Musical America Blogs

By ANDREW POWELL Published: September 23, 2015 MUNICH — Post is under revision. Still image from video © Bayerische Staatsoper Related posts: Nitrates In the Canapés Muti the Publisher Honeck Honors Strauss Kušej Saps Verdi’s Forza Time for Schwetzingen

By ANDREW POWELL Published: July 24, 2015 MUNICH — Bavarian State Opera has confirmed by phone it will announce a contract extension for Kirill Petrenko before the start of next season, in September. With the month of August being a house holiday, the news could come as early as next week when the company’s annual […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 29, 2015 MUNICH — Noisy and sustained boos fell upon stage director Christiane Pohle and her team after Pelléas et Mélisande last night here in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater. Though not uncommon in this epoch of Regietheater, the intensity of the scorn for Bavarian State Opera’s new production was alarming coming from […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 26, 2015 MUNICH — It would probably be asking too much for Yannick Nézet-Séguin to stand still while conducting. He likes to throw himself around, as if anything less might diminish the enthusiasm he intends to convey or deprive his musicians of essential signals. Mostly it works. He is after […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 25, 2015 MUNICH — 2014–15 has been a rough transitional season for the Munich Philharmonic. Lorin Maazel’s sudden resignation a year ago forced its managers into much recasting, and some feeble programs. Then, midseason, came worse news. An irksome pact between Munich’s Bürgermeister Dieter Reiter and Bavaria’s Minister-Präsident Horst Seehofer […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 6, 2015 MUNICH — After the genetic mismatch of Kirill Petrenko and Gaetano Donizetti here, it was a relief to watch the conductor easily navigate and ignite the tone rows of Lulu last week (May 25 and 29) at the National Theater. Happily he did so using Cerha’s reconstitution of […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 29, 2015 MUNICH — Tomorrow, a year behind schedule but 70 years to the day since Munich fell to the Allies, a six-story-high, slatted white cube opens for visitors here: the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, or NS-Dokumentations-Zentrum. Significantly, it stands directly on the site of the […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 26, 2015 MUNICH — He will always be attached to Rossini, but Michele Mariotti, 36, can probe and illuminate a vast repertory besides. This much was evident March 23 in a refreshing return engagement with the Münchner Symphoniker. The Pesaro-born maestro’s podium technique and constructive manner recall another Rossinian, the […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 16, 2015 MUNICH — Ivo Pogorelich wants to continue to play. He has recital programs planned out till 2020. He keeps several concertos in his repertory, the Chopin F-Minor and Prokofiev Third performed here persuasively in recent seasons. He is “pleased,” he writes, about a new box of his old […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 13, 2015 MUNICH — This morning the Munich Philharmonic detailed the rehearsal hours put in by Valery Gergiev for a Stravinsky program here in December 2013. They totaled 14¼, a lavish allocation by the heavily branded maestro given his skimpy work in Poland and Russia the same week, to wit: […]