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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Christoph Eschenbach, Elegant Cosmopolitan

May 26, 2009 by Scott Timberg


LAST week i went to meet christoph eschenbach, the conductor/pianist who’s been part of one of the nastiest divorces in the classical music world during a strained tenure at the philadelphia orchestra.

here is the way my colleague mark swed described him: “Thin and erect, with shaved head and large cranium, dressed in avant-garde sleek black shirt and slacks, he looked like some inscrutable creature of advanced intelligence out of the future.”

he was an imposing, very germanic guy, you could say, but one of the most culturally curious people i’ve ever interviewed, and he loosened up when we started talking about rilke. he’s the kind of guy so in love with music it literally wakes him up at night.

HERE is my story in today’s LAT.

looking forward to seeing eschenbach play schubert (d.960!) at disney hall tonight… he’s also conducting a program of mozart and bruckner this weekend. those of you in DC can count on him taking over as music director at the National Symphony — which he has pledged to bring into the 21st c. — in 2010.

Addendum: here is the review, not by me, of last night’s dvorak and schubert concert.
Photo credit: christoph-eschenbach.com

Filed Under: classical music, disney hall, eschenbach, germany

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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