Kirill Kondrashin - Exile To Western Europe

Exile To Western Europe

He left the Soviet Union in December 1978 while touring in the Netherlands and sought political asylum there, whereupon the Soviet regime immediately banned all his previous recordings. He took the post of Permanent Guest Conductor of Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1978 and remained in that position until his death. He also established a brief but fruitful collaboration with the Vienna Philharmonic.

In the Netherlands he married his assistant and interpreter, musicologist Nolda Broekstra (b. 1944). When they first met around 1975, Broekstra was 30 years younger and spoke no Russian; both were married and were not fluent in English, the language they spoke. Yet they fell in love, tried to be together when they could, and exchanged letters. Broekstra diligently started studying Russian and English and quickly mastered both languages. Their family life in the Netherlands was short, as Kondrashin died in Amsterdam from a heart attack in early 1981. On the same day he conducted Mahler's First Symphony with the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra. Philips Records issued recordings of some of Kondrashin's live concerts with the Concertgebouw Orchestra on LP and CD, including energetic performances of symphonies by Shostakovich. On the recording of Shostakovich's sixth symphony Kondrashin can be heard tapping or even pounding his foot as he conducts the lively final movement.

Read more about this topic:  Kirill Kondrashin

Famous quotes containing the words western europe, exile, western and/or europe:

    It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.
    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    the bird in the poplar tree
    dreaming, his head
    tucked into
    far-and-near exile under his wing ...
    Denise Levertov (b. 1923)

    Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straightshooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    That land is like an Eagle, whose young gaze
    Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume
    Floats moveless on the storm, and in the blaze
    Of sunrise gleams when Earth is wrapped in gloom;
    An epitaph of glory for the tomb
    Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made,
    Great People! as the sands shalt thou become;
    Thy growth is swift as morn, when night must fade;
    The multitudinous Earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.
    Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)