Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Salzburg Festival

With duets from Pique Dame and Iolanta, along with set pieces from Eugene Onegin, this gala was packed with Russian passion. 

Forget powerhouse “hojotohos” and sandblasting brass. Elīna Garanča and Christian Thielemann offered more intimate portraits of these composers at the Großes Festspielhaus.

The duo shines in sunny Beethoven, cool Prokofiev and over-ripe Franck.

“Go big or go home” could easily have been the motto of this summer’s festival. Muti didn’t just go big. He went huge. 

In a pandemic era of chamber reductions, the joy in this Mahler 6 was hearing an orchestra of 108 musicians let off the leash. 

It's difficult to believe Salzburg could have cast a finer Così in Loy's Covid-reduced production in the Großes Festspielhaus.

An Elektra conducted like Mendelssohnian fairy music, sung not shouted, just as Strauss required.

A wonderful cast conducted by William Christie in a new production of L’incoronazione di Poppea at the Salzburg Festival. 

Mariss Jansons and the Vienna Philharmonic do the real storytelling as Hans Neuenfels' staging underwhelms.

An astonishing performance by Asmik Grigorian is central to the Italian director's disturbing reading of a disturbing opera. 

Cecilia Bartoli is joined by frequent collaborators Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier in a fun-filled Rossini farce full of Italian sunshine. Big grins all round. 

Muti's reading of the score is extraordinary, both for its sophistication and originality.

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.

Youth was a hindrance rather than a virtue in this testosterone-driven performance which sought more than anything to sock the audience between the eyes

Under Mariss Jansons, the Vienna Philharmonic are on top form in Shostakovich's opera; together with a top class cast of singers, they create sonic and emotional intoxication.

The final opera in Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi 450 trilogy features an excellent cast and inspires deep emotion.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, the second opera of the Monteverdi 450 trilogy being toured by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, had a strong performance in Salzburg.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi 450 trilogy began its Salzburg run with a tear-jerking concert performance of L'Orfeo.

A nameless octet competes with the big names and easily wins the silver medal in Salzburg.

The multinational Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra proves that adolescence is no barrier to maturity in profound symphonic music making.

According to director Sven-Eric Bechtolf,  Don Giovanni’s divine retribution for a life of pure evil and insatiable fornication is just more of the same.

In a concert career lasting over 35 years, Murray Perahia has been a guest soloist with many orchestras. But his engagement with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields is a special one, since he is also the orchestra’s principal guest conductor, and their playing is so immaculate that not even technichal issues can distract from an incredible performance.

Peter Stein stages Schubert's problem opera Fierrabras in a world of cardboard knights. This last opera of the Salzburg Festival is well sung, but you have to ask: is the last always the best?

If you recognize how Maurizio Pollini walks onto the stage, you can probably gauge his mood – which this evening was particularly restless. I have always wondered why he reaches the piano so quickly and almost immediately begins to play. Invariably, he has a puzzled expression on his face, as if he were wondering what all these spectators are doing in the hall – I love this shyness.

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.

The Coro de Manos Blancas (White Hands Choir) of Venezuela, one of the leading group of the Special Education Programme, was founded by Johnny Gómez in 1995 to include children and young adults with disabilities. The White Hands Choir is part of the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs, known as “El Sistema”.

The Percussive Planet Ensemble was founded seven years ago, when the then 22-year-old Martin Grubinger first performed his Percussive Planet (twelve percussion pieces from around the world) at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn.

Faith and glamour have bookended this year’s Salzburg Festival, a move met with incredulity in certain quarters and yet one not entirely alien to Austrian customs, if one looks to the 20 or so most glittering events of the Viennese ball season, which is promptly curtailed by Ash Wednesday (still observed by much of the population here with high Catholic asceticism).

Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw can claim the most enduring historical connection with Mahler’s symphonies of any orchestra due to their erstwhile principal conductor Willem Mengelberg, who invited Mahler to Amsterdam to conduct the Third and Fourth Symphonies in 1903 and 1904 respectively and after the composer’s death became one of his chief disciples.

The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant.

The Vienna Philharmonic has received a mixed reception at the Proms in recent years, but this programme of Beethoven and Bruckner with Murray Perahia and Bernard Haitink, which was performed in Salzburg this weekend and tours to London next week, will be sure to be met with critical approval.There were however moments during the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no.

Giulio Cesare, an opera populated with manipulative characters that only interact with each other when shared interests are at stake, is a receptive vessel for a scornful indictment of imperialism and the dubious alliances it forges.

