By ANDREW POWELL
Published: September 23, 2015
MUNICH — Post is under revision.
Still image from video © Bayerische Staatsoper
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: August 27, 2015
SALZBURG — Two beggars sat on either side of the entrance to the Haus für Mozart Aug. 6 as attendees arrived for Norma. As if this was not alarming enough — and it disturbed one’s thoughts more than the tense Résistance staging of Bellini’s opera inside — another two panhandlers were positioned with military discipline at the Kollegienkirche’s door the next evening for the Klangforum Wien concert. And on Aug. 8, before Il trovatore, three beggars zigzagged back and forth between guarded entrances of the Großes Festspielhaus seemingly worried that they could not proceed with their assigned jobs — for these were E.U. citizens dispatched by predatory gangs from Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, if media reports* are to be believed. Nowhere did the police intercept.
Gyrating in his nearby grave was Herbert von Karajan, the Salzburg maestro who ran the Salzburg Festival adroitly from 1956 to 1989. He liked his gypsies on stage, not on the steps. He continues to fret about his city as local people exile themselves to the suburbs, locally owned businesses die out, historic dwellings are gutted. Having launched two of the four classical-music fairs here, the Salzburg Easter Festival (in 1967) and the Whitsun Concerts (1973), he senses a certain festival fatigue now, with music visitors present eleven weeks of the year. And from Anif cemetery he projects his horror at the main festival’s fuzzy sense of mission and the preservatives lacing its corporate food.
Bärenreiter’s critical edition of Norma relates the tragedia lirica snugly with the rest of Bellini’s output, notably I Capuleti e i Montecchi. On the evidence of this performance — a revival of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s May 2013 staging conducted by Giovanni Antonini — it is a swifter, more emotionally direct opera than known in the 20th century, with barer dynamic contrasts, airier textures, incisive choruses and instrumental vibrancy. Its melodies sound more articulate now that they are less dilated, its ornaments more germane. It wants a bright voice for Adalgisa, rationally, and an agile Pollione. The title role is exacting but no sui generis few can sing. Credit the curators. Maurizio Biondi initiated work from the autograph score for Parma performances in 2001 conducted by his brother Fabio; Riccardo Minasi, himself a conductor, furthered the effort for 2010 concerts in Dortmund led by Thomas Hengelbrock.
Already fluent in this version, Antonini brought tautness to Bellini’s lines no matter the tempo or expressive purpose. Lyrical charm flexibly balanced urgency. His cast — the same principals as for Hengelbrock, who left the Norma project before Decca began its related studio recording in 2011 — apparently shared his enthusiasm. Cecilia Bartoli stalked the boards as a priestess and mother possessed (in a production that trades devotion and sacrifice for World War II realism and madness), her long lines and embellishments articulated and colored to keen dramatic effect. Rebeca Olvera portrayed the torn Adalgisa with tender tones and skilled musicianship, partnering Bartoli precisely. John Osborn managed the awkward musical and theatrical chores of Pollione with fluency, almost garnering sympathy, while Michele Pertusi made a dull, unexpectedly suave Oroveso. The Coro della Radio-Televisione Svizzera (from Lugano) and period-instrument Orchestra La Scintilla (based in Zurich) supplied due degrees of vigor, fury and reflection.
Rewards at the Kollegienkirche (Aug. 7) lessened as the music got newer. Sylvain Cambreling on the podium coaxed precise yet nuanced sonorities in Boulez’s orderly cantata Le marteau sans maître (1955), smoothing the handovers of the vocal and instrumental strands and validating the “fertilizer” role of Char’s bitty poems. Hilary Summers’ confident contralto injected spontaneity. Still a functioning church, the lofty space tended to open up Klangforum Wien’s neatly delivered textures, a flattering effect that also helped Olga Neuwirth’s Lonicera caprifolium (Goat-Leaf Honeysuckle) after the break. This haunting 1993 piece for ensemble and audiotape deploys its forces sparingly to spin a distanced, hollowed plaint.
