Thoroughly Modern Jessye
A second Trove Thursday marking the recent passing of Jessye Norman focuses on the soprano’s catholic repertoire with three 20th century works: Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex; Berg’s Altenberg Lieder; and Franck’s Les Béatitudes.
Alban Berg
53 pieces since 2007.
53
pieces
20
years
Revolution blues
The opera proved somewhat puzzling—the score representing more a collage of fragmented and incidental musical ideas, and the libretto a turgid, slow-moving mass of purple prose.
Things to come
On this day in 1977 Alban Berg’s Lulu premiered at the Metropolitan Opera.
Tone police
Sixty years ago today, Berg’s Wozzeck was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
Love of the earth
Claudio Abbado passed away on the 20th of January five years ago, just months before I began my Ph.D.
Brute force
Alban Berg’s compact yet potent oeuvre has long played an outsized role in shaping my understanding of music’s aesthetic evolution.
Overview: Riccardo Chailly
Riccardo Chailly’s appointment as La Scala’s new music director was news that I greeted with enthusiasm when first announced in 2013.
MIsfit
On this day in 1977 Alban Berg‘s Lulu premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in the as-yet incomplete two act version.
We love you, Ms. Hannigan
Could Barbara Hannigan be Joni Mitchell’s classical counterpart?
C’est la chanson des rêveurs qui s’étaient arraché le coeur
Sandrine Piau‘s lovely recital with pianist Susan Manoff at The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society on February 14 entered around the themes of sleep, dreams and waking.
The leggy movie
This Met’s second production of Berg’s 1935 opera was the hot topic of November 2015.
No saints in two acts
The cast of Wiener Staatsoper’s first-ever performance of Lulu in 1968 reads like a Who’s Who of then-contemporary Austro-German opera: the 28-year-old Anja Silja, Martha Mödl, Waldemar Kmentt, Hans Hotter, Hilde Konetzni, Manfred Jungwirth, Heinz Zednik, and Karl Böhm presiding over a production by Otto Schenk.
Je ne suis pas précis ici
If you’ve been following the coverage of the Nézet-Séguin succession, you will note that a good deal of the coverage centers on whether the incoming maestro will “champion” this composer or that.
A fire upon the deep
Returning after 99 years for the Met’s annual New Year’s Eve gala, Bizet’s youthful exercise in Orientalia Les Pêcheurs de Perles proved a real crowd-pleaser.
Cherchez la femme (fatale)
Lilith. Pandora. Circe. Salome. “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Carmen. Brigid O’Shaughnessy: the eternal “femme fatale” still fascinates us.
Hell on wheels
Absent from Chicago Lyric Opera’s repertory for 21 years, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck came roaring into town on Sunday afternoon in a stunning new production by Sir David McVicar.
All mysteries
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith… I am nothing.”
Full of beans
It’s been a bitterly cold winter in NY. When it’s bitterly cold, the air is dry.
The cup runneth over
I am grateful to Sony for this new release
of the Metropolitan Opera’s latest production of Parsifal and I hope I’m not the only one who discovers what a rich experience this opera can be because of it.
Whispers and cries
We were not at Carnegie Hall to hear superb opera singers bestow their vocalism upon Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; we are there to hear the Wiener Staatsoper’s house band work their magic upon an intricate, spooky, devastating score.
Lulu (some)
Daniel Barenboim does not want to conduct Berg’s Lulu. Or so it seems.
Gold digger of 2011
It seems a thing incredible but fifty years ago Richard Strauss was regarded as the wunderkind composer of a few tone poems, three notable operas (all produced before the First World War) and then nothing notable during forty years of repetitious senility. Even Ariadne auf Naxos, today one of the most popular works in the […]
Cloud nein
Although Walter Braunfels was among those German composers whose music was banned in their home country after 1933, and whose political rehabilitiation in 1945 was not accompanied by a commensurate revival of his music, his 1920 opera Die Vögel should need no special pleading on musical or dramatic grounds. Though Braunfels is traditionally described as […]
Worth the wait
Arthaus Musik has released on DVD a superb 1963 “Historical Studio Production” of Der Konsul, a German language filmed version of Menotti’s 1950 opera, The Consul. It is a dark, harrowing vision of Menotti’s “denunciation of all forms of tyranny”, beautifully sung, superbly acted, and directed with an almost film noir/expressionistic style by Rudolph Cartier. […]