Established in 1987 by Leonard Bernstein, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra last year joined the exclusive club of youth orchestras to have performed at the Salzburg Festival and was immediately invited back for a return appearance this season.

The new Zauberflöte at this summer’s Salzburg Festival is a visually brilliant production with sets tailored to the atmospheric venue of the Felsenreitschule (for people not familiar with Salzburg, this is where the singing contest was held in the film The Sound of Music).

The baritone Thomas Hampson is a popular figure at the Salzburg Festival, having appeared there regularly since 1988, and at his Lieder recital with pianist Wolfram Rieger at the Haus der Mozart, one sensed a warm rapport between him and the audience. His programme consisted of Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op. 39, Dvořák’s Zigeunermelodien and Mahler’s songs based on the text of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

When Salzburg Festival director Alexander Pereira stepped onto the stage of the Großes Festspielhaus last night to announce that one of the cast members of La bohème was sick and unable to sing, he faced a chorus of hisses from the audience. Soprano Anna Netrebko, the festival’s biggest non-conductor star, was feeling fine (though as Mimì she would shortly die of consumption).

Strauss’ Don Juan has a long tradition as one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s more dazzling curtain-openers but a recent tendency, even with Gustavo Dudamel, who conducted this work with the orchestra last autumn, has been for more subdued accounts which downplay the brilliance and virtuosity of the orchestral writing.

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos was first performed in 1912, in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. Unlike the version usually seen today, this first Ariadne was a long-winded play-opera-ballet hybrid, incorporating a full production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme with dances to incidental music by Strauss followed by the short opera.

Il rè pastore was the last operatic work that Mozart completed before Idomeneo, and though there is a clear shift in style and level of achievement in the six years that separate them, it is very interesting to compare the 19-year-old composer to the later operatic master that we are more familiar with.

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal began their collaboration on Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) with utopian ambitions. Unfortunately they weren’t the same ones. For Hofmannsthal, this would finally be the opera where his poetry would be illuminated by rather than buried under the music.

Bei seiner Rückkehr zur Camerata Salzburg begeistert Norrington – sich selbst oft zurücknehmend und genießend – mit Wagner und Schönberg.

Im traditionellen Konzert der Wiener Philharmonikern zu Ferragosto erhält Schumanns Zweite Symphonie unter Mutis Händen Charme und südliche Wärme.

Václav Luks und sein Collegium 1704 bringen mit dieser barocken Ausgrabung vokale und instrumentale Hochspannung auf die Bühne des Mozarteums.

Bachs Hohe Messe mit Philippe Herreweghe und dem Collegium Vocale Gent hinterlässt in Salzburgs weiträumiger Felsenreitschule vor allem durch die dramatischen Arien und Duette Eindruck.   

Wie üblich beendete eine weiter konzertante Oper den Opernreigen der diesjährigen Salzburger Festspiele und in diesem Jahr war dabei Donizettis Attentäter-Drama Lucrezia Borgia zu erleben. Der Belcanto-Klassiker begeisterte mit mitreißenden Melodien und hervorragenden Solisten.

Dieses Jahr wurde Verdis I due Foscari ins Programm genommen, eine Oper, die trotz einiger musikalisch interessanten Momenten nicht zu Verdis Meisterwerken zählt und in Salzburg vor allem aufgrund einer durchwachsenen Besetzung nicht überzeugen konnte.

Christian Gerhaher und Gerold Huber widmeten ihr Konzert bei den Salzburger Festspielen ganz dem Namen Robert Schumann und gaben Einblicke sowohl in das frühe als auch das späte Liedschaffen des Komponisten.

Lange hat man Mozart in Salzburg nicht mehr so mitreißend erlebt. Mit dem neuen Titus gelingt Neo-Intendant Markus Hinterhäuser ein Coup, der erhoffen lässt, dass sich Salzburg einer neuen goldenen Ära entgegenbewegt.

Wer glaubte, sich für einen entspannten Kammermusikabend gemütlich in seinem Sitz zurücklehnen zu können, der wurde schnell mit einem Brahmsschen Scherzo eines Besseren belehrt.

Eine interessante Mischung aus altbekanntem und selten aufgeführtem Liedgut singt Piotr Beczala im Haus für Mozart. Robert Schumann, Antonin Dvořák, Sergej Rachmaninow und Mieczysław Karłowicz stehen auf dem Programm, und es wird deutlich: Am schönsten klingen Gefühle doch in der eigenen Sprache.