Then came the same composer’s Eleanor in its world premiere. A reduction in suite form of her disliked American Lulu venture of 2011, it promised to distill that work’s strongest ideas via blues singer (Della Miles), drummer (Tyshawn Sorey), ensemble and taped samples. What emerged was a formally hideous anthem to the bravery in political protest, a coarse Neo-Expressionist collage of fragmentary musical and non-musical material awkwardly scored. Sticking out like dusty saucers glued to a Schnabel canvas were Martin Luther King snippets, stale and mournfully unimposing. (Rebecca Schmid has fuller observations.)
Alvis Hermanis’ staging of Il trovatore, from 2014, places the action in the galleries of an art museum energized in reds and enlivened with sliding tableaux. It advances ably enough in Parts I and II of the opera but then, like Olivier Py’s production in Munich, runs out of ideas. There were reassignments this year. Gianandrea Noseda took over the conducting; Ekaterina Semenchuk and Artur Ruciński essayed Azucena and di Luna. Noseda insisted on an outsize orchestral sound, from an eager Vienna Philharmonic, but paid little attention to shaping and informing Verdi’s phrases, at cost to the whole work. Semenchuk sang in lucid Italian with power, expressive control, and theatrical zeal, and just about stole the show. Ruciński produced handsome legato lines, giving full value to notes. He also served as a smart foil to the Leonora, Anna Netrebko, who reprised her warm portrayal. Francesco Meli returned as the capable, not so memorable Manrico. Adrian Sâmpetrean made a clarion Ferrando. The night went sloppily, though, for the Vienna State Opera Chorus, muddying Cammarano’s words.
Perhaps it was the beggars, but this visit has underlined a number of maladies at today’s Salzburg Festival. Politicians run things now. They use proxy managers whose skills center on balancing the books and appeasing conglomerate sponsors — not exactly what Hofmannsthal, Reinhardt, Roller, Schalk and Strauss had in mind. There is no Intendant, or artistic director, this year or next. (The last one, Alexander Pereira, was ousted for having too robust a vision; Markus Hinterhäuser acquires the title in 2017, but he served in the artistically dithering regimes that preceded Pereira’s tenure.) Old formulas are being followed for programming, without a demonstrated understanding of why. The last innovation was the Ouverture spirituelle, back in 2012. Perforce we have seen a weakening in chamber music, a sharp cut in new opera stagings, a thinned, disjointed Ouverture spirituelle, and a miscellany of star-driven programs where there should be focus and mission.
If the institution looks half-detached from its artistic origins, it is fully so from local citizens, who operate, whether farming families or blue-collar workers, at some remove from the city center. Festival catering is emblematic. Conglomerates, not Salzburgers, decide the beverages, the appetizers, the employment contracts, the terms of service — all the while claiming sponsor privileges and bragging of “social responsibility.” A 1-fl-oz ristretto costs €3. Chewy-bread gravlax canapés under nitrate-laced dill sauce are €7.20 a pair. In nearby Munich, where labor costs are higher, vying local caterers offer pure-ingredient fare for reasonable prices, and less recognition.
Some issues run deeper. Locally owned storefronts that forty years ago proudly displayed festival posters, leaflets, mementos and trinkets are now scarcely to be found. A beloved antiquariat vanishes, an Intimissimi opens for business. No large inn remains that is both of the town and independent. Austrian law, protecting building façades not structures, has allowed corporate vandals to rip out the staircases, inner walls and woodwork of a historic block of houses below the Kapuzinerberg to make way for the conforming spaces and plastic fittings of a chain hotel. Festivalgoers’ alienation mounts on the streets, where hoards of tourists from nations that supply the West’s fuel and factory goods now roam in packs, with prams, sticks, mobile devices and religious garb, oblivious to the city’s Roman Catholic roots and its place in music, never mind the goings-on on Hofstallgasse. Only Prague has it worse as a real-life theme park.
