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Friday, December 01, 2006

Lithuanian wins International Conducting Competition

Heard last night that the young Lithuanian conductor Vytautas Lukocius won the Finnish Panula Conducting Competition. This is a very serious competition - Jorma Panula is the legendary teacher of many of the world's leading young conductors (not so young now) like Sakari Oramo, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, and Osmo Vänskä.

Saraste was on the jury, as well as Panula. So Congratulations, Mr Lukocius, and I hope your career takes off stratospherically. But do not forget those who have supported and employed you in the last 10 years!


1 comments:

violainvilnius said...

Our young hero gave an interview to one of the redtops today saying that the head conductor in the Filharmonija blocks all newcomers. Lukocius used words like 'psycho terror' and such like. Probably we will not see much of him in the Filharmonija now.

Mind you, he may have a bit of a point; some of us also feel that jobs for life are not always a good idea. It might be an idea for the Filharmonija to go over to fixed term contracts for conductors, of 5 years or 7 years, much like the big orchestras elsewhere. The renewal of the contract would then be dependent on quality...in an open competition?

Some orchestras, which are their own company, even hire and fire their own conductors, whereby the conductor is the orchestra's employee. An interesting idea that!