Keeping Vladimir Putin, Placido Domingo and Valery Gergiev at a safe arm's length whilst maintaining a tight grip on her champagne flute is just one of the skills a modern diva must master.
Anna Netrebko was in St Petersburg last night to star in a spectacular gala concert for the opening of the new Mariinsky II theatre. The multi-million-rouble modernist edifice is connected by a footbridge to the traditionally-styled old theatre, where the Austrian soprano used to scrub the floor in between singing lessons.
The concert, beamed live around the world, also featured Domingo, Ildar Abdrazakov, Olga Borodina, Alexei Markov, Evgeny Nikitin, René Pape, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Mikhail Petrenko, Sergei Semishkur, Yekaterina Kondaurova, Ulyana Lopatkina, Diana Vishneva, Olga Esina, Vladimir Shklyarov, Yuri Bashmet, Denis Matsuev and Leonidas Kavakos. It was conducted by Gergiev, celebrating his 60th birthday at the same time, and broadcast live.
You can watch the whole thing below - the music starts around 22 minutes in - or for the time-pressed try the brief news summary below that.
Alternatively, you could scoot over to the Barbican website, where loads of seats have been 'dynamically priced' down to £15-£25, around half what some of them were originally going for. (Now, should we tell the Barbican why their advance sales are down this season - or just let them guess?)
On 14 and 15 October, Valery Gergiev's Mariinsky Orchestra will join the CBSO, two choirs, ten timpanists, four brass bands, a donkey and a magic trombone to perform Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts in Birmingham's Symphony Hall.
Although this has been done before by rock bands (I have a treasured White Stripes effort from Alexandra Palace), I think it might be the first time a classical orchestra have attempted it in the UK. Way to prop up the dying CD market!
Götterdämmerung - Mariinsky Opera - Royal Opera House, 1 August 2009
And so the Mariinsky Opera's Ring Cycle draws to an end with - a mouldy angel? a novelty d1ldo? a foetus doing pressups? After 16 hours I shared the don't know don't care mood of most of the cast. The staging, by now familiar, consisted of adjusting the pewp-thingies into various inexplicable positions beneath random disco lights. At least the Tarnhelm had mutated from the first night's hankie into a proper helmet.
The only scene that worked, theatrically speaking, was the first part of Act 1, and even that was entirely down to a couple of splendid performances.
Mikhail Petrenko was simply the best Hagen I have ever seen. It's debatable whether he has the right voice for the part - firm and commanding, it's nevertheless on the light side, more golden syrup than black molasses. But he brings a devious, manipulative intelligence to the role. It's a fresh interpretation that nests with the sinuous music in a way that makes the traditional low-browed thug approach look not only outdated, but wrong. And he does it all in strapless ballgown and baldy wig. Just brilliant.
Evgeny Nikitin's cretinous, cowardly Gunther was equally compelling. He was far more animated than in his earlier appearances as Wotan, and the part seems to suit him better vocally at the moment too. The Egyptian temple set and costuming worked well, and with these two sparring together, for the first time in four days I felt I was watching a properly-rehearsed professional production. And it doesn't hurt that both sung their parts accurately and musically, without resort to bluster. Elena Nebera's Gutrune was anonymous in comparison, though mostly cleanly sung.
The Siegfried du jour wasn't a patch on the previous evening's. Debatably the better singer of the two, Viktor Lutsyuk's voice has a nasal edge that penetrates any number of orchestral decibels. But his vibrato made it hard to tell what note he was aiming at, and he often resorted to shouting. Without the acting chops or gung-ho charisma of Leonid Zakhozhaev, it was hard to warm to him. In his favour, he did die more credibly than anyone else in the whole cycle.
Olga Savova made a better Waltraute than Walküre Brünnhilde, though I wasn't sure why she sported the same shaggy poncho Wotan had worn the previous night.
Larisa Gogolevskaya seemed at first as if she would prove the best of the three Brünnhildes in the cycle. Her Mrs Tiggywinkle proportions clad in a shapeless black caftan instead of the S&M costume sported by her colleagues, and without much in the way of vocal or physical expressivity, she nevertheless held a firm, steady line in an appealing lyric soprano. Until the end of the first act, that is, when her voice suddenly hoarsened. She struggled through, but it seemed as if she was about to lose it completely. Whatever she took in the interval helped her through to the end of the opera, though she completely missed her third act cue, and limped through the most uneventful immolation imaginable - no horse, no flames, no Rhine, and oddly, no Hagen either.
