Musical America Blogs

By ANDREW POWELL Published: August 7, 2016 MUNICH — Two evenings after an “Allahu Akbar” eruption here cost nine mostly teenage, mostly Muslim, lives, it felt perverse to indulge in 280-year-old French escapism stretching to Turkey, Peru, Iran and the future United States. But there we were July 24 in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater for Bavarian State […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 18, 2016 MUNICH — It would be a novelty to hear Le vin herbé the way composer Frank Martin conceived it. The 1940 secular chamber oratorio reportedly soars when realized in concert by twelve French-singing voices, double string trio, double bass and piano — its lean forces yet complex harmony […]

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: 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 24, 2014 MUNICH — Few conductors can jump into a Berg-Zemlinsky-Honegger program on three days’ notice and lead it fluently without change. Enter Clement Power (33), a gray-haired Londoner, for the Münchener Kammerorchester’s March 13 subscription concert here at the Prinz-Regenten-Theater. The newcomer showed an easy rapport with the players […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: December 22, 2013 MUNICH — Somewhere between the patent introspection of his new Mompou CD* and the tags of his early Stateside career — “big bravura pianist,” “new Horowitz” — lies an accurate description of Arcadi Volodos. It may simply be this: German Romantic, as in Schumann and Brahms, with impressionist […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 2, 2013 MUNICH — Can music be sincere and ironic at the same time? Ask Peter Dijkstra, the artistic leader of the BR Chor who last weekend (Oct. 26) led Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle as billed. Solemnly. The result sounded not much like Rossini. Nobody smiled, and the musicians looked […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: August 24, 2013 MUNICH — What is written on skin? Craftsmanship “as immaculate as anything … composed since the heyday of Ravel” and “glimpses of a 21st-century tonality,” if you read Alex Ross in The New Yorker. And “a psychologically gripping, emotionally heart-pounding and viscerally satisfying drama,” according to Corinna da […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: July 9, 2013 MUNICH — With the brightness of his voice working against him at every turn, Pavol Breslik blazed and sweated his way through Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin last Friday (July 5) here at the Prinz-Regenten-Theater. By the end, drowned in Wilhelm Müller’s creek, he had somehow won over the […]