Works by Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler recently heralded this year’s concert season in Zurich, where Artist in Residence Janine Jansen gave a superb performance.
Classy performances from Leonidas Kavakos and Ying Fang, joining Christoph Eschenbach and the Verbier Festival Orchestra in a polished Berg Violin Concerto and a sublime Mahler 4.
Conceptually, the programme of descending and rising fourths offered a real treat: in practice, the musicians' skill was in danger of being lost as they attempted to recover from their opening gimmickry.
Despite some fascinating, impressive and often beautiful moments, the consistent refusal to give the audience time to applaud, pause and digest what they had just heard turned the evening into a wash of death songs.
A great programme of varied but accessible 20th-century music excites in spite of its imperfections; Faust gives a beautiful, introspective reading of the second Berg concerto.
Hannigan plays with expectations, opening with a single spotlight after a complete stage blackout to dramatic effect, and I am pretty sure she was rocking slippers on stage.
Vienna staged the first three-act performance of Lulu with Willy Decker adding to his 2000 production, with excellent singing contributing to its success.
Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich under conductor Teodor Currentzis brought the audience to its feet with works by Alban Berg and Dmitri Shostakovitch.
Christoph Loy's Oslo production of Wozzeck is a dramatic triumph, with gripping performances from a cast led by Audun Iversen's desperate title character.
Mozartian lightness and wit, dark beauty from Berg and melodious angst from Schubert: the Tetzlaff show us three very different sides of the Viennese string quartet
Stefan Herheim's eagerly awaited production of Berg's Wozzeck distances us from the emotional heart of the tragedy by portraying the story as a hallucinatory death-room experience.
A dream programme of works by Strauss, Berg and Sibelius, matched by performances from Sakari Oramo, Alina Pogostkina and the BBC Symphony Orchestra that really hit the sweet spot.
A refreshing Austro-German programme of works that neatly dovetailed into each other, presented with energy by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Robin Ticciati.
A skilfully constructed production, and one that plays with the our perspectives. Whether the images are flashbacks from a war-troubled Wozzeck or a Büchner-esque portent of the horrors to come is left for the audience to decide.
In Wagner and Strauss, the beauty and power of Mattila's voice, still fresh and flexible, left the audience reeling in a recital that was a showcase for technique and artistry.
Clarity and mounting horror in the orchestra pit, the full truth and ugliness of the human condition onstage. Dutch National Opera’s new production of Wozzeck is stomach-churning for all the right reasons.
The Grim Reaper swept the aisles of the Royal Festival Hall in Vladimir Jurowski's latest programme in the Southbank Centre’s “Belief and Beyond Belief” series which explores faith and spirituality.
This was an ingenious and memorable concert of rarities and hybrids from early 20th-century Vienna, curated and performed by the ever imaginative Janine Jansen.
The concluding concert in the Amsterdammers’ brief Barbican residency mixed youthful promise with a programme that seemed to sum up 2016’s angst and fears.
Although a British composer by birth, Rebecca Saunders is most respected in Germany, where she has spent much of her working life. Her latest project was an immersive choreographed programme with the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie based around her violin concerto still.
Baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Daniil Trifonov combined their talents to explore the darker side of human existence in an intense, uninterrupted 90-minute recital.
A mesmerising Wozzeck, thanks to the trampled dignity of Florian Boesch’s antihero, Asmik Grigorian’s gloriously sung Marie, and a thrillingly savage Netherlands Radio Philharmonic.
As part of the Konzerthaus’ Mittagsmusik (Midday Music) series, young soprano Anna Lucia Richter teamed up this week with one of the greatest living song accompanists, Gerold Huber, to present an extraordinarily varied matinée of songs in the Schubertsaal.
Both guest artists of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s concerts this week appeared in Australia for the first time: the octogenarian Christoph von Dohnányi and the versatile violinist, less than half his age, Carolin Widmann. The great German conductor must feel a certain pride in his ancestry, as he kept the Hungarian spelling of his surname.
A rotating set and a plethora of visual distractions can't ultimately detract from what proves a musically satisfying production of Berg's operatic masterpiece.
Soprano Lisa Larsson and pianist Roland Pöntinen dispelled the midwinter gloom with a heavy dose of Scandinavian Romanticism and the Dutch première of Rolf Martinsson's Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson.
A stormy evening in New York was a perfect setting for an intimate and unforgettable lieder recital by the two long-term collaborators at the top of their game.
In addition to incorporating twelve-tone rows for each character and within larger musical units like canons and chorales, the entirety of the opera itself is palindromic in structure, with performers whose characters died gruesome deaths during the first act returning as new characters in the third.
The set is a stark, grubby nonentity. A central concave structure spits out each scene's requisites, flashing up like apparitions from the vortex of Wozzeck's mind.
Bringing out the unabashed colour and detail of the score, Andrew Davis delivered a superb reading in the pit, tightly coherent and with exemplary attentiveness to articulation.
Mezzo-soprano and new music specialist, Katharina Rikus shuffled onto an elevated stage behind the ensemble in Pierrot make-up and costume to perform Schoenberg's masterpiece.
