Posts Tagged ‘Review’

Houston Has No Problem

Tuesday, March 20th, 2018

Andrés Orozco Estrada and the Houston Symphony Orchestra at work in Jones Hall

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: March 20, 2018

MUNICH — Judging from reports around the country here, the Houston Symphony Orchestra today returns to Texas mission-accomplished. The clarity of its tone colors, the exuberance of its brass section, the articulate luster of its strings — all have been remarked upon during an eleven-day tour to busy German cities (plus Brussels, Vienna and Warsaw) already awash in art music. Last night’s concert in the Gasteig certified the plaudits, although the advance acclaim had not filled every seat. Stronger programming might have helped. Music director Andrés Orozco Estrada opened with the so-called Overture to West Side Story (1956), “a compilation of tunes not made by [Bernstein]” (Jack Gottlieb), when he could have chosen the work’s tense and authentic Prologue and thrown a cleverer light on his musicians. A heavily pregnant Hilary Hahn then meandered in good taste and with pure intonation through the same composer’s conceited Serenade after Plato’s Symposium (1954), unable to do much about its weak structure but sensitively supported by harpist Megan Conley and six astute percussionists. Dvořák’s D-Minor Seventh Symphony (1885) received a brilliantly flowing, sunny performance, with smooth work from the Houston horns and much soft, detailed playing. The Vienna-based, Colombian-Austrian maestro, who learned music at a school next to the rainforest east of Medellín, and first conducted there, will be with the 105-year-old HSO until at least 2022. An ideal appointment, on the evidence.

Photo © Anthony Rathbun

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Tuesday, February 27th, 2018

La Favorite at Bavarian State Opera in Munich

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: February 27, 2018

MUNICH — Sometimes the revival has the better cast. So it was for La Favorite at Bavarian State Opera on Sunday, when Giacomo Sagripanti, Clémentine Margaine and Ludovic Tézier made more sense of the music than their counterparts in the 2016 production’s first run (a Deutsche Grammophon DVD) — conductor Sagripanti instilling new urgency and sweep, Margaine singing magnificently as Léonor, Tézier’s Alphonse resonant and incisive. Matthew Polenzani and Mika Kares reprised their monastic duties as Fernand and Balthazar, Kares with impressive control of line. Much applause. It was, though, a night to listen rather than look because Amélie Niermeyer’s morally confused, for-the-camera staging serves neither the historical characters nor Donizetti’s.

Photo © Wilfried Hösl

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Jansons Turns 75

Friday, January 12th, 2018

Mariss Jansons and Martin Angerer in rehearsal in Munich’s Gasteig in January 2018

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: January 12, 2018

MUNICH — Against the medical odds, perhaps, Mariss Jansons turns seventy-five on Sunday, still adored by his favorite orchestra. Bavarian Broadcasting marks the occasion with a 44-minute video portrait, Im Zeichen der Musik, or In the Music’s Character, freely watchable. Last evening here at the Gasteig, a subscription concert of the Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks paraded contrasting sides of the musicians’ long union with Jansons, and everyone’s versatility. Martin Angerer navigated the elegant byways and tricky trills of Hummel’s Concerto a trombe principale (1803) with apparent ease in its original key of E, tidily accompanied. In an interview, the section principal distinguished this “godly” tonality from the “mundane” feel of E-flat, taken often in a convenience edition of the Hummel he deems a “stab in the heart,” but he stopped short of chancing the performance with the kind of Klappen-Trompete used originally, preferring the luxuries of a modern American piston instrument. (Soloist and conductor are pictured midweek.) Genia Kühmeier, Gerhild Romberger, Maximilian Schmitt and Luca Pisaroni made an impeccable quartet for the program’s main work, after the break, Beethoven’s C-Major Mass (1807), although the bass for some reason sang half-voice. The BR Chor glowingly intoned its lines yet struggled to focus the words in the acoustically poor venue. Jansons led supportively but as always from the ground up, never from the bowels of the Earth, and showing no inquirer’s zeal for the imaginative score. His clinical manner and the Bavarian players’ skill found their most persuasive outlet in an episodic exercise in chromatic unrest at the top of the evening: the Symphony in Three Movements (1945) of Stravinsky. Here, structure reigned, details sparkled, and the con moto third movement sounded (suitably) die-cast. It was in 2003 that this celebrated partnership began, since when the demanding and fussy but personable Latvian maestro’s contract has been renewed with accelerating commitment: for three years in 2013, and for three more years less than two years later — right after he sounded receptive to a theoretical, but as it turned out imagined, offer in Berlin. Which takes us up to 2021, past several happy birthday returns.