Gergiev hardly went out in a blaze of glory either. The prologue and first act were promising, but he began the second at a funereal pace that never picked up. There were some nice details here and there, but it was hard to engage with an interpretation so stop-start. I guess economics dictate the touring of operas that sell rather than operas he has a passion and flair for (meaning the Russian repertoire) but I can't help thinking a bit more rehearsal might have rescued this from the realms of the slapdash.
Nikolai Putilin as Alberich reviews the production:
Siegfried - Mariinsky Opera - Royal Opera House, 31 July 2009
Perhaps I'm just suffering from PILES (Pap Induced Lowered Expectation Syndrome). But this Siegfried seemed not just the best of the Mariinsky's Ring bunch so far, but a creditable performance by any standards.
In most productions, the tenor in the title-role is a bit of a liability, but in this one he was the heroic saviour. Leonid Zakhozhaev wouldn't win any singing contests, but he hit the right notes often enough to convince he hasn't earned his place solely on his acting skillz - which were on a completely different plane to anyone else on stage. From grimaces to bum-wiggles, his performance was packed with little physical details that helped distract from the godawful scenery.
His solid, grainy lyric tenor is a size too small for the role, so he constantly pushed it, with varying unattractive effects on pitch and timbre. But his stamina was unflagging. Amazingly, he sang the last act more cleanly and brightly than the first, all while bounding about like Tigger.
His complete commitment and eagerness to reach out and please the audience transcended any vocal limitations. Most importantly, he didn't judge the character. He played Siegfried as an irritating brat, without ever being irritating himself - the hardest trick of all.
The classiest singing came from Evgeny Nikitin. Unlike most Wotans, he actually sang the part rather than bellowing it, and with nuance and structural appreciation too. Sadly his voice tired towards the end, and he'd clearly had next to zero direction or rehearsal.
Neither Nikolai Putilin as Alberich or Vasily Gorshkov as Mime offered quite such lovely singing, and their ghastly costumes limited them to gleeful-Hobbit characterisations. But both, Gorshkov in particular, milked every word for expressive effect - and proved that a wooden sword to the armpit (where was the director when they planned that one?) can deliver a mortal blow.
Brünnhilde proved a bit much for Olga Sergeyeva, with pitch and vibrato issues as her voice rose, and Anastasia Kalagina couldn't quite find the delicacy (or the very highest notes) as the Woodbird. But then she was hampered by a ridiculous doily costume extending up to cover her head.
The orchestra played well (if not entirely fluff-free) and Gergiev was able to sustain the momentum he found in the preludes. The policy of switching some players between acts seems to help - the orchestra is showing a stamina to equal Leonid Zakhozhaev's.
Die Walküre - Mariinsky Opera - Royal Opera House, 30 July 2009
Things are looking up. Part two of the Mariinsky's Ring Cycle was a definite improvement on the previous night. Like swine flu is better than TB, that is. Still tosh, but evidently planned and rehearsed a little more than Das Rheingold. Performers looked less lost, there were fewer obvious mishaps, and the action was generally a lot more credible.
Gergiev had a patchy night. He wasn't able to maintain the febrile energy he brought to the first act prelude, but the playing did occasionally catch fire later in spite of sluggish tempos and a generally underweight sound.
Larissa Diadkova sang much more incisively than the previous night and made a commanding Fricka. It was the only truly world-class performance of the evening. Olga Savova was a shrill (if largely accurate) Brünnhilde, Mikhail Kit's Wotan was expressive but worn, and skipped text, Mlada Khudoley's Sieglinde was hysterically overplayed and Avgust Amonov's wildly variable Siegmund missed more notes than he hit (and his tone narrowed to a costive bleat even then). When one of the Valkyries skipped an entire line, it was par for the course.
The monumental coprolites were again in place all night as the only scenery - so why we needed over two hours of intervals is beyond me. It made a long night even longer.
Das Rheingold - Mariinsky Opera - Royal Opera House, 29 July 2009
Infantile, cartoonish, theatrically inept - unfortunately it looks as if this Ring Cycle is going to tick all the boxes that its past critics claim for it, despite a supposed 'restaging' earlier this year.
