by Sedgwick Clark NOTE: BEGINNING THIS WEEK, I’LL BE POSTING MY BLOG ON THURSDAYS AT NOON RATHER THAN WEDNESDAYS. At a press luncheon for the Vienna Philharmonic in 1986, I was seated next to cellist Werner Resel, the chairman of the orchestra. We were talking about the unique sound of the VPO, and he remarked [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark NOTE: BEGINNING THIS WEEK, I’LL BE POSTING MY BLOG ON THURSDAYS AT NOON RATHER THAN WEDNESDAYS. Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and its current music director, Mariss Jansons, stopped by Carnegie Hall last week (2/13 and 14) for a pair of concerts to celebrate the ensemble’s 125th anniversary. They were a great success, [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark The Warm European Touch Andris Nelsons is one of the hottest young conductors around. Hailing from Riga, Latvia, he has been music director of the Birmingham Symphony since 2008 and made a splash in March 2011 at Carnegie Hall, substituting on a day’s notice for James Levine in a Boston Symphony performance [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark Daniil Trifonov is a diplomat at the keyboard, not a pounder. We’re so used to powerhouse Russian pianists that the slight young man who bounded onstage Tuesday evening for his Carnegie Hall recital debut and proceeded to caress the keys took at least one listener by surprise. Winner of the prestigious Tchaikovsky [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark A Blu-ray video of Lawrence of Arabia was finally released in November. Collectors have been screaming for it for years, but Columbia Pictures was working on yet another upgrade of this foremost of epic films for its “50th Anniversary Edition.” I ran to Barnes & Noble the first day of its availability (somebody’s got to rearrange those deck chairs before [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark A couple of Musical America’s former Musicians of the Year took a drubbing last week. Rebecca Schmid, MA’s Berlin correspondent, reported on our Web site (1/11) that Simon Rattle (2002) announced he would not renew his Berlin Philharmonic contract as music director in 2018 after 16 years. She wrote that “Rattle’s popularity [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark We were driving bumper to bumper out to the country last Friday and checked out the Met Opera station on Sirius XM. It was about 20 minutes into Wagner’s Die Walküre, and Hunding had just come home from a hard day at the office to discover his lovely wife, Sieglinde, with a [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark My favorite solo piano music is Debussy’s – iridescent, sensual, and, after all these years, mysterious. My first recording of his music was by Charles Rosen performing Images, Books I and II, Estampes, L’Isle joyeuse, and other short pieces on an Epic LP. It had been praised by David Hamilton as “indispensable” [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark April 22, 1972, was American composer Elliott Carter’s night to remember, when 2,800 listeners at Carnegie Hall cheered a stupendous performance of his Variations for Orchestra (1955) by Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony. Solti brought him to the stage and the audience went wild. They were called out by the audience [...]
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by Sedgwick Clark December is a special time for us at Musical America because we have the great pleasure of honoring a group of the finest musicians in the world and introducing the latest issue of our annual Directory. At our Awards party Joy to the World reigns, we forget about our typos, gnashing of [...]
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