Musical America Blogs

By ANDREW POWELL Published: January 8, 2013 RAVENNA — Sacred music has lent gravitas to Riccardo Muti’s career since the 1960s. Settings of the Ordinary and the burial service by Bach, Mozart, Cherubini, Schubert, Berlioz, Brahms and Verdi have drawn his attention and received, more often than not, a disciplined performance. No, this is not [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: December 21, 2012 MUNICH — They all laughed eight years ago when the Bavarian State Opera set Verdi’s Rigoletto on the Planet of the Apes, and the production fast vanished. Naturally, then, the return of the deformed ducal jester in a new régie last Saturday (Dec. 15) promised relative normalcy, perhaps [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 23, 2012 MUNICH — Scorpion-Man prowls the rubble of an unnamed flattened city at the start of Babylon, Jörg Widmann’s new opera, wailing as he moves. We should care. Seven scenes, a Hanging Garden interlude, and three costly theater hours later, he is back, doing his thang over the same [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 19, 2012 DRESDEN — Christian Thielemann made his opera debut here yesterday (Nov. 18), 37 months after agreeing to replace Fabio Luisi as Chefdirigent of the Sächsische Staatskapelle, effectively music director of the Semperoper company. The vehicle, Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s 12-year-old, quasi-faithful staging of Der Rosenkavalier — notable for its [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 8, 2012 MUNICH — Johannes Brahms came here in 1870, catching the completed half of Wagner’s Ring and hobnobbing with colleagues, Liszt among them. He basked in a new celebrity, his German Requiem having appeared in print a year earlier. The visit ended with a few days’ repose at Lake [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 11, 2012 MUNICH — Arts groups here present a compromised 2012–13 season, facing pros and cons not always aligned with those in America. Funding holds steady. City and state (Bavaria) play their part, and local powerhouses — Siemens, BMW, Audi, Allianz, and Linde among them — step up habitually to [...]