 2014 as part of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival.

The repertoire for the evening included the Sonatas for Flute and Basso Continuo (BWV 1034-35) by Johann Sebastian Bach, who contributed to the rapidly expanding body of works for the flauto traverso in the first half of the eighteenth century, Piece for Flute Solo by contemporary Austrian composer Herbert Willi, and the Sonata for Cello and Continuum for Solo Harpsichord by Hungarian composer György Ligeti.

– Dubrovnik Summer Festival

A Guitar God Lives

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amplifier, arpeggio, Caprice no. 24 in A minor, CD, computer, Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E-flat minor, Dreaming (Tell Me), DVD, Eddie van Halen, electric guitar, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, Fireball, Genesis, grunge, guitar, Guitar Hero, guitar pick, heavy metal, Jim Fusilli, Jimi Hendrix, karate, long-playing record, Los Angeles, Marshall Amplification, Orlando, Paganini, popular music, Pro Tools, Rising Force, rock and roll, Rock Band, Ron Thal, Sayreville, shred guitar, shredding, Stockholm, Stratocaster, Swedish, Tampa, tennis, The Wall Street Journal, Tony Banks, video game, Woodland Hills, Yngwie Malmsteen, YouTube

Yngwie Malmsteen

A household name in heavy-metal shredding, guitarist Yngwie J. Malmsteen describes himself as stubborn and dictatorial. “I’m very set in my ways and not necessarily in a bad manner,” he said over breakfast. “I know what I want and I go for it.” Though his style of music isn’t as popular as it once was, he presses on with renewed vigor, his titanic talent intact.

Now on tour with Guitar Gods, a mind-warping, blizzard-of-notes-per-bar bill that also features guitarists Bumblefoot – Ron Thal‘s stage name – and Gary Hoey, Mr. Malmsteen, 50, is getting ready for the release in August of a live DVD and CD, recorded in Orlando and Tampa, respectively.

Ranked with Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen as innovators of electric rock guitar, the Stockholm native became obsessed with the instrument after he received a copy of Deep Purple‘s Fireball for his eighth birthday. But though he admired the band’s guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, young Yngwie was even more intrigued by the work of Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks, who made references in his compositions to J. S. Bach. In fact, it was a recording of a Niccolò Paganini composition that helped Mr. Malmsteen find his musical voice. Paganini’s Caprice no. 24 in A minor would eventually become a model for his style, which relies heavily on clearly articulated arpeggios and dazzling speed. “Niccolò Paganini and Johann Sebastian Bach with a Strat and a stack of Marshalls” is how Mr. Malmsteen described his approach last week, referring to his Fender Stratocaster guitar and Marshall amplifiers, his preferred gear.

He arrived in Los Angeles in 1983, recruited by a producer who placed him in a group that was beneath his talents. “It was the most banal band I could be with, but I wanted to be on a piece of vinyl,” Mr. Malmsteen said. “It wasn’t an ideal situation, but I knew I was going somewhere.” He released his first solo album a year later.

With ear-splitting, classically influenced shredding as his trademark, Mr. Malmsteen quickly became a star – and lived the lifestyle that went with it: In 1987, while driving drunk, he plowed into a tree near his home in Woodland Hills, CA, and was in a coma for a week.

“A lot of people pine for the ’80s,” he said. “I don’t.” No longer a drinker, Mr. Malmsteen’s game these days is tennis. Framed by right-angle mutton chops, his moon face was bright, his smile engaging. Vitamins went down with his scrambled eggs.

With the arrival of grunge music, the ’90s were a bleak period for gonzo guitarists such as Mr. Malmsteen, who had no US record deal and relied on touring in Japan and South America to keep going. Late in the decade, he composed Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E-flat minor, op. 1. Many rock artists have played with full orchestras, but Mr. Malmsteen said his concerto was the first to be composed in a classical mode with electric guitar as the solo instrument.

The recording industry in a shambles, his career received an unexpected boost via Guitar Hero and Rock Band, video games that featured his challenging music. Footage of his wild performances were viewed by millions on YouTube – the kind of exposure, Mr. Malmsteen said, that was impossible when the industry was in control. Resistant initially to new recording techniques, he eventually used Pro Tools software on his home-studio computer to record his most recent album, Spellbound (2012), which he released on his own label.

“In a bizarre way it’s like I was going back to when I was seventeen years old,” he said of life in rock’s new model. “I had no expectation of radio airplay, no anything else.” As a teen in Stockholm, he explained, “I would play a seventeen-minute guitar solo, sing four bars, and do another seventeen-minute guitar solo. That was the greatest means of expression then. I love to have that feeling.”

At the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, NJ, a wall of Marshalls at his back, Mr. Malmsteen jumped and karate-kicked, spun the guitar around his back, flung picks at the rabid audience and discharged a torrent of fully articulated thirty-second notes – all during Rising Force, his first number. Later, he offered the Bach-influenced Dreaming (Tell Me) on acoustic guitar before returning to his Strat for metal’s roar. His relentless attack seemed effortless, and never did he seem to mind that he was playing for far fewer people than when he filled stadiums in his glory days.

“I don’t know what the carrot in front of me is,” he said the morning before the show. “I take criticism and praise the same way. Of course, everyone likes to hear good things, but I don’t change. I know what I’m doing.”

