Finde Artikel | David Allen

Third time’s a charm? Or is three a crowd? It isn’t often that an orchestra takes up an entire weekend at Carnegie Hall. Could this be too much of a good thing?

Why would Mariss Jansons leave the Concertgebouw? Because he has the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra... 

The New York Philharmonic has a distinguished history in Mahler, as does Bernard Haitink, but this Mahler Third didn't quite work.

Innovative programming from Manfred Honeck mingles readings, music, and chant in memory of Mozart.

Bernard Haitink and Leonidas Kavakos join the New York Philharmonic for a programme of Webern, Berg, and Beethoven.

Ludovic Morlot conducts the New York première of the piece that won this year's Pulitzer Prize, Become Ocean, and pairs it with Varèse and Debussy.

Lisa Batiashvili joins the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin for smooth, suave Bartók, but Bruckner's Ninth doesn't quite cohere.

Ensemble ACJW's thoughtful approach to programming pays off in Akiho, Bach, Benjamin, Birtwistle, and Ligeti.

In her annual appearance at Carnegie Hall, Mitsuko Uchida plays Schubert's G Major sonata and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations.

Michael Volle stars as a complex Mandryka in the Met's birthday revival of Richard Strauss's Arabella.

A tremendous performance of one of Rameau's great stage works, but one that raised questions about the plot in concert form.

Superb pianism in unexpected repertoire from Paul Lewis, while the Beethoven with which he made his name doesn't quite stack up.

Matthias Goerne steps in for Thomas Hampson and electrifies James Levine's Wozzeck at the Metropolitan Opera. 

Risks bring rewards as Matthias Goerne and Christoph Eschenbach present Die schöne Müllerin at Carnegie Hall.

A thoughtful pairing of Schoenberg's Friede auf Erden and Beethoven's Ninth fails to catch fire.

This BAM production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, imported from Glyndebourne, achieves the rare distinction of making a great performance out of a decidedly mediocre work.

Daniil Trifonov returns to Carnegie Hall in a performance of Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, and Schumann.

The English Concert and Harry Bicket bring Theodora to Carnegie Hall, with Dorothea Röschmann, David Daniels and Sarah Connolly.

Marc-André Hamelin plays Schubert, and premieres two works never before heard at Carnegie Hall: his own Barcarolle, and a Medtner sonata composed a century ago.

Nathaniel Merrill’s production of Der Rosenkavalier opened at the Metropolitan Opera on 23 January 1969. Richard Nixon had been sworn in as President as the United States only a few days earlier. It is still in the repertory today, here revived with Edward Gardner conducting.

So much myth has accreted to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony that it is difficult to know where to begin any more.

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have made a partnership from playing with expectations, and this first of two Carnegie Hall concerts this season was yet another example of their craft.In a programme of Beethoven, Copland, and Steven Mackey, perhaps the most amazing subversion here was that by far the most interesting performance came in a Mozart piano concerto.

The unnecessary celebrations of Richard Strauss’ 150th birthday seem to have begun early at the Metropolitan Opera. Two weeks after this Die Frau ohne Schatten comes Der Rosenkavalier, and a few months after that Arabella. By the standards of Strauss at the Met, Herbert Wernicke’s Frau is still new at only a dozen years old.

Almost a year after it started, András Schiff’s Bach project in New York is finally coming to its conclusion. He began on the Upper East Side, at 92Y, with both books of The Well-Tempered Clavier. His performance of Book I, I wrote, was “of the highest quality and depth of thought”.

What a fine Mozart orchestra the LSO became under the benevolent gaze of Sir Colin Davis, and with Bernard Haitink on hand as a regular guest conductor, what a fine Mozart orchestra they shall continue to be. Their annual concerts at Lincoln Center this year paired Mozart with Shostakovich, the latter a composer in whose music it would be easy to forget that Haitink has considerable experience.

It’s time to stop talking about James Levine’s comeback. After a scintillating return to Carnegie Hall in May and a fleet, immaculate Così fan tutte at the Metropolitan Opera in September, Levine has proven what he never really had to: his powers have not waned in his absence from the podium. Given sensible scheduling and interesting repertoire, we can focus once again on his music-making.

This is the one Britten work scheduled by the Metropolitan Opera this year, in Tim Albery’s production from 1996, revived most recently in 2002. The psychological designs are infused with such colour that the staging in no way shows its age.

“Gergiev, your silence is killing Russian gays!” Activists from Queer Nation had disrupted opening night at the Metropolitan Opera three weeks ago, and with demonstrations outside it was almost inevitable that the same protests would accompany the start of the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra’s three-concert stay at Carnegie Hall.

In the 15,606 concerts given by the New York Philharmonic and its predecessors before this, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony had received nearly 200 renditions.

With all the attention rightly focused on the demise of the Minnesota Orchestra and the New York City Opera, it would be easy to believe that the musical arts are in dire straits in America. In some ways they are. But from the funding rubble of the financial crisis new groups and new facilities are sprouting too.

