Musical America Blogs

By ANDREW POWELL Published: May 4, 2013 MUNICH — Adam Fischer keenly propelled a revival here last night (May 3) of Stephan Kimmig’s 3½-year-old staging of Don Giovanni for the Bavarian State Opera. Predictably, perhaps, the music fared better than the dramma. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller brought an evenly produced, warmly intoned Zerlina. After a tenuous start [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: April 24, 2013 MUNICH — Members of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra venture six times a year to Lake Starnberg, some 20 miles southwest of here, to play chamber music at the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, or “EAT,” as its website favicon reads. A mid-season program (Feb. 24) paired quintets by Mozart [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: March 28, 2013 MUNICH — Bavarian Radio chose to film Bach’s St Matthew Passion last month here in the Herkulessaal. In blue light. Drafted for the mood-enhanced venture were Karina Gauvin, Gerhild Romberger, Maximilian Schmitt and Michael Nagy, the vocal quartet; Julian Prégardien and Karl-Magnus Fredriksson, as the Evangelist and Christus; [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 21, 2013 MUNICH — As dramaturgy, Calixto Bieito’s new staging here of Mussorgsky’s 7‑scene 1869 Boris Godunov (seen and heard yesterday, Feb. 20) runs into trouble almost immediately. Set in present‑day Russia — identifiable by the up‑to‑date, thug‑police gear and the wall map in Boris’s Terem (Scene 5) — it [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 20, 2013 MUNICH — Bavarian State Opera this month dusted off (sort of) Ferruccio Soleri’s drab staging of Il barbiere di Siviglia. The Italian actor’s action scheme has devolved — presumably in his absence — into an unfocused free-for-all, permissive, at its saddest, of impromptu bopping and weaving to Rossini’s [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 17, 2013 MUNICH — There is a genteel inscrutability about Herbert Blomstedt. Authoritative, tall and silver-haired, he has never cut the profile of a star. His thoughts are calmly his own, locked deep behind a probing gaze and ungroomed eyebrows. Musicians play well for him, perhaps out of a sense [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: February 1, 2013 MUNICH — In a statement issued today here, Lorin Maazel shed light on the brevity of his tenure as Chefdirigent of the Munich Philharmonic: “I congratulate Valery Gergiev on his appointment as principal conductor … starting the 2015–16 season. I am honored to have been serving as the [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: January 23, 2013 MUNICH — With the city council’s blessing today of Valery Gergiev’s hire as the next Chefdirigent of the Munich Philharmonic, all three of the Bavarian capital’s globally renowned orchestras will be in Soviet-born hands by late 2015. This September, 40-year-old Kirill Petrenko of Omsk, Siberia, finally takes over [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: January 8, 2013 RAVENNA — Sacred music has lent gravitas to Riccardo Muti’s career since the 1960s. Settings of the Ordinary and the burial service by Bach, Mozart, Cherubini, Schubert, Berlioz, Brahms and Verdi have drawn his attention and received, more often than not, a disciplined performance. No, this is not [...]

By ANDREW POWELL Published: December 21, 2012 MUNICH — They all laughed eight years ago when the Bavarian State Opera set Verdi’s Rigoletto on the Planet of the Apes, and the production fast vanished. Naturally, then, the return of the deformed ducal jester in a new régie last Saturday (Dec. 15) promised relative normalcy, perhaps [...]