Detached and alienated of course is how the beggars feel. So what would Karajan do? He would press the politicians to tighten the laws. He would identify and demand remedies for the harm to the festival within the powers of the city. He would partner with the few local food businesses persevering in the center — Schatz Konditorei, Café Tomaselli, Zum fidelen Affen, a couple of brasseries off the Kaigasse. When he ran the festival, he lured sponsors even as he navigated the artistic direction, and driving Volkswagen’s Scirocco never meant betraying Salzburg’s interests.
[*Nine O’Clock: “Highly irritated by a large number of Romanian beggars taking over … , local authorities have initiated a large-scale operation … . Salzburg media [quoted Mayor Harald Preuner] as saying ‘these people do look for sympathy, but helping them would mean supplying all sorts of mobsters, because the cash does not get to the beggar.’” The Local: “At present, police … have very little power to stop organized begging. … Begging was a central theme in Salzburg’s local election campaign.” “At peak times, around 150 beggars per day have been counted in the center of Salzburg.” UPDATE, The Telegraph (May 25, 2016): “Salzburg banned begging on most of its streets on Wednesday. The ban comes just days after a court overturned fines imposed on four people by the Salzburg police for ‘aggressive begging’ because they said ‘please’ to passersby.”]
Photo © Tourismus Salzburg
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: July 24, 2015
MUNICH — Bavarian State Opera has confirmed by phone it will announce a contract extension for Kirill Petrenko before the start of next season, in September. With the month of August being a house holiday, the news could come as early as next week when the company’s annual Munich Opera Festival winds down.
Petrenko, 43, became Generalmusikdirektor less than two years ago but has quickly earned respect with his musical dedication, technical gifts and impassioned manner. His present contract expires in August 2018.
Although talks to retain the Russian-Austrian’s services longer into the future have been underway for some time, as company Intendant Nikolaus Bachler noted last month, the announcement will be coming at an awkward juncture given Petrenko’s June 21 acceptance of a surprise invitation to serve as Chefdirigent of the Berlin Philharmonic, albeit with no firm start date.
His move from Carlos Kleiber’s orchestra to Herbert von Karajan’s will likely mean a briefer extension than would otherwise have been the case and a phasing in of Berlin commitments that works around his long-range Munich opera plans. Hopes are dashed anyway of a full Petrenko “era” at Bavarian State Opera like that of Wolfgang Sawallisch, who led the company for twenty-one years.
The new contract will have three parties: the conductor, who is currently preparing cycles of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth; Bachler; and Ludwig Spaenle, Bavaria’s Kultusminister.
A perfectionist if ever there was one, Petrenko operates with specific capacity. Strain takes its toll. In 2007 he suffered “exhaustion,” leading to cancellations. He pulled out of a 2011 Fidelio in London due to back problems. Last December he was “indisposed” for his fourth planned Berlin Philharmonic program, and in March he cited strenuousness of assignment as a reason for withdrawing from the Bayreuth Festival in 2016 and 2017. He has just begun to relax in the saddle with the Bavarian State Orchestra.
What separates him somewhat from his nominal peers is his not being good at everything. Instead he brings ideas and expressive depth to scores he identifies with. Mussorgsky and Strauss and Berg are strengths.
Petrenko debuted at Bavarian State Opera with Pikovaya dama in October 2003. He returned five seasons later for a new Jenůfa, receiving personal acclaim. In July 2010 it was leaked that Kent Nagano’s contract as GMD would not be renewed, and immediately, before Nagano “quit,” Petrenko’s and Fabio Luisi’s names were publicly mooted. Bachler’s choice, Petrenko won out on Oct. 5, 2010 (to start Sept. 1, 2013). Luisi withdrew piecemeal from several later staged-opera commitments with the company.
As GMD, Petrenko has led premieres of Die Frau ohne Schatten, La clemenza di Tito, Die Soldaten, Lucia di Lammermoor and Lulu as well as a revival of Wagner’s Ring in Andreas Kriegenburg’s hopeless realization (Siegfried’s encounter with Brünnhilde reduced to bedroom farce).
