Photo: © Marco Borrelli Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” is one of those operas that is larger than life. Arguably, two operas in one night. Everything sounds like the realization of romanticism’s epic promise and showcases the musicians’ talents overflowing in the hall. It is hard to not expect a lot from a performance of Berlioz’s opera with a revolutionary and Romantique {…}
(Photo credit: Marco Borrelli) The Salzburg Festival has released the final report for its 2023 edition. In its 103rd year, the Salzburg Festival held 178 performances over 43 days at 15 venues. Directors of the Salzburg Festival, Kristina Hammer, Markus Hinterhäuser and Lukas Crepaz reported a “record quota” of 98.5% of seats filled at the 2023 festival. Over 241,000 visitors {…}
The Salzburg Festival has announced that The Würth Group will continue to provide support for the organization’s Youth Programme and the Ouverture Spirituelle in 2024. Dr. h.c. mult. Reinhold Würth’s first donation to the festival came in 2016 for the production of “West Side Story.” Since then he has been a support of the concert series “Ouverture Spirituelle” and the {…}
(Photo: © Ruth Walz) A couple of weeks ago, I had a lovely conversation with one of the dramaturgists of Salzburg Festival’s production of Verdi’s “Falstaff.” He pinpointed how strange it is for a dramaturg to hear that the staging for this production did not work, but the music did. To him, music and theater are part of the same {…}
(Photo: ©SF Marco Borrelli) It is believed that there are no bad orchestras, just bad conductors. Following this rationale, Marco Armiliato conducting my high school orchestra in David Gefffen Hall would be greeted with rave reviews. It is not that he wrung water out of stones—this miracle belongs exclusively to Moses’s staff. But, he did lead Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra to {…}
(Photo: SF/Monika Rittershaus) Bohuslav Martinů’s opera “The Greek Passion” is a work still in search of its audience. The opera, seldom performed, is considered to be one of Martinů’s finest compositions. This season’s Salzburg Festival tried hard to make “The Greek Passion” a rare and visually noteworthy production. But it didn’t quite work out. The opera’s political radicalness and musical accomplishments are {…}
(Photo: © SF/Marco Borrelli) It is always good when a song recital does not include the usual suspects of the Lieder repertoire (you know who they are). This is nothing against “Die schöne Müllerin” or “Dichterliebe.” However, Asmik Grigorian and Lukas Geniušas’s recital was exciting because it featured Rachmaninoff songs, along with some small pieces by Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov for {…}
(Photo credit: Salzburg Festiva)l Apple Music Classical has partnered with the Salzburg Festival. Listeners are offered exclusive audio recordings and playlists from the Salzburg Festival, both past and present. Spatial Audio’s remastering a number of iconic recordings from past Festivals, with the 2009 recital from Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire featured. Festival officials commented in a press release that,”The Salzburg {…}
Photo credit: SF Bernd Uhlig In one of his literary excursions, the great Portuguese author Eça de Queiroz reviewed the premiere of Verdi’s “Macbeth” in Lisbon. He did not see the original Italian version of the opera, but the revised French one and quite likely with the same cast as in Paris. Eça insisted that Verdi was the greatest living {…}
(Credit: © SF/Marco Borrelli) The Salzburg Festival has announced that Hankyeol Yoon is the 2023 winner of the Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors Award. This is the 11th time that the award has been presented and it comes with a 15,000 euro prize. Yoon will also get the opportunity to conduct a Festival concert with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra {…}
Photo credit: © SF/Marco Borrell It might be unfair to name Purcell as the composer of “The Indian Queen.” The opera, left unfinished, has been restored from the composer’s fragments mostly through the efforts of Teodor Currentzis and Peter Sellars. They managed to give some theatrical shape to the arias and added music from elsewhere in Purcell’s corpus that made {…}