The economy might be down, but the marquees are still lighting up in İstanbul. İstanbul International Music Festival director Yeşim Gürer Oymak regrets that they had to decrease the number of concerts due to difficulties in finding sponsors. “But we believe that the program has been very enthusiastically welcomed by the festival lovers as the ticket sales increased by 15 percent compared to last year,” he added.Headliners include André Previn and Daniel Barenboim, both of them pianists and conductors, and many Turkish artists will perform in venues that are new for the festival, such as the garden of the Archeology Museum and a courtyard at Topkapı Palace.
The jazz side offers such treats as SMV, the all-bass trio of Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller and Victor Wooten. Stanley Clarke's reaction to the trio's first performance, as reported by jazzhq.blogspot.com: “The second we started ... I knew it was historical for us and the audience. Marcus and Victor are so intuitive, and we each found our range. Marcus was slamming down the groove and Victor started playing these harmonics chords, and I was like, man, this is so bad-ass! When you have that amount of knowledge, respect and love it always creates clarity in the music.”
If only the sponsors could enjoy such clarity of vision. When the organizers started planning the program for 2009 they expected that life wouldn't be easy with the economic crisis.
“I have to say that it hit us more than we imagined,” said Jazz Festival director Pelin Opcin. “Although the festival sponsor Garanti Bank still continues its support, the total sponsorship income has decreased by 50 percent, as we lost most of our performance sponsorships. This year's program is actually an optimized model of the festival's usual framework.”
Love that word, “optimized.” With her attitude of making lemonade from lemons, Opcin can jump over to the corporate side anytime.
“We do have a nice lineup, but the number of concerts is noticeably decreased,” she said. “In addition to a diverse lineup from several different genres, our trademark has always been to use interesting locations, such as historic sites, as concert venues. Our main aim is to make the audience encounter high-quality musical performances as well as experience İstanbul as a unique background. We do have the same approach this year, but we are taking fewer risks, so we haven't incorporated a new venue into this year's program.”
Making do with the same old, same old. The top venue for the jazz festival remains the Cemil Topuzlu Open-air Theater, but this venue's biggest show may come after the festival closes, when Leonard Cohen performs two shows on Aug. 5 and 6. Talk about old, the man is 74 and still out there.
Indeed, Cohen is playing all over Europe this summer. He's coming to İstanbul for the first time ever, just two days after a scheduled concert in St. Mark's Square in Venice. Perhaps when they're packing up the band equipment they could slip in those bronze horses, the ones the Crusaders looted from here when they sacked Constantinople in 1204.
Can we find a sponsor for an act of grand art reclamation? A few years ago an artist made plastic replicas of the horses and showed them in İstanbul, at the Garanti art gallery in Beyoğlu. I can't remember whether that was part of the Biennial or not, but I thought it was great to see the horses back in İstanbul after 800 years.
The bronze statues once graced the hippodrome, which in Turkish we call the At Meydanı, or Horse Plaza. The chariot races were the Formula One of the time. İstanbul's a rich city, why not get hold of those plastic models and commission an artist to reproduce the originals in bronze? We're supposed to be the capital of European culture next year. Turks practically invented horses -- what better way to let EU leaders know that we know our own past? Now… is there a sponsor in the house?