Stark lighting exposes the shortcomings of the bare set, semaphore substitutes for acting, and the 'difficult' scenes - fights and physical transformations and so on - are bereft of imagination or credibility. (The Tarnhelm is a big hankie, and it's kind of downhill from there.) The less said about the pewpie dolls hanging from the ceiling, the better. Oh, and the stagehands chatted - loudly - during the music. Can you believe it?
On the upside (yes there is one), while it may be risible, it's not irritating and it doesn't get in the way. I'd just like to have had some sort of intellect or perspective applied, that's all.
And the casting isn't bad. Evgeny Nikitin (Wotan), Evgeny Ulanov (Donner), Zhanna Dombrovskaya (Freia) and Vadim Kravets (Fasolt) can really sing, even if the (lack of) direction means they flounder physically. Larissa Diadkova brought her inimitably starry presence and a powerful set of lungs to Fricka, and Nikolai Putilin's tremendous range of expression made it easier to overlook the shoutiness of his Alberich. Andrei Popov (Mime) proved himself the only convincing actor of the bunch and Zhanna Dombrovskaya (Woglinde) was the best of the Rhinemaidens.
The Mariinsky Orchestra played well, though Gergiev didn't seem to have any particular goal in sight other than getting through it. Das Rheingold, with all its various 'effects', is the part of the Ring you'd expect him to excel at. But the anvil chorus slipped by, and Donner's thunderstorm lacked climactic impact. All rather monochromatic. Part of the problem was an understaffed and underequipped percussion section - it's the bit of the orchestra you don't tend to notice unless it's not quite right. Doesn't bode well for the rest of the cycle.
Amongst a bunch of names that mean nothing to me I spot Evgeny Nikitin as Wotan (except in Walküre), Larissa Diadkova as Fricka and Mikhail Petrenko as Hagen. Unfortunately none of the young singers who impressed me most in the Mariinsky's recent Barbican visit, but then they weren't exactly Wagnerian voices. We shall see.
It's a gruelling marathon, so apparently musicians will 'switch parts on different nights to vary the pressure'. What does that mean? Gergiev is typically opaque:
“It's like what was called total football',” he explains. “About 30 years ago, there was a great national team of Holland who introduced total football' where the defender was able to attack, and the forward — someone like Cristiano Ronaldo or Drogba today — was also able to defend.”
Perhaps as Johan Cruyff himself once said:
"If I wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better."
Not long now till the Royal Opera House summer season opens for booking - 25 March for Friends and 28 April for the rest.
The highlight for me is Berg's Lulu, in a new production by Christof Loy, a director for whom drama is never confined to the stage. He famously (allegedly) sacked Tubby Voigt from his Ariadne in 2004, then walked out of his own production - La finta giardiniera - a couple of years later, citing Spinal Tap style "musical differences" with the conductor.
For his Lulu, newbie Agneta Eichenholz takes the title role, but more importantly, Klaus Florian Vogt makes his Covent Garden debut as Alwa. (Which means he'll be hanging around Covent Garden while Lohengrin's on, should either of the scheduled leads catch Netrebkoitis - we can but hope). A welcome return for Michael Volle (Dr Schön / Jack the Ripper) too. Pappano conducts.
Richard Eyre's beautifully coherent and underrated La traviata returns, this time with the cougarific pairing of Renee Fleming and Joseph Calleja in the leads. Will la Renee's unconcealable chemistry with Thomas Hampson (Germont) lend an 'interesting' dimension? Tony Pappano conducts this one too.
The hugely jolly if puddle-deep Leiser and Caurier Il barbiere di Siviglia gets an all-star cast this time round - Simon Keenlyside, Joyce DiDonato, Juan Diego Flórez, with the fabulous Alessandro Corbelli and the great Ferruccio Furlanetto the cream on top. More Pappano.
Bryn Terfel is the main attraction in Jonathan Kent's tourist-friendly Tosca. Marcello Giordani attempts to fill the shoes last worn by Jonas Kaufmann and Deborah Voigt displays her slimmed-down talents. Jacques Lacombe conducts.
I can't get too excited about Un ballo in maschera with Ramón Vargas and Angela Marambio, though I look forward to Anna Christy's ROH debut as Oscar.