Photo © Bayerischer Rundfunk

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Fall Discs

Sunday, November 26th, 2017

Recommended CDs and DVDs

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 26, 2017

MUNICH — Post is under revision.

Photos © Arthaus, BelAir Classiques, Querstand, Supraphon, Warner Classics

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Gärtnerplatztheater Reopens

Saturday, November 4th, 2017

Die lustige Witwe at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich in October 2017

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 4, 2017

MUNICH — With a shrill, pretty Hanna, a shriller, pretty Valencienne, a Camille of uneven tone, but a tight, fluent chorus and much charming orchestral work, Die lustige Witwe ended six years of darkness at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz Oct. 19. This city’s second opera company, of the same name, had been homeless all that time while painfully slow laborers spiffed up the 1,000-seat venue’s front-of-house and essentially rebuilt its backstage.

Both of the bosses were on duty for the return: Anthony Bramall, the company’s new Chefdirigent, buoyant of rhythm and propulsive in Lehár’s 1905 score; and Josef Köpplinger, the Staatstheater’s Intendant, who took it upon himself to stage Victor Léon and Leo Stein’s bubbly book within a tragic frame, adding a dark-angel mime (Adam Cooper) to lace the action and sustain his “concept” as if unaware that living without anxiety had been the authors’ message.

Pontevedro’s assets had been secure from the start in Danilo’s love for Hanna, but the alliance of Bramall and Köpplinger going forward could prove far from secure. For Gärtnerplatz remains all about the “show,” not so much the singing, just as before the years of closure. The embassy, the garden, the animated pavilion, the “Maxim’s” theme-party in Hanna’s ballroom looked terrific, while only Daniel Prohaska’s nuanced Danilo, of the principals, sounded worthy.

Photo © Marie-Laure Briane

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Magelone-Romanzen on Disc

Monday, October 16th, 2017

Brahms, Tieck, Gerhaher, Huber and Walser

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: October 16, 2017

MUNICH — Sony has released a remarkable recording of Brahms’s Magelone-Romanzen, Op. 33, complete with Zwischentexte prepared by German author Martin Walser. Christian Gerhaher sings the fifteen songs and recites two of the other three poems (the 1st, 16th and 17th) from Ludwig Tieck’s 1797 narrative not set to music. Walser, 87 at the time of the recording, reads his own choice of eloquent, plain words, condensing Tieck’s eighteen-section prose while still advancing the tale and earmarking each song, as Brahms would have expected. Between the two of them, the German language has never sounded more beautiful. Gerold Huber accompanies. Sessions stretched over five days, at Bayerischer Rundfunk here, an indication of the care taken. This 93-minute, 2-CD release, with booklet essay and Romanze texts in German only, has EAN 088985 3110223 and ASIN B01NA7L2AN and must be distinguished from the widely reviewed single-disc issue omitting Walser’s work. Essential listening.

Images © StadtMuseum Bonn, 1865 wood engraving after a drawing (Brahms); 1838 oil on canvas by Joseph Karl Stieler (Tieck); Gregor Hohenberg (Gerhaher); Marion Koell (Huber); Philippe Matsas (Walser)

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Two Quartets for Mendelssohn

Monday, October 16th, 2017

August Everding Saal in Grünwald, south of Munich

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: October 16, 2017

GRÜNWALD — In mixing-bowl terms, Berlin’s Armida Quartett and Paris’s Quatuor Modigliani combined rather than blended in a standing-room-only concert Oct. 11 here at the August Everding Saal. That is as required for some recipes, possibly including Mendelssohn’s E-flat String Octet (1825), which received a convulsive, unnuanced performance that seemed to want to come apart in loud, fragmentary gestures, pleasing the crowd anyway. More enlightening were the program’s two other half-hour works, before the break: the Mozart String Quintet in G Minor, K516 (1787), staffed by the Modigliani, and Brahms’s B-flat String Sextet, Opus 18 (1860), centered on the Armida, with the violas and fine Modigliani cellist François Kieffer doing triple duty. The French group, now in its fourteenth year, had the tighter, more reserved ensemble and sound, suiting the Mozart; the German quartet, new in 2006 and adept at winning prizes, offered more character (violist Teresa Schwamm), resonance (cellist Peter-Philipp Staemmler on a larger instrument than Kieffer’s 1706 Goffriller) and visceral abandon (first violin Martin Funda), enhancing the Brahms. Not that anyone was competing. The sextet flowed with boldness and conviction, opulent tones throughout, a warm, lyrical traversal, swept along by Funda. The cellists delighted in each other’s timbral contrasts. In the Mozart, a precise rapport among the Modigliani musicians produced intriguing balances, with Schwamm adding gradated charm. But here, as in the concluding Mendelssohn, Amaury Coeytaux’s pacing and deft fingerwork drew attention. He is the Modigliani’s new first violin: at 33 the only man on stage with a pot belly, and apparently traveling without a hairbrush. (Coeytaux joined ten months ago, in time to lead the group’s probing, pliant survey of the Schumann quartets recorded by Mirare at Evian in April. Although written together in 1842, the three Opus 41 pieces go their separate ways in terms of form and even style, something conveyed with discernment on the 79-minute disc.) Gemeinde Grünwald itself presented the concert. This leafy little city on Munich’s southern fringe, home to Bavaria Film and once home to Carlos Kleiber as well as stage director Everding, boasts a median personal income of U.S. $147,000, as compared to $64,000 for Landkreis München and $45,000 statewide. Enough for the fanciest mixing bowls.

