Musical America Blogs

By: Frank Cadenhead Where is Stephen Colbert when you need him? He certainly could do a comedy routine about the train wreck that is the opening of the musical season in Paris this year. The goofiness of multiple openings of world-class events on the same day would get lots of laughs. In his absence I […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 31, 2014 SALZBURG — Alexander Pereira is now gone from the main festival here, and two tenuous summers are in the offing before Markus Hinterhäuser replaces him as Intendant in 2017. His exit, under a cloud, ends a budget tempest but threatens reversals of worthy initiatives he took: lengthening the […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 21, 2014 SCHWETZINGEN — The right setting makes all the difference. At the palace here, a probing six-week spring music festival mirrors the scale and serenity of its context, courtesy each year of Stuttgart broadcaster SWR. Two days last month afforded a sampling of the extended activities: the melodic Arcadian […]

By Rebecca Schmid Richard Strauss was a man of many masks, from his intimate piano songs to the demonic outpourings of his stage works and tone poems. Following a semi-staging of his second opera, Feuersnot, in Dresden, where it premiered in 1901, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig came to the Saxon capital on June 9 to stake […]

By Rebecca Schmid Classical music historiography of the 20th century tends to create neatly delineated periods, with World War Two creating a kind of indelible caesura in all things aesthetic and philosophical. This is particularly true in Germany, where the Nachkriegszeit (post-war period) is defined as a veritable epoch: a time in which the country […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 11, 2014 MUNICH — Watching Manfred Honeck lead the Munich Philharmonic in Strauss last Sunday (April 6), a question came to mind. Why isn’t this the man replacing Lorin Maazel next year? With refreshing conviction and broad arm gestures à la Carlos Kleiber, Honeck drew polished performances from the orchestra […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 7, 2014 MUNICH — Kirill Petrenko unobtrusively passed the litmus test of Der Rosenkavalier here this week, shaping the score on his own terms (March 5) amid the hoopla of his Bavarian State Opera company’s 2014–15 season announcement. Energetic, vivid, not so flexible, often perilously fast or loud, but dynamically […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 22, 2013 MUNICH — Everything looked ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille, at Die Frau ohne Schatten last night (Nov. 21). Down to the last falcon feather. When the cameras roll for a Dec. 1 live stream of this new Bavarian State Opera production, the copious blue-greens, red and purple […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 12, 2013 MUNICH — Some like to tiptoe into a new job. Kirill Petrenko, 41, prefers to plunge. The fresh Generalmusikdirektor at Bavarian State Opera is now deep in rehearsals for his first production here: Strauss’s ambitious, arduous Die Frau ohne Schatten, uncut apparently. Krzysztof Warlikowski directs. Known in Munich […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: October 13, 2013 MUNICH — Next Wednesday (Oct. 16) new portraits go on display in Bavarian State Opera’s lobby. Twenty-one new portraits. Astrid Varnay, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kurt Moll, Brigitte Fassbaender, Lucia Popp, Edita Gruberová, René Kollo, Hildegard Behrens and Waltraud Meier are among the worthy singing subjects, company troopers all. But […]