Baritone Georg Nigl and pianist Alexander Melnikov will be performing the world première of Wolfgang Rihm’s dort wie hier today at the Kölner Philharmonie – together with Lieder by Franz Schubert, Alban Berg and Johannes Brahms.
The Dutch première will take place tomorrow at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ.
David Fennessy’s choir work Letter to Michael will be performed today at “Composing the Island: Choirland | 100 years of Irish Choral Music”.
David Fennessy on the piece:
”A few years ago I came across an extraordinary piece of art by a woman named Emma Hauck. She was admitted to a German psychiatric ward about a hundred years ago diagnosed with schizophrenia. Whilst a patient there she produced pages and pages of text – thousands of lines in pencil which were addressed to her husband who had ceased to visit her. She simply wrote the words ‘Sweetheart Come’ [Herzensschatzi komm] over and over again or sometimes just the word ‘come’. Every page is thick with overlapping text and some are so condensed as to be illegible.
I was deeply moved by these repeated pleas and feel strongly that the desperate passion that can be seen on these pages could only really be expressed with voices. I imagine a dense layering of a simple line; each voice adding to the power of the plea…”
We just sent out our latest newsletter:
– The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra presents Weill’s and Brecht’s The Lindbergh Flight in St. Louis.
– The Zuger Sinfonietta premières Paul Leonard Schäffer’s instrumentation of Alban Berg’s 7 Early Songs for chamber orchestra.
– Belgian première of the new critical edition of The Makropulos Affair at the Opera Vlaanderen.
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Happy Birthday Arvo Pärt!
The Othmar Schoeck Festival (1 to 11 September 2016) is currently running in Brunnen. A highlight of the festival will be an international symposium dedicated to Schoeck’s final opera Das Schloss Dürande [Dürande Castle] after Joseph von Eichendorff’s novella of the same name.
Find a detailed programme of the symposium on the website of the Bern University of the Arts:
Surely there’s an irony in the fact that some of the sweetest love music ever written was penned by the man blamed for the collapse of romanticism. (Kate Molleson, The Guardian, 29 August 2016)
The grand finale of the Edinburgh International Festival’s Usher Hall concerts: on 28 August Donald Runnicles conducted Arnold Schönberg’s Gurre-Lieder.
Aleksey Igudesman and Julian Rachlin perform “Klezmer’s Freilach” from Igudesmans book Klezmer & More – the video is from the Igudesman’s new TV series “Du Kunst Mich!”, which airs for the first time on ORF 2 next Monday, 29 of August, at 23:35.
When listening, one completely forgets that these single movements are in fact interludes and extracts from an opera. The captivating beauty of Berg’s absolute music belies the underlying substance of the opera.(Willi Reich on Lulu-Suite)
Tonight conductor and soprano Barbara Hannigan will sing with and conduct the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in performances of Alban Berg’s Lulu-Suite and works by Debussy, Sibelius, Haydn and Gershwin at the KKL Luzern.
Tonight and tomorrow, the Bochumer Symphoniker and ChorWerk Ruhr perform Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Carré for 4 orchestras and choirs at the Ruhrtriennale under conductors Rupert Huber, Matilda Hofman, Florian Helgath and Michael Alber.
We’ve uploaded the full score of Orchestra I for you.
View the score of Carré – Orchestra I
Find out more about the performance on the website of the Ruhrtriennale.
When I play the Polyptyque by Frank Martin, I feel the same responsibility, the same exaltation as when I play Bach's Chaconne. (Yehudi Menuhin)
Violinist Renaud Capuçon and the Kammerorchester Basel will perform Frank Martin’s Polyptyque today at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival, which celebrates the 100th anniversary of Yehudi Menuhin.
I’d buy a small West End theatre, give it great acoustics and initiate a contemporary music festival curated by composers.
The Guardian asked David Sawer about first record, his favourite piece of music, whether he had ever considered a career outside of music and whether he had any musical guilty pleasures.
Can this be the best British opera in years? (Anne Ozorio, Opera Today, 09.04.2014)
Conductor Klaus Simon sent us this photograph from the first rehearsals of Luke Bedford’s opera Through His Teeth. In the picture: Sirin Kilic, Georg Gädker and Siri Karoline Thornhill.
The German première of Luke Bedford’s highly acclaimed work will take place on 8 October at the E-Werk in Freiburg.
Three years ago, in June 2013 we conducted a video interview with Bedford about his then upcoming opera. Intrigued by the composer’s words, we documented the work’s process of creation, providing readers with regular updates regarding the development of Trough His Teeth, ranging from the composing of the score and the writing of David Harrower’s libretto to the actual printing of the score and its production.
The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reviews Zubin Mehta’s performance of Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder [Songs on the Death of Infants] with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival: a “‘Viennese’ and existential event” – read the full review on Der Standard.
For our book “Gustav Mahler: The Conductor’s Interviews” we talked to the conductor about Mahler. Find out more on our dedicated page or watch the interview with Mehta on YouTube.
Zubin Mehta and Arvo Pärt preparing for the performances of Swansong on August 6 and 7 at the Salzburg Festival. Mehta conducts the Vienna Philharmonic.