Photo © Richie Müller

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Levit Plays Elmau

Tuesday, September 19th, 2017

Schloss Elmau and the Wetterstein Mountains in Bavaria

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 19, 2017

ELMAU — His website left the program as vague as “Beethoven and Shostakovich” right up until the recital, but Igor Levit knew exactly what he wanted to do Aug. 14 in the timber-framed auditorium of this isolated castle-spa below the Wettersteinwand. An aural onslaught was in the offing. The pianist would deny the Waldstein Sonata (1803) all stylistic context and push every limit in nine prelude-fugue pairs from the Russian composer’s Opus 87 (1951), written for Nikolayeva.

Beethoven’s Allegro con brio emerged frenzied, indeed cacophonous. His slow movement sprawled unworkably. The Rondo’s opening melody had poise, but much passagework was rushed or inarticulate — this from an artist promoted by Sony Classical for his grasp of Beethoven’s universe. Then came the preludes and fugues (Nos. 1, 4, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 18 and 24), and somehow they stood up, proving craggy and caustic, mordant and merry. Their varying structures and challenges palpably engaged Levit, even if he did use the scores. He telegraphed affection in No. 1 (C Major), brought clarity and imagination to No. 10 (C-sharp Minor), mustered a macabre, sustained tension for No. 14 (E-flat Minor). He savored contrasts throughout yet reveled in density, for instance in the heavy-handed double fugue of No. 4 (E Minor) or in the mad emphases of No. 15 (D-flat Major). Neatly delineated counterpoint was in short supply, however, as was poetry.

Recitals and readings have been a central pursuit at Schloss Elmau since theologian Johannes Müller established the German retreat a century ago. Performances typically end the day for overnighters drawn by the mountains, forests, sports, treatments and “five-asterisk” dining. Tickets are made available as well to residents of villages within a certain distance. The memorable open-arms image of Bundeskanzlerin Merkel and President Obama derives from a G7 Summit here.

Photo © Schloss-Elmau GmbH

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Netrebko, Barcellona in Aida

Wednesday, August 30th, 2017

Aida at Salzburg Festival 2017

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 30, 2017

SALZBURG — Qualitative upticks at the main festival here have heralded Markus Hinterhäuser’s installment as Intendant after a shaky two-summer void. The priority, it appears, is music itself over theater or opera, as might be expected from a boss who is also a professional pianist. Hinterhäuser is retaining the Ouverture spirituelle, a costly 2012 innovation of predecessor Alexander Pereira that ensures a big window for sacred music, and he is returning strength to the chamber-music slate. In a newly staged Aida and a fresh take on La clemenza di Tito this month, the pleasures were musical alone.

Riccardo Muti prepared and led the Verdi, heard at the Großes Festspielhaus fortuitously on Aug. 16 when Anna Netrebko and Daniela Barcellona faced off as the princesses — graduates of Donizetti and Rossini, respectively, and both rich of tone, secure, unstinting, and able to wield the Italian text to exact expressive purpose, generating sequences of actual drama.

One such occurred in the first scene. Barcellona’s Amneris hurled out the imperative Ritorna vincitor! with enough power and point to spin all of Act I around these two words. Muti’s forces — the Vienna State Opera Chorus and the Vienna Philharmonic — emblazoned the mandate with thunderous intensity, leaving Netrebko’s Aida to wanly echo it not as some affront, as many do, but as reason to fear. Her scena rose naturally from the thought, shaped with clear words, dark rumination, ravishing high notes, wondrous floats — this was a steadier performance than for the Aug. 12 video-stream — culminating in a Numi, pietà that would have melted the heart of the stoniest deity, before she promptly vanished, ovationless, as Verdi instructs.

