By ANDREW POWELL Published: September 24, 2017 MUNICH — He had to abandon his Munich Philharmonic cycle, a cosmic Fifth being one of its relics, but Christian Thielemann’s Dresden cycle* of the numbered Bruckner symphonies has progressed smoothly to near completion, and with video. Oddly parts of it have been filmed here at the Gasteig […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: May 10, 2016 MUNICH — As if to unify its program of late Beethoven and Schubert last week (May 4) at the Court Church of All Saints, the Arcanto Quartet stressed gloom wherever possible. Playing of intensity and integrity supported this approach, and, to be sure, the Heiliger Dankegesang String Quartet, […]
Read the rest of this article »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 […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: May 17, 2014 MUNICH — Something has happened to Moscow’s Bolshoi Orchestra. Perhaps steady funding? It has lost its old woolly sound, judging from an April 9 Bell’Arte tour stop here at the Gasteig, and found another: a gleaming, uniformly virtuosic persona that commands attention. Vassily Sinaisky, overseer of this transformation, […]
Read the rest of this article »By ANDREW POWELL Published: January 31, 2014 MUNICH — The 11-year-old Arcanto Quartet, heard here last Friday (Jan. 24), is everything a chamber group shouldn’t be for promotional purposes. There are no family ties. Their instruments don’t match. They share no doctrine about period practice. They don’t grind out whole cycles of anyone’s music. Not […]
Read the rest of this article »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 […]
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