By ANDREW POWELL Published: May 2, 2017 MUNICH — Like the miracle of compound interest, Bavarian State Opera’s pricing can chart smartly upwards when you’re not watching. The company sells using an astounding total of 128 price points — the product of eight price categories for its National Theater home and sixteen sliding scales. Things […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 30, 2017 FERRARA — Lanky Teodor Currentzis looms over his MusicAeterna players the way Basil Fawlty loomed over Manuel, and with comparable gestures. It is anyone’s guess how their 13-year relationship has survived, what with labor conditions in Russia, the quirks of period-instrument practice, their joint move from Novosibirsk (in […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 25, 2017 BOLOGNA — Teatro Comunale’s busy direttore musicale Michele Mariotti, 38, ventured his 33rd and 34th operas* this month with a foray in verismo, the terse tribulations of Cavalleria rusticana, and, incongruously, La voix humaine, a vehicle for the Bologna-schooled soprano, former mezzo, Anna Caterina Antonacci. He chose big […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 24, 2017 MUNICH — It was a short courtship by recent standards. Dalmatian conductor Ivan Repušić (pr. REP-oosh-itch), 39, debuted with the Münchner Rundfunk-Orchester in a concert La rondine in Oct. 2015, returned for a gala two months later and signed his contract* last June. His background, happily, is stable: […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 13, 2017 MUNICH — Bavaria’s Culture Ministry declined to comment last week on the handicapping of online ticket buyers by Bavarian State Opera, one of the entities it supervises. In theory the Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Culture, Science and Art, to give it its full name, supports culture […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 13, 2017 MUNICH — Philipp Stölzl’s new and relatively sane production of Andrea Chénier will be video-streamed Saturday by Bavarian State Opera as part of a regular free service. — when: 2 p.m. EDT (11 a.m. PDT), March 18, 2017 — where: https://www.staatsoper.de/tv.html Omer Meir Wellber brings his inimitable visceral […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 9, 2017 MUNICH — Making a taut and impassioned case for Mahler’s Tenth Symphony (1910) here at the Herkulessaal Feb. 17, Yannick Nézet-Séguin still rather confirmed Leonard Bernstein’s dictum that the composer “had said it all in the Ninth.” Mahler’s inspiration sustained itself, as tidily executed by the Symphonie-Orchester des […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 7, 2017 MUNICH — Without citing an error, Bavarian State Opera claimed last month that the report here about its handicapping of online ticket buyers contains “false statements” but at the same time said it would “leave it as it is.” The report, based on research by people using two […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 4, 2017 ZURICH — The goal presumably was to freshen the tale of Jason and his cooperative wife Medea as told by Thomas Corneille (filtering his brother Pierre and Euripides) and mise en musique by Charpentier. But stage director Andreas Homoki’s new Médée (1693) for Opernhaus Zürich, where he doubles […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 24, 2017 SALZBURG — The gimmicky proposition of Mozart’s Requiem enhanced with equine ballet dominated this year’s Mozartwoche schedule, and no doubt budget. It capped, in a way, five iterations of the festival lavishly managed by Marc Minkowski and his front-office counterpart Matthias Schulz, and it brought in for the […]
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