A few days ago, the government announced with a lot of noise that “the magic of the New Year’s Concert of Vienna will for the first time be experienced live by the Albanian public.” The concert by Kosovar violinist Shkëlzen Doli and his piano quartet “Philharmonic Ensemble – Vienna” has been planned on January 2 in the Pallati i Kongreseve.
The government’s announcement and the accompanying promotional video was formulated in such way as to suggest that the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, in which Doli plays the second violin, would jump into a plane after their concert on the 1st in order to perform for Albanians on the 2nd.
No more tickets
According to the announcement for the concert:
The link to buy tickets online will be posted on the website of AGE Group Production before 10:00 on December 17. We want to emphasize that only ten percent of the tickets will be sold online.
We want to announce that the sales of tickets will begin on Saturday, December 17, 2016 at 10:00 at the ticket counter of the Pallati i Kongreseve and online at the same time.
Hundreds of citizens waited several hours in the cold before the counter would open on the announced time. But when it opened, only thirty tickets were sold – from the hundreds that should have been available according to the capacity of the Pallati i Kongreseve.
The lack of tickets led several citizens, who had waited hours in the cold, to complain, but the only justification given by the sales personnel was that this was the amount that they were given to sell. All other tickets had been distributed privately among the political and business elite of the country.
The online ticket websites has announced that the tickets have sold out.
The next “first, original, unique, rare” event
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Edi Rama has announced another event in Tirana, using similar clichés:
After the Concert of Vienna in Tirana, January will also bring the first exhibition in Albania with a collection of original painting masterpieces.
For the first time, not only young artists or arts educators, but also high school and university students and the entire art-loving public will encounter the unique taste of the original works of the masters of European painting.
This new road of rare artistic experiences for the Albanian public, which just like the Concert of Vienna in Tirana, we want to turn into a tradition, year after year, starts with the masterpieces of Italian painting from the Novecento and I have a lot of hope that it will continue in 2018 with a collection of original pieces from the Picasso Museum in Paris.
