Musical America Blogs

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 […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: September 23, 2015 MUNICH — Post is under revision. Still image from video © Bayerische Staatsoper Related posts: Nitrates In the Canapés Muti the Publisher Honeck Honors Strauss Kušej Saps Verdi’s Forza Time for Schwetzingen

By ANDREW POWELL Published: August 27, 2015 SALZBURG — Two beggars sat on either side of the entrance to the Haus für Mozart Aug. 6 as attendees arrived for Norma. As if this was not alarming enough — and it disturbed one’s thoughts more than the tense Résistance staging of Bellini’s opera inside — another […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: July 24, 2015 MUNICH — Bavarian State Opera has confirmed by phone it will announce a contract extension for Kirill Petrenko before the start of next season, in September. With the month of August being a house holiday, the news could come as early as next week when the company’s annual […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: June 29, 2015 MUNICH — Noisy and sustained boos fell upon stage director Christiane Pohle and her team after Pelléas et Mélisande last night here in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater. Though not uncommon in this epoch of Regietheater, the intensity of the scorn for Bavarian State Opera’s new production was alarming coming from […]

By ANDREW POWELL Republished: May 4, 2015 MUNICH — Word around town has it that Christian Thielemann holds the biggest committed block of votes heading into next Monday’s Berlin Philharmonic election. The rest, so the scuttlebutt goes, divide widely, in part reflecting the musicians’ open-nomination process. That this Chefdirigent transition is much discussed up here […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 29, 2015 MUNICH — Tomorrow, a year behind schedule but 70 years to the day since Munich fell to the Allies, a six-story-high, slatted white cube opens for visitors here: the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, or NS-Dokumentations-Zentrum. Significantly, it stands directly on the site of the […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 17, 2015 MUNICH — Although no news release hailed its arrival, a revamped website was launched today for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. It is faster, navigationally flatter, and better geared to mobile platforms than the old pages, criticized here. To enable the advance, domains have been set up liberating […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 13, 2015 MUNICH — This morning the Munich Philharmonic detailed the rehearsal hours put in by Valery Gergiev for a Stravinsky program here in December 2013. They totaled 14¼, a lavish allocation by the heavily branded maestro given his skimpy work in Poland and Russia the same week, to wit: […]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 24, 2015 MUNICH — Fourteen months ago irate journalists confronted Valery Gergiev at a news conference here amid his preparations for a Stravinsky program with the Munich Philharmonic. The confrontation wasn’t over music, rather politics, but it did lead to questions for the orchestra’s management about his hours and pay, […]