ionarts (10 unread)

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  Oundjian with the BSO

  Posted: 25-May-2012, 4:25pm CEST by Charles T. Downey

  Tenor Nicholas PhanAnton Bruckner's setting of the Te Deum, premiered in 1886, needs an ally at the podium to help it win over listeners. The composer's friend and biographer, August Göllerich, recounted a famous anecdote about attending a pretty awful performance of Berlioz's operatic setting of the Te Deum in Vienna with Bruckner. After leaving the performance, in a secular concert hall,

  
  

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  Bach, Death, and Antihistamines

  Posted: 25-May-2012, 11:10am CEST by jfl

  Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 4 ) I am in beautiful Dresden ? birthplace of magnetic tape ? for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-delight, Bach-despair, and Malkovichean divertissement, it was time for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Ian Bostridge to showcase Bach in Dresden?s bombed-out and privately [!], recently

  
  

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  Sex, Lies, and Mozart Arias

  Posted: 24-May-2012, 3:07pm CEST by jfl

  Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 3 ) I am in beautiful Dresden ? birthplace of milk chocolate ? for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-delight and Bach-despair, it was time for something completely different: The Infernal Comedy, Malkovich, Haselböck et al. ArtHaus DVD The Giacomo Variations, Malkovich, Haselböck et al.

  
  

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  Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 2 )

  Posted: 23-May-2012, 3:15pm CEST by jfl

  I am in beautiful Dresden ? birthplace of the toothpaste ? for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Kristian Bezuidenhout?s very attractive Mozart recital on my first night here, I was headed for another concert that had all the makings of an absolute highlight: an all Bach recital on the historic Silbermann organ in Dresden?s Katholische Hofkirche, the

  
  

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  Goldoni at STC

  Posted: 23-May-2012, 7:42am CEST by Charles T. Downey

  Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) had an important influence on the history of comic opera, transferring the broad humor he adapted from the commedia dell'arte tradition to the opera buffa librettos he wrote for Galuppi, Piccinni, Haydn, and others. In his colorful Memoirs, Goldoni wrote about how, in 1743, an offer from Sacchi -- Antonio Sacco, a celebrated Truffaldino in the commedia improvisational

  
  

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  Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 1 )

  Posted: 22-May-2012, 7:30pm CEST by jfl

  I am in beautiful Dresden ? birthplace of the bra ? for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. Embarrassingly, I knew nothing about it until I randomly ran into its head of PR, a Munich acquaintance, at the Barbican last year. Now I am making sweet amends. From May 15th until June 3rd the Festival offers a varied lineup of star attractions (Vienna Philharmonic

  
  

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  American Opera Gets Its Day

  Posted: 22-May-2012, 7:00am CEST by Charles T. Downey

  Charles T. Downey, WNO?s young singers illumine lesser-known American operatic works Washington Post, May 22, 2012 J. Heggie, Dead Man Walking, J. DiDonato, P. Cutlip, F. von Stade, Houston Grand Opera, P. Summers (released on April 24, 2012) Washington National Opera has another promising crop of young singers in its Domingo-Cafritz apprenticeship program. It showed them off Sunday afternoon

  
  

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  Marytrdom of St. Sebastian

  Posted: 21-May-2012, 7:50am CEST by Charles T. Downey

  Charles T. Downey, National Philharmonic performs Debussy?s ?Le martyre de Saint Sebastien? Washington Post, May 21, 2012 Debussy, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, I. Huppert (narrator), Orchestre National de France, Ch?ur de Radio France, D. Gatti It is a shame that Washingtonians had to wait for the sesquicentennial of Claude Debussy?s birth to hear a local concert of the composer?s

  
  

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  In Brief: Missing DFD Edition

  Posted: 20-May-2012, 7:54am CEST by Charles T. Downey

  Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio, online video, and other good things in Blogville and Beyond. The world lost one of the greats, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, on Friday (watch his heart-stopping performance of Schubert's Der Lindenbaum with Alfred Brendel, embedded at right). Yesterday we suggested some of his best recordings. [Ionarts] Watch Jean-Yves Thibaudet with

  
  

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  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925?2012)

  Posted: 19-May-2012, 6:04pm CEST by Charles T. Downey

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, The Great EMI Recordings (11 CDs, $55) Schubert, Lieder, D. Fischer-Dieskau, G. Moore (21 CDs, $60) Brahms, Deutsche Volkslieder, D. Fischer-Dieskau, E. Schwarzkopf, G. Moore (2 CDs, $11) Schumann, Dichterliebe / Liederkreis (op. 39), D. Fischer-Dieskau, A. BrendelIt has been a bad week for fans of vocal music. In the inevitable trend of threes, the deaths of