Vienna Philharmonic to play "closed concert" in Helsinki as part of Baltic Sea cruise visit in 2010

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The world-famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will perform in Helsinki’s Finlandia Hall next summer, but don't expect tickets to appear on the local Ticketmaster site.
      The Vienna Philharmonic will take the stage in a private function at Finlandia on July 12th, 2010. The reservation for the space has been placed by the Austrian tour operator MS Reisegesellschaft.
     
Individual tickets to the concert will not be available. Instead, the tour operator will bring in both the orchestra and the audience.
      The concert is part of a luxury cruise around the Baltic Sea starting from Kiel on July 7th and ending with a final concert in Kaliningrad on July 15th. During the course of the cruise the cities of Tallinn, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, and Stockholm will be visited.
      In Helsinki, pianist Rudolf Buchbinder will play Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos. 1, 2, and 4, while conducting the orchestra from his piano stool, the organisers say.
      In the remaining concerts Christian Thielemann and Valeri Gergijev take turns as conductors.
     
In addition to Helsinki’s Finlandia Hall, actual orchestra concerts will also be performed in the Stockholm Concert Hall, the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, as well as in Kaliningrad, where Otto Nicolai, the founder of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, was born in 1810.
      The cities of Kiel and Tallinn, in turn, will function as mere visit destinations, without any concerts attached to them.
      On board the ship the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will perform five chamber music concerts in smaller line-ups.
      The cheapest cruise tickets, which come with a price tag of EUR 3,000, buy a cabin without a sea view.
      “The tickets are available for the Finns, too”, urges Kerstin Meyer of MS Reisegesellschaft. The cruise has not been sold out yet.
      In all, around 2,000 cruise tickets are available, which means a sold-out cruise would earn the organisers in excess of EUR six million.
      The Vienna Philharmonic first co-operated with a tour operator in 2008, when a Mediterranean cruise from Mallorca to Barcelona was accompanied by conductor Zubin Mehta and pianist Lang Lang.
      On the orchestra’s website Clemens Hellsberg, Chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic, praises co-operation with the travel organiser as “successful”.


Links:
  The Vienna Philharmonic
  Sea & Music - The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra aboard “Mein Schiff” (.pdf file)

Helsingin Sanomat