[Note by Tom Gross]

This is a brief-follow up note to my dispatch last Thursday: “I do not want to be spared of the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter...”

A large number of people wrote to me about this. I apologize for not having time to reply to most of your emails, but I have passed some of them on to Evgeny Kissin and he thanks you very much for them.

Some readers wanted to see a photo of Evgeny Kissin receiving his new Israeli passport and ID card:

At Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Jerusalem with Israel’s Absorption Minister Sofa Landver and Natan Sharansky.

 

RACHMANINOV, TCHAIKOVSKY AND CHOPIN

Other readers wanted to see some of Kissin’s performances. I have posted three examples below.

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From the First Night of the 2000 BBC Promenade Concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall, where Evgeny Kissin played Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto and as an encore, Rachmaninov’s Prelude in G minor.

 

Evgeny Kissin plays Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1, at Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night in New York in 1995.

 

To celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Frederic Chopin, in 2010 the French cultural TV channel Arte recorded Kissin playing Chopin with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Antuni Wit.

 

IN YIDDISH TOO

My dispatch revealing that Kissin was to receive Israeli citizenship has been picked up in many places, for example in America at National Review Online, or in Israel at the Times of Israel, or here in Britain. It has also been reported widely in the Israeli media, on music blogs and on blogs that advocate a boycott of Israel.

Dispatches from this email list are often translated into other languages. For example, the recent al-Quds university dispatches have been translated by media in other countries into Danish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French and so on.

But my Kissin dispatch is the first one, to my knowledge, to be translated into Yiddish.

Among his other languages, Evgeny Kissin is a fluent Yiddish speaker and he requested that the Yiddish version of The Forward translate and publish my dispatch here:

קיסין באַקומט ישׂראלדיקע בירגערשאַפֿט.

 

A RAP REPLY TO THE BOYCOTTERS

Speaking of boycotts, for those of you with a different taste in music, the Orthodox Jewish rap and reggae artist Ari Lesser has released a song “Boycott Israel” – in which he delivers a stern message to all those around the world advocating a boycott of Israel and Israelis:

-- Tom Gross