Posts Tagged ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’

Two Quartets for Mendelssohn

Monday, October 16th, 2017

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 […]

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Carmen Dives In at Bregenz

Saturday, September 23rd, 2017

By ANDREW POWELL Published: September 23, 2017 BREGENZ — Post is under revision. Photos © Bregenzer Festspiele Related posts: Nitrates In the Canapés Harteros Warms to Tosca Nézet-Séguin: Hit, Miss On Wenlock Edge with MPhil Wagner, Duke of Erl

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Netrebko, Barcellona in Aida

Wednesday, August 30th, 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 […]

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All Eyes On the Maestro

Sunday, April 30th, 2017

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 […]

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Horses for Mozartwoche

Friday, February 24th, 2017

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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Flitting Thru Prokofiev

Wednesday, November 30th, 2016

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 30, 2016 MUNICH — As fluent as Valery Gergiev is in Prokofiev, he had precious little to say with a cycle of the symphonies here this month. Fluency meant wise tempos, a feel for the boldness in the scores’ structures, a facility in cuing the two orchestras on duty. It […]

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Mozartwoche: January’s Peace

Monday, February 15th, 2016

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 15, 2016 SALZBURG — There is a pleasure in arriving in Salzburg with snow on the ground. Or maybe the word is reassurance: the city will be real, not a theme park; the people mostly locals, despite the hollowing out of property ownership here; the profile quiet, even intimate, affording […]

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Maestro, 62, Outruns Players

Sunday, November 22nd, 2015

By ANDREW POWELL Published: November 22, 2015 MUNICH — At five o’clock last Sunday afternoon, Munich time, three Mariinsky Orchestras began to play. Two of them launched into Pikovaya dama and Die Zauberflöte at the Mariinsky complex in St Petersburg. The third, here at the Gasteig, opened the accompaniment to a witty Shchedrin vocalise. Such […]

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Mariotti North of the Alps

Sunday, April 26th, 2015

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 […]

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Winter Discs

Tuesday, March 31st, 2015

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 31, 2015 MUNICH — Arts projects in Europe with any visual aspect to them nowadays migrate to DVD whether or not there is a need, partly to justify public subsidy through distribution. Many are operas filmed too often, like Nationaltheater Mannheim’s just-released Der Ring des Nibelungen, which joins DVD tetralogies […]

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