Posts Tagged ‘Jörg Widmann’

Maestro, 62, Outruns Players

Sunday, November 22nd, 2015

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 22, 2015 MUNICH — At five o’clock last Sunday afternoon, Munich time, three Mariinsky Orchestras began to play. Two of them launched into Pikovaya dama and Die Zauberflöte at the Mariinsky complex in St Petersburg. The third, here at the Gasteig, opened the accompaniment to a witty Shchedrin vocalise. Such […]

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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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Dual Frequencies at the Ultraschall Festival

Friday, January 24th, 2014

By Rebecca Schmid Duos—both literal and metaphoric—are the official theme for this year’s Ultraschall Festival for New Music, taking place in Berlin until Jan.31. The event, hosted by the city’s two main classical radio stations, Kulturradio rbb and Deutschlandradio Kultur, is better known for its wide range of offerings than its tight programming. But the […]

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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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Rocky Seas, a Waltz and a Violin Concerto

Friday, October 26th, 2012

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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