Barcellona’s own brilliant highs and roundness of sound in the middle octave produced exciting duets and ensemble work. A tall actress, she regally commanded her scenes yet managed to convey vulnerability, and in Act IV she slid poignantly from bitterness to remorse — a woman, never the fire-eater — so that the dwindling string parts seemed to trace her fate as much as those of Aida and Radamès, closing the opera perfectly.

Probably the credit belonged with Muti for that last feat, and certainly the sensitive legato in Francesco Meli’s work as Radamès suggested keen preparation, an improvement on his Manrico here two summers ago (when Gianandrea Noseda conducted). Meli sounded best after Act I, his heady metallic timbre acquiring plushness as the action progressed, but he sang with elegance of line all through.

Luca Salsi exuded fatherly authority as Amonasro, sustaining long phrases on a single breath. Dmitry Belosselsky summoned requisite thrust for Ramfis, a stern but precise capo dei sacerdoti, aptly gruff of tone. Most impressive of all, measure for measure, was the true Italian basso of Roberto Tagliavini singing the Rè d’Egitto. Tall like his Amneris, he projected clarion words and mellifluous, weighty tones, apparently without the slightest effort.

After Netrebko’s plea and the brief scene investing Radamès for war — that is, after Act I — the maestro from Molfetta took a full intermission. He had paced this unit of the opera slowly on the whole, at 44 minutes, but had built into it latent strengths, enforcing piani and saying something new with each measure, even in the chanting and dancing, so that Nume, custode e vindice packed more punch than usual and the act could fully balance, not just precede, the one following. An intermission for combat felt only logical.

Out in the lobby, by Café Tomaselli’s (welcome) ice-cream cart, a none-too-sanguine-looking Mariss Jansons engaged in animated chat. The whole crowd in fact seemed stirred if not shaken by the rancor in Memphis. But Aida reverts to human dimensions the moment it has proclaimed its context, and Muti in the next scene elicited the lightest, most mercurial textures for the attendants’ and slaves’ music, choral and orchestral, as if tracing the thoughts of Amneris — leaving Barcellona to gamely play these out on Netrebko.

The conductor supported his singers’ breathing throughout, tending to encourage beauty of phrase and expression. He executed pristine shifts of tempo, tending to inject urgency and sharpen contrasts. He remembered to dance: to honor rhythmic impulses on the instant and ripely characterize them. Best of all, he erred on the side of dynamic restraint, permitting but never urging high decibels.

So this was an Aida on the composer’s terms, nowhere more virtuosic than in its second Thebes scene. Muti finely shaded the women’s and priests’ interludes in the opening Gloria all’Egitto e ad Iside. In the marcia trionfale, what looked like the meter-long, straight, single-rotary-valve C trumpets Karajan used — in place of Verdi’s trombe egiziane in A-flat and B-natural — rang out with immaculate intonation and thrilling antiphony across the gaping stage. The ballabile had infectious rhythm. Salsi’s smooth, obsequious Ma tu, Rè, tu signore possente offset neatly Tagliavini’s grand edicts. The tutti after the priests’ rejection of clemency made its ominous impact, and the Finale’s last section unfolded with tautness.

Each time he entered the pit Muti magnetized attention, and when he trod out it was with the bearing of a mortician, as people roared approval in vanity-stroking counterpoint. But he properly took the remaining three scenes without a formal break, returning in Act III to the stately speeds of the opera’s first two scenes. Netrebko rose to the stipulated dolce high C to conclude O patria mia after conveying that aria’s sense of reflection with exquisite tones, and she and Meli blended tidily for O terra, addio. Barcellona dominated Scene I of Act IV before injecting genuine grief at the close, as noted, to cap a proud Salzburg Festival stage* debut.

Italians in four of the lead roles in this hard-to-cast opera; expert choristers (aided by their confinement to the staging’s Brutalist box structures and by stage-direction prescribing little movement); and Vienna’s orchestra playing with more abandon than for opening night (Aug. 6, as broadcast by BR Klassik) or the video-stream — negating impressions of a musically stilted, dramatically aloof presentation, though these had borne out Muti’s 38-year hiatus from the score and the hiring of a stage director who is really a photographer — reinforced the belief that Salzburg is the one place where ingredients of such quality can come together.

