Musical America Blogs

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 17, 2013 MUNICH — There is a genteel inscrutability about Herbert Blomstedt. Authoritative, tall and silver-haired, he has never cut the profile of a star. His thoughts are calmly his own, locked deep behind a probing gaze and ungroomed eyebrows. Musicians play well for him, perhaps out of a sense [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 1, 2013 MUNICH — In a statement issued today here, Lorin Maazel shed light on the brevity of his tenure as Chefdirigent of the Munich Philharmonic: “I congratulate Valery Gergiev on his appointment as principal conductor … starting the 2015–16 season. I am honored to have been serving as the [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: January 23, 2013 MUNICH — With the city council’s blessing today of Valery Gergiev’s hire as the next Chefdirigent of the Munich Philharmonic, all three of the Bavarian capital’s globally renowned orchestras will be in Soviet-born hands by late 2015. This September, 40-year-old Kirill Petrenko of Omsk, Siberia, finally takes over [...]

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: 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 [...]

By Rebecca Schmid „Kinder, schaff Neues,“ (Children, create something new) Wagner wrote in an adage frequently quoted by stage directors in Germany. In Bayreuth, 136 years after the founding of his festival, the spirit is alive and well. Provocatively-minded Regietheater, for lack of a better blanket term, has come to stamp the recently installed administration [...]

By Rebecca Schmid The Bayreuth Festival has had its share of scandal to contend with as Wagner’s bicentenary approaches next season. An international investigation into exclusive ticketing practices; the publicized struggle to find the director for a new Ring cycle; administrative policies that have reportedly shortened rehearsal time; widely reviled productions; and—most recently—the last-minute withdrawal [...]

By Rebecca Schmid The theme of this year’s Dresdener Musikfestspiele, “Herz Europas” (the Heart of Europe), inventively returns the East German city to its roots as a thriving cultural hub. While today’s united Germany is roiled by the end of the ‘Merkozy’ era and Eurobond controversy, the emphasis of the festival (May 15-June 3) on [...]