The Mariinsky's summer Ring Cycle is also booking - no casting yet announced. I don't know whether that's good or bad news. But given that the company harbours everything from wet-behind-the-ears teens to world-class soloists, we can only hope for the best. Check out the ticket prices carefully before you book - there are very few cheap seats, even in the amphitheatre.
Gambling types may grab a ticket for Rolando Villazón's recital with Tony Pappano on 24 June. 'Mixed form' doesn't begin to describe Rolando's recent performances, but at least with the opportunity to pick and fine-tune his programme, we may see him at his best.
As previously announced here (and only here!) Valery Gergiev's Mariinsky Theatre are bringing their big bad Ring Cycle to The Royal Opera House this summer.
Performance dates and prices are:
DAS RHEINGOLD Wednesday 29 July at 7.30pm DIE WALKÜRE Thursday 30 July at 5pm SIEGFRIED Friday 31 July at 5pm GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG Saturday 1 August at 4pm
TICKETS prices for the complete four night cycle range from £40 (standing) to £840 for the best seats. That's a little bit more than regular ticket prices, but considering it on a cost-per-minute basis may soften the blow a little.
Booking opens on 24 March for Friends of the Royal Opera House and 28 April for mere mortals.
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And the Royal Opera House now have an official Mariinsky page! It's here.
The detailed seating plan with ticket prices can be found at the foot of this page.
The Mariinsky Theatre's Ring Cycle is to receive its London premiere at the Royal Opera House this summer.
The production, which opened in St Petersburg in 2003 and visited Cardiff in 2006, has met a mixed reception on its extensive travels so far.
Some criticised 'Production Supervisor' (oh yus) Valery Gergiev for sporting one hat too many. "Bereft of ideas and dramatic interaction between the characters" was a typical response. Many found the soloists less than ideal: not all the Mariinsky singers are of the exemplary calibre we heard at last week's Barbican performances. Add to that Gergiev's notoriously hot-cold conducting and the results are unpredictable.
The Brothers Karamazov - Mariinsky Theatre / Gergiev - Barbican, 1 February 2009
In Dostoevsky's novel, Ivan Karamazov says that if the Devil doesn't exist, then man has created him in his own image. It's a characteristically Russian formulation explored all three of the works presented in the Mariinsky's three-night Barbican mini-residency. The final one, Alexander Smelkov's The Brothers Karamazov, premiered last year in St Petersburg, was the least successful.
This is not the fault of the performers - craftsmanship and commitment were as evident here as in the earlier shows. But Smelkov tried to stuff too much of Dostoevsky's multi-layered, multi-voiced, immaculately tangled web of a novel into the opera's two and half hours and the result was a rambling, episodic sprawl that failed to sustain interest throughout. Perhaps it would work better on stage, though it's hard to see how much could be added to the dramatisation the Mariinsky's superb singers managed in the narrow strip of stage in front of the orchestra.
The music itself is bravely retro. It could have been written at any time in the last hundred years - Tchaikovsky with a dab of Prokofiev here and Shostakovich there. It's most successful in pastiche - of liturgical music, of gypsy dances, of Brahms. Elsewhere it wanders, tunefully but aimlessly, neatly orchestrated but rarely sparkling. An occasionally interesting evening's entertainment but not a great one.
Click below for some of the Mariinsky Theatre's production photos from the St Petersburg premiere:
Queen of Spades - Mariinsky Theatre / Gergiev - Barbican, 30 January 2009
The Mariinsky Theatre scored an undisputed away win with the first opera of their three-night Barbican residency.
And a two-fingered salute to those who whine that Gergiev doesn't rehearse enough.
Maybe he didn't rehearse this at all - I don't know - with his non-stop schedule it's hard to see how he could fit much in. But 'enough' rehearsal is however much the ensemble in question need to achieve the required results. With a competent orchestra who know the work, are nurtured in the same traditions as the conductor, and appreciate that half the joy of music-making is those unexpected moments of inspiration, then maybe rehearsals can be shelved altogether. It helps of course that Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades is a Mariinsky staple. But this was no warhorse plod, it was a faultless and minutely-detailed performance, fresh and alive.
