On Stage
Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques at the Cité de la Musique
A concert presenting the full cycle of Gérard Grisey’s Les Espaces Acoustiques is a rare event. The project had not been performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain for a decade. The ...
Jukka-Pekka Saraste’s debut in Lyon
The Orchestre National de Lyon likes Finnish conductors: after Hannu Lintu and before Osmo Vänskä and Susanna Mälkki, Jukka-Pekka Saraste was the one in charge that night. Saraste is well-known in ...
Dialogues of the Carmelites in Paris, The ladies’ Delight
This is the fourth important production of Dialogues of the Carmelites premiered this season in France, after the ones in Toulon, Bordeaux/Nantes and Lyon. This work, commissioned exactly sixty years ...
Anna-Maria Helsing conducts Webern, Mahler, Berg, and Hartmann
Classical music as we know it today would be quite different if it were not for early twentieth century Vienna. Mahler was taking the late-romantic symphony to almost every extreme ...
Warsaw celebrates Krzysztof Penderecki’s 80th birthday
Poland has been celebrating the 80th birthday of its most famous composer, Krzysztof Penderecki. It is not often that contemporary composers are extolled with such splendor: the National Bank of ...
The Cleveland Orchestra in Paris : an event in itself
The Cleveland Orchestra has a prominent place, both among the greatest American orchestras and in music-lovers’ hearts. It is indeed legitimately considered one of the famous “Big Five,” with some ...
Stockhausen night at the Festival d’Automne
For this concert of the Festival d’Automne, a banner was hung up at the entrance of the Cité de la Musique building. It warned the incoming audience that the Southwest ...
Brahms, Leipzig Gewandhaus and Riccardo Chailly in Paris : delightful classicism
For this series of concerts by the legendary Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Pleyel concert hall was unusually crowded. Riccardo Chailly has been the orchestra’s conductor since 2005, and his contract ...
The Magic Flute in London: drama, music and magic
In the program at the opening of The Magic Flute in London, director Simon McBurney recounts a rehearsal, explaining at the same time the ideas driving his direction of the ...
Finnish Independence Day Concert
Although performances of Finnish music in Finland are frequent, the repertoire is generally restricted to Sibelius or other living composers, such as the "big three" of Lindberg, Salonen, and Saariaho. ...
Christian Tetzlaff plays Shostakovich second violin concerto
While the first violin concerto of Shostakovich is firmly established in the 20th-century violin repertoire, performances of his second violin concerto are considerably less frequent. Perhaps this is due to ...
Los Angeles : The Magic Flute in silent film style
This Flute, which first we watch, with ever-widening eyes, for we proceed from good to excellent surprises, then we hear…is especially noteworthy, as you may have guessed, because of the ...
Denève conducts Britten, Roussel and Ravel
22 November 2013 is the precise day when the British composer Benjamin Britten would have turned 100 years old. To celebrate the occasion, the first half of the evening’s program ...
Rare flute concertos by Loïc Schneider
Like Sakari Oramo, Susanna Mälkki, and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, among others, Jan Söderblom is another talented Finnish conductor whose career began as an instrumentalist. In this concert, Söderblom led the Tapiola ...
Trisha Brown’s Living Repertoire in Paris
The Trisha Brown Dance Company devoted its first night in Paris to a focus on cinema, beginning with For M.G.: The Movie, a 1991 tribute to Michel Guy, Secretary of ...
Allan Pettersson by Lindberg, a historic milestone like Mahler by Bernstein ?
In his famous television series Young People's concert, Leonard Bernstein devoted one show in 1960 to the Austrian composer with this revealing title "Who is Gustav Mahler?". Speaking to his ...
In Budapest, the Franz Liszt Academy reopens
The Franz Liszt Academy, built by architects Flóris Korb and Kálmán Giergl in 1907, is the major Hungarian conservatory (music school?), but it also includes several concert halls, among them ...
The Grand Théâtre de Genève revives Ernest Reyer’s Sigurd
Genevans had not heard Ernest Reyer's Sigurd for a century, since its last performance was during the 1911–2 season. It has often been described as a matching piece to Wagner's ...
La Vestale resurrected at the Théâtre des Champs-élysées
Paris had to wait for 160 years to see again La Vestale, a masterpiece from the First Empire, the missing link between the French lyric tragedy and the Romantic opera, ...
Christian Lindberg performs Pettersson Symphonies 4 & 16 in Norrköping
The Norrköping Symphony Orchestra has a long history of performing and recording the still relatively unknown Swedish composer, Allan Pettersson (1911-80). This began in the late 1970s with Okko Kamu’s ...
Arthur Nestrovski, artistic director of the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra
« We are very much part of your world !» ResMusica: What caused the energetic development of the São Paulo Symphony in the last decade, with conductors such as John Neschling ...
The Zermatt Festival, edition 2013
The Zermatt Festival and its academy (summer school) are held in the famous Swiss ski resort of the same name in the Alps, partly at the instigation of the resident ...
Exceptional opening for Musica’s 30th edition in Strasbourg
Musica celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, and for this special occasion Jean-Dominique Marco concocted a rich and ambitious program, inviting such ensembles as Accroche-Note, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Linea, and Recherche, and ...
Beethovenfest Bonn: Fidelio in a Sturm und Drang version
Many years have passed, but Rocco, an old, retired jailer, remembers. He remembers an extraordinary young man, although he was not a young man: his son-in-law, Fidelio, who turned out ...
Krystian Zimerman celebrates Lutosławski’s anniversary in Warsaw
This year we celebrate the hundredth birthday of Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, and his compatriot Krystian Zimerman returned to Poland to play his Concerto for Piano as part of the ...
Paul Daniel takes the reins in Bordeaux
Paul Daniel made a curious choice for his first concert as musical director of the Orchestre National Bordeaux-Aquitaine: a Purcell–Mahler pairing, which started with a funeral service and ended with ...
The Moritzburg Festival’s twentieth anniversary: the German Marlboro
In 1993, violonist Kai Vogler and cellists Jan Vogler and Peter Burns were looking for a place in Saxony where they could hold a music festival on the model of ...
Francesco Cavalli’s Elena, the lyrical discovery of Aix
At last! After a remarkable - albeit not very lyrical - premiere (The House Taken Over), a poor Rigoletto, a Don Giovanni with a dubious cast, the Aix festival eventually ...
