Posts Tagged ‘Commentary’

A Stirring Evening (and Music)

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013

By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 24, 2013 MUNICH — Members of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra venture six times a year to Lake Starnberg, some 20 miles southwest of here, to play chamber music at the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, or EAT, as its website favicon reads. A mid-season program (Feb. 24) paired quintets by Mozart […]

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Jansons! Petrenko! Gergiev!

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

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 […]

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Muti Taps the Liturgy

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

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 […]

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Widmann’s Opera Babylon

Friday, November 23rd, 2012

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 thing over the same […]

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Brahms Days in Tutzing

Thursday, November 8th, 2012

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 new celebrity, his German Requiem having appeared in print a year earlier. The visit ended with a few days’ repose at Lake Würm, […]

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Season of Concessions

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 11, 2012 MUNICH — Arts groups here present a restrained 2012–13 season facing pros and cons not always aligned with those in America. Funding, for instance, holds steady: city and state (Bavaria) play their part, as do local corporations Siemens, BMW, Audi, Allianz and Linde. Excellent pools of musicians, instrumental […]

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