The Barbican has a notoriously lousy acoustic, but Gergiev's LSO job has taught him how to work it. You could believe it was the best concert hall in the world, so perfect was the balance between the lusciously warm Mariinsky strings, the dazzling brass and whispering winds. And with the singers lined up out of sight in front of him, there must have been some kind of ESP at play - no slips, no imbalances. No wallowing either. Gergiev's pace was brisk and his accents decisive, sugar-free romance that displayed the full palette of Tchaikovsky's remarkable orchestral colouring.
Last week most of the cast were performing the opera in the Mariinsky Theatre itself. They brought all the physical expressivity of their staged performance to this no-scores-required concert version, and the drama came alive in a way it rarely does in the concert hall. Not one performance was less than strong, and some were very good indeed.
Larissa Diadkova simply *is* the Countess, grand but vulnerable, burdened by her terrible secret, conveying with the twist of a note the omnipresent fear of death lurking beneath the silver-spoon graciousness. With the nostalgic reverie of her Grétry aria she held the audience spellbound.
Vladimir Galusin is a sort of Russian Domingo with a dark, baritonal quality beneath his bright ringing tones, and he gave an intense and powerful performance as Herman. I didn't quite buy the transition from lovelorn innocent to manic gambler, but I think that's as much Tchaikovsky's fault as any singer's, and a problem that disappears in a good staging.
The noble baritone of Alexey Markov produced the most purely beautiful singing of the night in the short part of Yeletsky. And Kristina Kapustinskaya, doubling up as Polina and Milovzor, should be on everyone's watch list - an outstanding smoky-timbred mezzo with a haunting quality that stops you in your tracks.
The quality of the chorus was underlined when Viktor Antipenko stepped up out of the ranks to perform the small roles of Master of Ceremonies and Chaplitsky. Many opera houses would be happy to have a clear big voiced tenor like that singing their leads.
But all this would have been as nothing without Gergiev, who feels this music in his bones and transmitted it through his fluttering fingertips.
As the London concert scene awakes from its festive slumber, evenings are once more full of Things To Go To. Here is a selection of what's happening in January
There are two premieres at the Royal Opera House. Willy Decker's much-travelled Die tote Stadt, which I caught last year in Vienna, opens on 27 January 2009. Still plenty of tickets left - be warned that the mise en abîme staging is largely performed in a kind of box upstage, and may not be fully visible from some side seats.
This year's annual Britten production is The Beggar’s Opera, in the Linbury Studio from 20 January. The cast includes Tom Randle and Susan Bickley; Christian Curnyn conducts. It's currently sold out, though as ever, seats may 'appear' later. Avoid side seats towards the front, where the sound is abysmal.
In an appealing ballet triple bill, the separated-at-birth Martha Wainwright and Zenaida Yanowsky return from 31 January for Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins. Mats Ek’s Carmen and Christopher Wheeldon’s frenetic DGV, set to Michael Nyman's music, complete an evening that should attract music lovers as well as ballet fans.
The English National Opera's January is yet another month of ballet, but Nicholas Hytner's enduring Magic Flute returns on 24 January with Roderick Williams as Papageno and Robert Lloyd as Sarastro.
The Barbican's year sets off to a cracking start. One of the early highlights is Haydn's Creation with Thomas Quasthoff and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra conducted by René Jacobs on 10 January.
Sir Colin Davis conducts the LSO in Verdi'sRequiem on 11 and 14 January, with soloists Christine Brewer, Larissa Diadkova, Stuart Neill and John Relyea. (There's another opportunity to hear it at the Royal Opera House on 13 March, this time with Pappano conducting.)
Lock up your grannies on 17 January - the BBC Symphony Orchestra celebrate the genius of Stockhausen with a whole Stockhausen day - a 12 hour programme of films, talks and concerts.
Gergiev cools his heels in London for a few more days to conduct the visiting Mariinsky Theatre in three performances from 30 January. Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, Rubinstein's The Demon and Smelkov's new The Brothers Karamazov are on the menu - here's a video of the latter, which premiered in Russia last year.
On 27 January Rachel Podger joins the OAE in the Queen Elizabeth Hall for bill of Bach and Telemann. But skip that for the 10pm bargain Night Shift concert, which repeats some of the earlier programme and adds a few extras on top - tickets £8, drinks allowed, and a more laid-back atmosphere all round.