“Opening Night” at the New York Philharmonic is a gala affair, although it’s rarely the actual opening night of the season. The gala isn’t as gaudy as the one that takes place across the plaza at the Metropolitan Opera, but it’s an auspicious occasion nonetheless, filmed for broadcast on public television and usually featuring a soloist with the appropriate star wattage.

The wait was long between James Levine’s 2,442nd and 2,443rd performances at the Metropolitan Opera, but it was worth it. What’s more, Lesley Koenig’s 1996 production of Così wears its age well.

So begins the fifth year of Alan Gilbert’s quest to make the New York Philharmonic the very model of a modern symphony orchestra: a concert in which the music director spent the vast majority of this time seated stock still; in which the luckier of the musicians spent most of their hours looking up at a big screen; and in which the audience spent most of their evening entranced by visuals and jump

Bruckner, like all symphonic-minded composers after Beethoven, had a finale problem, or so the conventional wisdom goes. How, after all, could one follow the Ninth? At his very greatest, Bruckner solved this with ingenious formal devices (his Fifth Symphony) or through sheer force of emotional and religious will (his Eighth).

High above the Salzach’s east bank towers the Hotel Sacher, and atop it for the last few days has been an unusual standard: the flag of Venezuela.

Trust Haydn to provide the music for by far the most engrossing performance I heard at the Verbier Festival. Once again, having heard his music played with verve and appreciation by keen musicians, one wondered why more Haydn is not heard in concert, whether as symphonies, piano sonatas, or string quartets.

The Verbier Festival Orchestra is the centrepiece of the festival from which it takes its name. Hundreds of young players hoping to start a professional orchestral career audition each year for the chance to work with big-name conductors, the likes of which this year include Charles Dutoit, Valery Gergiev, Gábor Takács-Nagy, and, for this concert, Gianandrea Noseda.

Other than the gigantic Salle des Combins, a semi-permanent white tent seating a couple of thousand, the major venue for the Verbier Festival is the local église, perched higher up the mountains than the main square. Marked by a tall bell-tower shaped like a cross, the hall is prowlike, dark, and claustrophobic, enlivened only by coloured slits of light coming from behind the audience.

The Recontres inédites series is what makes the Verbier Festival famous among aficionados. The title translates – roughly – as “Unprecedented Meetings”, and that is certainly what the concerts represent: world-class soloists brought together on minimal but far from non-existent rehearsal time to play chamber music.

The world ended again last night. It ends fairly frequently in performances and in recordings, and that schedule tends to innoculate us against Richard Wagner’s political and philosophical messages. If ever there were to be a performance to transcend that, it would come at the Proms, at the conclusion of its first full performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Going to a concert at (Le) Poisson Rouge reminds me of listening to the old recording of Sviatoslav Richter and Andrei Gavrilov playing Handel’s keyboard suites. It sounds a bit like they were playing in a hotel lobby: teacups clink, throats are cleared, glasses smash, and the occasional telephone lingers unanswered.

Preview of the 2013 Verbier Festival.

There are, speaking in broad generalisations, two main ways that Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is performed. One sees it as the composer’s farewell to life, an elegy that celebrates, fears, stands tall, and refuses to go quietly into the good night.

With a gleaming, glistening chord of purest A major, the man New Yorkers love to call “the Maestro” returned to the concert stage. His last public performance was a Die Walküre in May 2011, one that took its searing emotional power by maintaining the constant impression that it was about to disintegrate musically, just as Wotan’s worlds fell apart on stage and the conductor’s body buckled.

Yuja Wang is all about rhythm. It would be easy to write about how her playing doesn’t have the profundity or architectural sense of more mature artists, but that would be to miss her considerable achievements – and with a young artist, it’s what’s achieved that should count.

For the last concert of her Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, Renée Fleming assembled one of the least coherent concept programmes imaginable. Billed as “Vienna: Window to Modernity”, it was never clear what was specifically Viennese about the music on show, nor what was particularly modern, nor what windows had to do with anything.

A concert of the Op. 109, Op. 110, and Op. 111 piano sonatas could very easily be delivered with the kind of self-seriousness that turns Beethoven into the Beethoven of legend, a daunting, impenetrable titan, the kind of Beethoven consecrated high on the proscenium arches of so many American concert halls.

It’s easiest to describe Christian Tetzlaff’s approach to playing the violin by what he isn’t trying to do. He is not trying to play as beautifully as possible, in the conventional sense. He is not trying to sound like a nightingale, soaring long, honeyed lines above an accompaniment.

Christian Thielemann’s repertoire is broader than is often made out, but not that much broader. At its heart are the four composers most associated with late Austro-Germanic Romanticism: Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Anton Bruckner.

“Der Sir”, they used to call him. The death of Sir Colin Davis has been a strikingly international event, and New York has been no exception. Over at Lincoln Center, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic opened their latest subscription run with “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a joint tribute to the British conductor and the people of Boston (another of Sir Colin’s haunts).