By Rebecca Schmid Journeys have provided powerful inspiration to writers, painters and composers alike, opening eyes to new ways of seeing the world. The broadening of artists’ palettes has sometimes allowed them to capture a landscape more vividly than the natives could themselves. One only has to think of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Gauguin’s portraits [...]
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By Rebecca Schmid In the final scenes of Mahlermania, a ‘dramatic fantasy with music by Gustav Mahler’ conceived by the troupe Nico and the Navigators in cooperation with the Deutsche Oper to inaugurate the West Berlin opera house’s new alternative stage Tischlerei on November 27, manuscript paper and fur coats scatter across the stage in [...]
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By Rebecca Schmid The eclectic musical life of the brief but thriving ‘Roaring twenties’ continues to inspire a nostalgia that is all the more understandable given contemporary classical music’s reorientation toward popular idioms from techno to rock. The latest album of French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, Le Boeuf sur le Toit, sets out to recreate the [...]
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By Rebecca Schmid As Regietheater becomes the norm on opera stages in Germany, it is a pleasant, if not shocking, surprise to see a production of Die Zauberflöte that looks like a throwback to the time of its world premiere. The Staatsoper Berlin has revived a 1994 staging modelled after designs by the nineteenth-century Prussian [...]
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By Rebecca Schmid Fans of Joyce DiDonato may find it hard to fathom that one of today’s leading bel canto singers and Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year is just spreading her stardom to Germany. The Kansas native has sung only once at a Berlin opera house, performing Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia at [...]
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By Rebecca Schmid The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin is off to a fine start this season, having gained Tugan Sokhiev as music director after an interim period senza maestro following Ingo Metzmacher’s departure in 2010. On Wednesday, Paavo Järvi and the violinist Janine Jansen joined the orchestra together for the first time in a performance of [...]
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By Rebecca Schmid The programming of the Berlin Philharmonic, while reportedly having gravitated away from the players’ specialty in German repertoire since Sir Simon Rattle took the reins a decade ago, not only gives equal weight to post-Romantic repertoire but consistently illuminates connections between works which seem disparate at first glance. Andris Nelsons conducted the [...]
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musica reanimata, Günter Grass, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Norbert von Hannenheim, Arnold Schönberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Breier, Gottfried Eberle, Konzerthaus Berlin, Deutschlandfunk, Moritz Ernst, Irena Troupovà , Jean-Claude Velin , Berlin Philharmonic , Vivaldi, Andrea Marcon, RIAS Chamber Chorus, J.S. Bach, The Four Seasons, Emmanuel Pahud, Albrecht Mayer, Johann Joachim, Andreas Buschatz, Lisa Larsson , Marina Prudenskaja
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By Rebecca Schmid The socially aware agenda of the Komische Oper’s new Intendant Barrie Kosky has been ruffling the feathers of Berliners months before he officially took over this season, not least with the decision to end the house tradition of performing operas exclusively in the German language. His emphasis on cultural pluralism aside, the [...]
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By Rebecca Schmid Many American opera-goers, including New Yorkers, look across the ocean and wish that their home institutions would afford themselves the same liberties of programming. Back in Berlin, the Deutsche Oper kicked off its season with a Lachenmann opera, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, while the Komische Oper launched a Monteverdi trilogy including [...]
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