In 2017, VAN published an interview with Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani wherein he said that he felt the harpsichord was becoming a tool of nationalism. Allegations of his misconduct included two separate incidents where he purportedly "grabbed and members of his staff in anger." The Columbia Journalism Review called the report "groundbreaking," and linked VAN to a vanguard of classical music journalism that expanded focus from performance and technique to issues of representation, interpersonal and global politics, and workplace culture. In 2019, VAN broke news of conductor and music director Daniel Barenboim's alleged professional misconduct, characterized across interviews with past and current employees as "authoritarian, mercurial, and frightening" behavior. VAN's style of reporting is characterized by stories that go beyond the traditional purview of legacy classical music publications. VAN has published essays and features written by Haas, cellist Matt Haimovitz, author and former Leonard Bernstein assistant Craig Urquhart, ABC News's Alexandra Svokos, The Paris Review's Helena de Groot, Kenji Fujishima, critic and librettist Olivia Giovetti, musicologist and Jeopardy! contestant Linda Shaver-Gleason, and Belarusian conductor Vitali Alekseenok. ![]() It has published interviews with Teju Cole, Laurie Anderson, Barbara Hannigan, Mahan Esfahani, Claire Chase, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Peter Eötvös, and Elina Garanca. It has also reported on the ongoing allegations of misconduct against James Levine both in the US and Germany. VAN has published breaking news around topics including alleged professional and sexual misconduct at both the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe, Germany and the University of Texas at Austin's Butler School of Music, as well as allegations of professional misconduct by conductor and music director Daniel Barenboim. A documentary featuring five of the six finalists, filmed at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, was released in the summer of 2020. The magazine would curate the prize in partnership with Swiss bank Julius Baer. In 2020, VAN announced the inaugural Berlin Prize for Young Artists, a competition for early-career musicians that judged based on both artistic vision/curation and performing talent and technique. In 2018, VAN partnered with music publisher Ricordi for the Ricordilab program for emerging composers, a three-year mentorship and career program. The popular literary website Longreads cited two of the magazine's essays as explorations that allow readers to "hear the music, and think of culture, differently, too." Several pieces written for VAN are listed as sources in the textbook Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance. Other VAN interviews and reported pieces have informed pieces in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Forbes, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Slate, and Pitchfork. Later that year, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross wrote that the magazine had "rapidly established itself as a venue for unfettered music writing." The Haas interview was also referenced in a Quartz article on BDSM and creativity. It was the first time that Haas had, in his words, "come out" as the dominant in a BDSM relationship with his wife. VAN first received international attention in February, 2016, when its interview with Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas was written about in The New York Times. ![]() Its focus on news and stories that center on non-mainstream voices, perspectives, and stories within classical music has earned it comparisons to Pitchfork Magazine for its respective musical genre. Unlike many other classical music publications, such as Gramophone, Opera News, and Das Opernglas, VAN caters to a younger audience of classical music fans and professionals. It launched as a bilingual publication in January 2016, styling itself as "a fanzine for music lovers, music professionals and followers of the arts." Its name comes from Ludwig van Beethoven. ![]() VAN is an independent weekly online magazine published monthly in German and English and devoted to classical music.
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