Teodor Currentzis led a vigorous, aurally colorful, not especially elegant traversal of Mozart’s Roman opera Aug. 17 in the Felsenreitschule, with tight support from the Choir and Orchestra MusicAeterna of Perm Opera, or, more precisely, the Choir and Orchestra of Teodor Currentzis. His cast toiled diligently. Golden-toned Golda Schultz acted credibly but sounded overparted as Vitellia in this venue. Marianne Crebassa made a compelling but hyperactive Sesto, not especially sumptuous of voice. She was much cheered after Parto, parto, ma tu ben mio, for the obbligato to which Perm’s clarinetist slunk around her on stage. Reprising a title role he sang at the Met five years ago, Russell Thomas projected his voice with focus and musical authority. The smaller roles of Annio (Jeanine de Bique), Servilia (Christina Gansch) and Publio (Willard White) were adequately sung. At curtain, Currentzis drew wild, really quite bizarre applause, louder than for any cast member.

Neither of the two stagings will be much welcomed going forward. Shirin Neshat’s scheme for Aida, another essay in lens-obedient, firm, gray surfaces that bathe in any light and reflect any color but take us nowhere, features stiff, contrived action hampered and dwarfed by the box structures. Our engagement hinges on costumes, lighting, and initiatives by the singing actors. And Salzburg’s safety curtain more closely evokes Pharaonic Egypt than the commissioned sets. Peter Sellars’ realization of Tito, conversely, has too much fluidity and parades a number of old clichés, many of them Sellars’ own. The idea of intravenous infusions for a bedridden emperor proves especially irksome.

[*She and Netrebko sang I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the festival in 2004 under Ivor Bolton, but in concert. Her career is evolving. October, for instance, brings Schumann and Brahms songs at La Scala.]

Photos © Monika Rittershaus (set; Meli with Netrebko), Marco Borrelli (Barcellona; Barcellona with Netrebko), Franz Neumayr (Muti and Netrebko at curtain call)

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Saturday, July 29th, 2017

BRSO premieres Mark Andre’s whence … whither in the Herkulessaal

By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 29, 2017

MUNICH — Not every week does the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra devote a whole program to music written since 2000. Guest conductor Matthias Pintscher’s concert July 7 in the Herkulessaal proved an exception. It began spatially, extravagantly, with his own fantasy With Lilies White (2002); progressed to a nuanced new Mark Andre work in need of an edit; and concluded, feebly it must be said, with pieces by György Kurtág and Jonathan Harvey. Along the way, the orchestra’s precision, enthusiasm, and seemingly instinctive care with color and balances brought rewards. The 20-minute fantasy, written for Cleveland and scored for orchestra with voices, sets wholly unrelated texts by Edward Paston and Derek Jarman, makes chitchat in soft percussive would-be quadrophony, and fuses stylistic gestures of the Renaissance and Baroque. If it never quite makes its point, it at least achieves handsome self-sufficiency. Vinzenz Löffel, soloist of the Augsburger Domsingknaben, and sopranos Sarah Aristidou, Anna-Maria Palii and Sheva Tehoval etched the vocal lines with varying degrees of steadiness at probably too much volume. The longer, BRSO-commissioned whence … whither (2016) charts the touch and direction of a barely audible wind, an element of Christian faith for Andre, Marc André. Strings and percussion of a large orchestra used with remarkable restraint trace sound-shadows that are broken up by abrupt or gradual, hard or soft, events to yield an intriguing sense of physical movement, crucially free of horror-movie cliché. Even the whirling bows, or Schwirrbögen, fit in snugly. The first four of Andre’s seven movements, called “sections,” present a balance of ideas and might well have made a complete work — the third rises loudly, as it were violently, at its close; the fourth hints at resolution — but the composer pushes on, stirred by the spiritual number seven, alas with duller material until a lively yet in context less innovative final section. Kurtág conveys nothing so much as desolation in his seven-minute Petite musique solennelle (2015), a harmonically cautious exercise in sour chord-clusters. Clangor at the midpoint comprises one statement of a permeating four-note figure. Brooding horns, soft trumpet lines of some grace, and reticent percussive utterances go precisely nowhere. Harvey’s … towards a Pure Land (2005) places a string group “peacefully behind the sound” of the main orchestra, endowed with innumerable percussion instruments, and proceeds to describe in sixteen minutes an active but chronically pallid arc whose center of “insubstantial pitch” is, as in the Kurtág, and in the composer’s words, “an emptiness.” There, presumably, lies the Pure Land, “a state of mind beyond suffering … revealing the meaning of Dharma,” not in the surrounding music, with its fluid, ungraspable ideas. Pintscher and BR’s players nimbly negotiated all exercises.

Photo © Bayerischer Rundfunk

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