Jim Fusilli – The Wall Street Journal

A Petition from Weimar

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Bach House Weimar, Bach in Weimar, Bachfest Weimar, Brahms, Brandenburg Concertos, cantata, car park, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Christoph Wolff, Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, cornerstone, Freud, Günter Blobel, Gerhart Hauptman, Gustav Stresemann, harpsichord, heritage protection, Hotel Zum Erbprinzen, Ibsen, John Coetzee, Konrad Adenauer, Leipzig, Liszt, Ludwig I, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Monika Grütters, Myriam Eichberger, Napoleon, Nobel, organ, Paganini, rally, Thuringia, Tolstoi, UNESCO, violin, Wagner, Weimar, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach

Proposed site of the Bach House Weimar

Dear Madame Federal Government Commissioner Grütters,

Up to the present day, the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach has not received the appropriate acclaim within the cosmos of great spirits that frequented the European Cultural City of Weimar.

This fixed star in the world cultural sky lived and worked for ten years in Weimar. Here, at the Weimar Market Square, principal parts of his oeuvre were composed: a large part of Bach’s organ works, over thirty cantatas, parts of the Brandenburg Concertos [BWV 1046-51] as well as numerous solo works for violin and harpsichord including the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue [BWV 903]. This is where the two most famous Bach sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel were born. According to the renowned Bach researcher Prof. Dr. Christoph Wolff, “after Leipzig, Weimar must be considered the second most important place in the composer’s life and work.”

The foundations of his home and the original Renaissance vaulted cellar have been preserved underground and placed under heritage protection – but are yet still inaccessible. This is the only at least partially existing and, among all the Bach cities, the only location proven by records to have been a place where Johann Sebastian Bach composed and lived that has survived to the present day. In the former Bach House – as of 1805 part of the Hotel Zum Erbprinzen – musical celebrities such as Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler and Niccolo Paganini, but also the intellectuals Leo Tolstoi, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann and Sigmund Freud and the politicians Napoleon Bonaparte, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, Gustav Stresemann, Konrad Adenauer as well as over one hundred additional well-known European figures lodged and/or gathered here.

In the meantime, for the past twenty-four years, this location – in the center of the World Culture City of Weimar and in the midst of UNESCO World Heritage – has been being used as a car park.

In the year 2006, the association Bach in Weimar was founded, and with prominent supporters that include two Nobel Prize-winners, it pursues the objective of building a musical Bach meeting-place above with preserved vaulted cellar and foundations of the residence: a “Bach House Weimar.”

So far, however, the realization has been stifled by the passive resistance of the property owners and the lack of active support by the City of Weimar and the Free State of Thuringia. In spite of many discussions with the responsible parties, there has been no concrete change to the location so far. That is why we are using all democratic means to progress this important project after years of stagnation and hope to be successful.

The area necessary for a Bach House would encompass only 15% of the 2,200m² of the car park lot. The financing has been largely secured, thanks to financially strong supporters. Even though we respect the justified economic interests of the owners in respect to this central location, we are no longer able or willing to accept the stagnation of this unique location that has now gone on for over twenty years.

Therefore, we have two urgent requests:

1.
Please act in our interest!

Please actively engage your efforts to encourage the owners to effectively discuss the realization of a Bach House Weimar with the Bach in Weimar Association and its supporters. The objective of the discussions should be to agree on the basis to allow a (partial) sale of the property, a lease, a building lease, etc. in the near future and to realize development perspectives. That is the prerequisite necessary to begin concrete planning and subsequently make it possible to build the Bach House Weimar at this location – on a small part of the lot. Of course this could also be harmoniously integrated into a complete building project on the property or into a re-constructed Hotel Zum Erbprinzen.

With the authority of your office, communicate your wish to have this renowned place adequately reconstructed, as the City Council’s resolution has already stated.

Remind the owner of his responsibility and please support us in convincing him of the reasonableness of Article 14 GG (Constitutional Law of the Federal Republic of Germany): “Property is a commitment. Its use is to serve the good of the general public.”

2.
We cordially invite you to Weimar:

The Bach City of Weimar will be the focal point of international public cultural interest on the occasion of this year’s Bachfest Weimar from 30 April until 4 May 2014. The occasion is the three-hundredth birthday of Johann Sebastian’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. He was born right here, in the Bach House in Weimar. As it happens now, day after day, tourists from all over the world will then also stand in front of the wall and the car park at the Weimar Market Square and ask the astonished question: “Why isn’t the Bach House here?”

We will use this historical occasion to resolve the stagnating situation after so many years.

By progressing the Bach House project at this time, we have the chance to help the Cultural Capital City become more attractive and gain worldwide attention – not lastly in the context of the Thuringian Theme Year “UNESCO World Heritage” in 2014.

Come to the Bachfest Weimar in May 2014 to lay the “idealized cornerstone” for this singular cultural project and during a special event or rally and give your guarantee to the attending guests that you will actively support this important matter of national and international cultural interest.

We look forward to welcoming you here.

Sincerely,

Prof. Myriam Eichberger, Chairwoman Bach in Weimar e.V.

and Patrons of the Bach House Weimar:
Prof. Dr. Günter Blobel, New York (USA) – Nobel Prize-Winner Medicine
John Coetzee, Adelaide (Australia) – Nobel Prize-Winner Literature

– Bach House Weimar