For an hour and five minutes on the evening of May 8, 2025, Berwaldhallen was not Berwaldhallen as Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” took control of our minds, reshaping our understanding of ourselves and the world. What had been a hall full of strangers eagerly awaiting the sonorous beauty of musical excellency transformed into an arena of interpreters of philosophical truth. {…}
(Photo Credit: Ewa Marie Runquist) Very rarely do I review concerts featuring heavy hitter singers and feel sad afterwards, for the audience and performer alike, wishing that what was presented was something else entirely. However, in Berwaldhallen’s second offering of the 2024-25 season, “So We Will Vanish With Anne Sofie von Otter,” the great Octavian, the incomparable mezzo-soprano, and one {…}
(Photo Credits: Maarit Kytöharju) Opening Berwaldhallen’s 2024 Baltic Sea Festival, on August 24th, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gerard McBurney produced a tastefully contemporary and neo-Wagnerian rendition of Modest Mussorgsky’s unfinished “national music drama,” “Khovanshchina,” to a ravenous public. Awarded, and rightly so, with three ovations, ten soloists from across Europe and three choirs successfully produced one of the most expressive versions {…}