Salzburg Wrap-up

Salzburger Festspiele

Ok, this year’s festival was a short one for me. I saw only a couple of performances but some of these were really excellent!
1) Grisey: Les Espaces Acoustiques. I’ve already written about that one on this blog.

Marc Ribot

2) Then there was this other concert from the Kontinent Scelsi series. An evening with the Ensemble [...]

Because once is never enough!

Almost exactly one year after I heard Claus Guth’s Figaro in Salzburg, I had the chance to hear that same production again yesterday (again in the Orchesterhauptprobe). The impression it made on me was even better than last July. It’s a very intelligent staging and the cast consists of truly great singers, amongst them Gerald [...]

Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques in Salzburg

This was an amazing concert. The Basel Sinfonietta under Stefan Asbury and Geneviève Strosser (viola) performed Gérard Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques at the Salzburg Festival. Having thought a lot about an aethetics of spacial music listening I found yesterday’s concert to be a perfect stimulus. It was incredible to hear this piece in its entirety [...]

Nachtseite der Vernunft

Having just returned from a trip to Munich today, I found the new program for the Salzburg Festival 2007 in my mailbox! As you probably all know the festival has a new artistic director (Jürgen Flimm). Since Flimm is a opera/theater person he has put Markus Hinterhäuser in charge for the concert events at the [...]

Musikfest Berlin 06

Berlin is overflowing with classical music: there are three opera houses, seven symphony orchestras, and concert events ad infinitum. But the city seems to be in need of yet another music institution. A new festival, the Musikfest Berlin, was inaugurated last year and although ticket sales seem to go somewhat slowly this year, the Musikfest [...]

Addenda

1) Les grands spectacles II. Just a couple of words on this exhibition at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg. After yesterday’s boring display of traditional stage setting, it was refreshing, fascinating, and shocking (in the cases of Hermann Nitsch and Christoph Schlingensief) to learn more about the history of stage design. The exhibition that [...]

Mozart: La Finta Giardiniera

This is the second time that I am reporting from the Landestheater in Salzburg. The first post was on Zaide/Adama by Mozart and Czernowin. This time I’ll write about the premiere of Doris Dörrie’s staging of Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera. Doris Dörrie is a well-known TV and film director in Germany, who debuted in opera [...]

Premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Gogo No Eiko

Three years ago the Salzburg Festival staged the world premiere of Henze’s L’Upupa und der Triumph der Sohnesliebe, a huge success at the time. It is thus no wonder that today’s performance of Gogo No Eiko drew a lot of media attention. The aging composer himself was present for the concert premiere of the third [...]

Trio Wanderer and Gérard Caussé: Mozart and Schedl

Today at twenty past seven my girlfriend got a call from a festival manager in Salzburg: “Can you be here in 10 minutes to turn pages in a chamber music concert?” She could … and she took me along, too. We had no idea what was on the program, nor did we know who [...]

(5′ -> 3′) ATGGAATTCTCGCTC

Reading the program notes can sometimes be very illuminating. Yesterday, for instance, at the concert of the Ensemble Wien-Berlin and Denes Varjon (piano), I learned something about molecular biology and its application to music. York Höller’s Klangzeichen for piano and wind quintet is a piece based on a Klanggestalt, a melodic structure from which all [...]

The Arditti Quartet plays Kyburz, Dusapin, Ferneyhough, and Lachenmann

One of the many good things about New Music concerts at the venerable Salzburg Festival is that a lot of people who have expensive tickets are leaving in the intermission. This comes in handy when the piece in the second half is Grido by Helmut Lachenmann, a composition that employs a lot of very quite [...]

Premiere of Czernowin’s Zaide - Adama in Salzburg

Somewhere towards the end, there is a short moment of hope. The possibility of forgiveness. The possibility of reconciliation and fraternization. Everything is up in the air. Will Soliman, the despotic ruler of the Serail forgive the lovers Zaide and Gomatz who are desperately in love which each other and try to flee from him? [...]

Post Scriptum Figaro

Here is what the Deutsche Presse Agentur has to say about yesterday’s premiere of Le Nozze di Figaro at the Salzburg Festival. As always the premiere drew a very distinguished and elitist crowd of politicians, stars, artists, and business people. But not only those who were lucky and rich enough to get tickets enjoyed the [...]

Anna Netrebko in Salzburg

Yesterday at the Orchesterhauptprobe (main orchestra rehearsal) for Le Nozze di Figaro at the Salzburg Festival I had the chance to hear, for the first time, the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko. What a big disappointment. It’s not that Netrebko is a bad singer (she is a fairly good one), or that she doesn’t look well [...]