Posts Tagged ‘Beethoven’

Plush Strings of Luxembourg

Wednesday, December 31st, 2014

By ANDREW POWELL Published: December 31, 2014 MUNICH — Lëtzebuerg Stad, a.k.a. Luxembourg-Ville, population 100,000, holds a spiffier position these days in the musical firmament. Its orchestra has graduated from the legendary but somewhat seedy aegis of Radio Luxembourg — once a commercial thorn in the national broadcasting sides of France and Britain — and […]

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Pollini Seals His Beethoven

Monday, November 24th, 2014

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 24, 2014 MUNICH — It took him 39 years, but Maurizio Pollini has now completed his recorded survey of Beethoven sonatas here in the Herkulessaal, where the project began. The final sessions, for the Opp. 31 and 49 pieces, were held in June this year, and the resulting CD set […]

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Salzburg Coda

Friday, October 31st, 2014

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 31, 2014 SALZBURG — Alexander Pereira is now gone from the main festival here, and two tenuous summers are in the offing before Markus Hinterhäuser replaces him as Intendant in 2017. His exit, under a cloud, ends a budget tempest but threatens reversals of worthy initiatives he took: lengthening the […]

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Festive Sides

Friday, August 29th, 2014

By ANDREW POWELL Published: August 29, 2014 MUNICH — Staged works and the legendary Lied evenings hold the limelight here at the annual Opernfestspiele, begun 139 years ago. But veins of chamber music and, since 2008, choral programming run through the five-week schedule, lending scope and affirming organizer Bayerische Staatsoper’s depth of musicianship. The chamber […]

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Arcanto: One Piece at a Time

Friday, January 31st, 2014

By ANDREW POWELL Published: January 31, 2014 MUNICH — The 11-year-old Arcanto Quartet, heard here last Friday (Jan. 24), is everything a chamber group shouldn’t be for promotional purposes. There are no family ties. Their instruments don’t match. They share no doctrine about period practice. They don’t grind out whole cycles of anyone’s music. Not […]

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Tutzing Returns to Brahms

Wednesday, October 16th, 2013

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 16, 2013 MUNICH — Some festivals strive to be on your radar twelve months of the year, with unending publicity. Others revel in a few days. Take the annual Brahms Days in tranquil Tutzing, south of here on Lake Starnberg. Its scale is intimate, its setting gemütlich. Its focus — […]

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Modern Treats, and Andsnes

Sunday, October 6th, 2013

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 6, 2013 MUNICH — The 1909 candy-box essays by Schönberg and Webern, Fünf Orchesterstücke and Sechs Stücke, can pass by gratuitously in uncommitted hands. Not so yesterday (Oct. 5) in a Munich Philharmonic program pairing them with Beethoven concertos. Norwegian conductor Eivind Gullberg Jensen, calm and assured, drew incisive, expressive […]

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Martha Argerich at the Musikfest

Friday, September 20th, 2013

By Rebecca Schmid The Musikfest, Berlin’s 20th-century music festival, took a welcome occasion to revisit the opus of Lutosławski upon his centenary this year. Following the appearances of guest ensembles such as the Royal Concertgebouw, Philharmonia Orchestra and Bavarian Radio Symphony, the Staatskapelle Berlin performed his Mi-Parti (1976) under Music Director Daniel Barenboim alongside works […]

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New York Rites

Friday, September 21st, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid In Berlin, where contemporary music thrives from the Philharmonie to off spaces, it is a widespread perception that New York’s mainstream institutions are afraid to program anything past Stravinsky. A look at Alan Gilbert’s recent undertakings with the New York Philharmonic, notably in a hugely successful “360” concert of Mozart, Stockhausen, Boulez […]

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Opening words…

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid The author Karl Scheffler famously described Berlin as condemned to forever becoming but never being. When I arrived here nearly two years ago as a DAAD grantee in journalism, the city sprawled out like an unfinished collage. The Philharmonie on the gleaming, rebuilt Potsdamer Platz where I heard Daniel Barenboim perform and […]

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