The Riga Jurmala Music Festival has announced the formation of the Mariss Jansons Festival Orchestra. Per a press release, the formation of the ensemble was triggered by the cancelation of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra will include members of the former Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra as well as members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouworkest, the Oslo {…}
Credit: Simon Fowler
Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons died last night Nov. 30, 2019 at his home in St. Petersburg, Russia. Jansons, who was 76 years old, died of an apparent longstanding heart condition. Born in Riga, Jansons entered the Leningrad Conservatoryin 1956 to study piano and conducting and continued his training with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna and Herbert Von Karajan in Salzburg. Shortly {…}
Mariss Jansons has canceled all his summer performances in order to rest his health. The Bayerischen Rundfunks Symphoniker announced that the conductor on the advice of his doctors has to take a break in order to recover from health issues. As a result, he has canceled all performances scheduled from June to August. The performances he has been forced to cancel include {…}
Musikverein Wien has announced its 2019-20 season. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on vocal performances. Martin Haselböck will lead the Orchester Wiener Akademie in a performance of various works by Franz Schubert as well as Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 4 in D Minor. Baritone Thomas Hampson will be featured. Performance Date: Oct. 13, 2019 Bass Günther Groissböck and {…}
It is hard to imagine Russian music without Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Russian literature without poet Alexander Pushkin. Tchaikovsky’s opera “The Queen of Spades,” based on the eponymous novella by Pushkin, is one of the most important of the existing operas. Its beautiful and dark music leaves hardly any hope at the end, revealing a very fatalistic, and very Slavic, way {…}