By ANDREW POWELL Published: July 29, 2017 PASSAU — What more heavenly way to mark your 90th birthday than conducting a favorite symphony in four cathedrals on four successive nights, and with an orchestra that adores you? This, at least, was Herbert Blomstedt’s thinking, amenably realized by the Bamberger Symphoniker — in Bamberg’s Dom St […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: July 4, 2017 OBERAMMERGAU — Amplification makes it possible; amplification limits the achievement. That is the dilemma for opera in this neat Bavarian town’s Passionstheater (1930), built to service a post-plague pledge made 384 years ago. Raked seating in the barn-like house confronts a fixed templar structure on a stage open […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 3, 2017 SALZBURG — When artistic control of the Whitsun Festival here moved to Cecilia Bartoli nearly six years ago, its programming changed from a steady focus on one period and place (18th-century Napoli) to shifting annual themes. First there was “Cleopatra.” Next came the idea of “sacrifice.” Then the […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: May 19, 2017 RAVENNA — Sometimes a musician just needs a good partner. Cellist Alban Gerhardt and pianist Steven Osborne work magically together but have a habit of starting their recitals apart, as if to establish credentials. So it was April 11 here at the Teatro Alighieri, home of the Ravenna […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 30, 2017 FERRARA — Lanky Teodor Currentzis looms over his MusicAeterna players the way Basil Fawlty loomed over Manuel, and with comparable gestures. It is anyone’s guess how their 13-year relationship has survived, what with labor conditions in Russia, the quirks of period-instrument practice, their joint move from Novosibirsk (in […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 25, 2017 BOLOGNA — Teatro Comunale’s busy direttore musicale Michele Mariotti, 38, ventured his 33rd and 34th operas* this month with a foray in verismo, the terse tribulations of Cavalleria rusticana, and, incongruously, La voix humaine, a vehicle for the Bologna-schooled soprano, former mezzo, Anna Caterina Antonacci. He chose big […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 24, 2017 MUNICH — It was a short courtship by recent standards. Dalmatian conductor Ivan Repušić (pr. REP-oosh-itch), 39, debuted with the Münchner Rundfunk-Orchester in a concert La rondine in Oct. 2015, returned for a gala two months later and signed his contract* last June. His background, happily, is stable: […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 9, 2017 MUNICH — Making a taut and impassioned case for Mahler’s Tenth Symphony (1910) here at the Herkulessaal Feb. 17, Yannick Nézet-Séguin still rather confirmed Leonard Bernstein’s dictum that the composer “had said it all in the Ninth.” Mahler’s inspiration sustained itself, as tidily executed by the Symphonie-Orchester des […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 4, 2017 ZURICH — The goal presumably was to freshen the tale of Jason and his cooperative wife Medea as told by Thomas Corneille (filtering his brother Pierre and Euripides) and mise en musique by Charpentier. But stage director Andreas Homoki’s new Médée (1693) for Opernhaus Zürich, where he doubles […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 24, 2017 SALZBURG — The gimmicky proposition of Mozart’s Requiem enhanced with equine ballet dominated this year’s Mozartwoche schedule, and no doubt budget. It capped, in a way, five iterations of the festival lavishly managed by Marc Minkowski and his front-office counterpart Matthias Schulz, and it brought in for the […]
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