At Wigmore Hall, tomorrow, 9 January, Alice Coote and Paul Nilon tackle Mahler with Mark Elder. For spring, there's a focus on vocal music, and 11 January sees the first of a series of Sunday 4pm concerts featuring young British-based singers, all at a bargain £12 price. This one has Anna Grevelius, Anna Leese, Andrew Staples and Jacques Imbrailo. Emma Bell and Lucy Crowe appear later on in the series
This snippet of information Sadlers Wells withheld, no doubt thinking the more £60 tickets we can flog, the better.
But it had plenty to offer for the grown-ups too - one of the reasons it remains a staple of the Russian repertoire, despite being rarely-staged over here.
The Tale of Tsar Saltan naturally lends itself to a family-friendly treatment in any case. Rimsky-Korsakov took a quintessential fairytale complete with beautiful princesses and wicked stepsisters and packed it with hummable tunes and soothing harmonies.
Though structurally it owes something to Wagner, with its through-composition and leitmotifs, there's little harmonic adventure, and no attempt to symbolise, characterise, or probe more than a millimetre below the surface. So the decision of director Alexander Petrov (also artistic director of a children's musical theatre) for visual splash at the expense of psychological insight is artistically appropriate, not just junior audience-friendly.
The sets are really the star in this production, and they are closely based on Ivan Bilibin's 1937 designs. They were in turn based on Bilibin's 1905 illustrations for the Pushkin poem The Tale of Tsar Saltan - as was the opera itself in 1900. So while they're not technically the original sets for the opera, they can at least claim a degree of contemporaneity.
The folkloric designs pulsate with colour and pattern, and the conscious artifice of the flat wooden sets emphasises the unreality of the tale being told. The only modern touch came in the orchestral interludes, accompanied by gently-animated backdrops of Bilibin's illustrations.
Gowned in luscious brocades and explosive prints, the performers didn't go for naturalism either. The sort of choreographed gesticulation on display could have looked as wooden as the sets in another context.
But when your hero prince turns into an insect and back again, then marries a swan who turns into a princess, it works perfectly. Or almost. The infamous Flight of the Bumblebee, portrayed here by a dancer racing round the stage with a fist-sized cuddly toy bee on a stick, provoked perfectly understandable laughter.
As the Mariinsky company carry on performing in St Petersburg while they're on tour, what we got in London was a sort of B team - not that it was particularly obvious. The singers weren't particularly starry, but none were less than competent, and there were some terrific character performances.
Victoria Yastrebova, a sort of Netrebko-in-waiting, could certainly hold the stage, and as the Tsaritsa who is wrongly cast out by the Tsar had the opportunity to present a more rounded and human characterisation than some of the others.
Daniil Shtoda, who played the hero Tsarevich, was the only disappointment. He sounded for the most part pinched and tiny-voiced, though in a few lines he opened out and showed he can do better.
But the show was almost stolen by the smaller comic parts, especially the interfering crone Babarikha, played by Nadezhda Vasilieva, and Vassily Gorshkov's silly old Grandpa.
The orchestra under Tugan Sokhiev sounded oddly less 'Russian' than I'd expected, but splendid all the same. A few brass-laden moments threatened to lift the roof off Sadlers Wells (obviously EU noise regs haven't migrated east) but they were generally well-balanced with the stage, and tremendously spirited in the orchestral interludes.
Not everyone enjoyed the brazen naivety of the production (a certain opera director left at the interval, who knows why), but there's only so far the Eastenders-in-corsets verism of most current productions can go. I suspect a more contemporary approach would shatter the delicate magical spell which is this opera's main reward.
Some more production photos:
And some from the curtain call (by intermezzo.typepad.com), which show the gorgeous costumes more clearly:
Here's an amateur video of the production, shot inside the Mariinsky. Not the highest of quality, but the first couple of minutes give a glimpse of the beautiful Mariinsky theatre itself, and the rest includes representative musical snatches:
And here's a pointless musical exercise if ever there was. Flight of the Bumblebee performed on 8 pianos. Culprits include the usual suspect, Lang Lang, but what makes it bizarrely compulsive is that Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin, James Levine, Emanuel Ax, Leif Ove Andsnes, Mikhail Pletnev, Staffan Scheja, Nicholas Angelich and Claude Frankare are also implicated:
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