Next season his commitments here include South Pole (Miroslav Srnka), a new Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and, not least, Die Fledermaus. The Bavarian State Orchestra’s six yearly concert programs, or Akademiekonzerte, will feature Petrenko in music of Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Mahler, Elgar and Sibelius.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: June 29, 2015
MUNICH — Noisy and sustained boos fell upon stage director Christiane Pohle and her team after Pelléas et Mélisande last night here in the Prinz-Regenten-Theater. Though not uncommon in this epoch of Regietheater, the intensity of the scorn for Bavarian State Opera’s new production was alarming coming from the dressy summer festival premiere crowd, many of whom were to adjourn to parties after the performance and whose circles deplore boorish behavior.
The fifteen scenes of Debussy’s 1902 drame lyrique to a Symbolist libretto by Maeterlinck unfold in Pohle’s conception in a hotel lobby, with Mélisande as a receptionist. Scene I, where Golaud nominally loses his way while hunting in a forest, has him seated drinking at the hotel’s bar. Scene XV, in which Mélisande will admit no guilt, takes place as a loose, group-therapy session.
The stationary lobby set, with hard, photo-realistic surfaces that look good on camera, is of a type costly to build and awkward to move, restricting scenic transformation in a way ordinary theatrical flats do not. After Golaud’s forest, Maeterlinck and Debussy call for une appartement dans un château, a setting devant le château, une fontaine dans le parc, une grotte, une des tours du château (from which Mélisande’s hair cascades down to Pelléas), les souterrains du château, une terrasse, and so on, a visual feast potentially.
BR Klassik carried the audio last night, preserving a musically imaginative performance. The Bavarian State Orchestra conveyed ravishing nuances as well as the burliness in Debussy’s score as led by Constantinos Carydis. Markus Eiche sang a lucid Golaud in properly projected French. Elena Tsallagova’s lovely tones proved ideal for Mélisande. As a mostly effective Pelléas, Elliot Madore followed bizarre stage directions: on his first date with Mélisande, for instance, he sat with his knees together while she stood. Okka von der Damerau inertly impersonated Geneviève. Peter Lobert as the Doctor outsang Alastair Miles’ Arkel, while Hanno Eilers, 12, of the Tölzer Knabenchor intoned Yniold bravely and drew the loudest applause.
Pelléas et Mélisande becomes the latest of numerous flops for the company’s impenitent Intendant Nikolaus Bachler, who insists on freedom for his stage directors — many of them grounded in straight theater and lacking flair for the visual and inter-disciplinary aspects of opera — without apparently recognizing his own duty to monitor quality during production development. Guillaume Tell (Antú Romero Nunes) and Věc Makropulos (Árpád Schilling) have been mounted here with jaw-dropping ineptitude over the last twelve months. Earlier stagings of Medea in Corinto (Hans Neuenfels) and Saint François d’Assise (Hermann Nitsch) went speedily to the dumpsters and to costume sale, the probable fate of this Debussy.
Photo © Wilfried Hösl
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By ANDREW POWELL
Republished: May 4, 2015
MUNICH — Word around town has it that Christian Thielemann holds the biggest committed block of votes heading into next Monday’s Berlin Philharmonic election. The rest, so the scuttlebutt goes, divide widely, in part reflecting the musicians’ open-nomination process.
That this Chefdirigent transition is much discussed up here in Bavaria comes as a surprise. The Berliners years ago lost their dominance among German orchestras, notably with the return to glory of the older Leipzig Gewandhaus and Dresden Staatskapelle, which since reunification in 1990 have been solidly funded by their Saxon Government and are now routinely televised under their conductors Riccardo Chailly and Thielemann.
But discussed it is, probably out of happy fascination that a body of 124 tenured musicians actually enjoys the freedom in this corporate-political world to determine its own artistic path. The process certainly beats officials deciding, or a clubby mixed committee. If voting on May 11 yields no “clear majority,” a shortlist will be drawn up and a second round held, at which time the less committed will shift. Naturally the winner has the option of declining the offer.
Another surprise, two weeks ago, was Mariss Jansons’ casual comment during the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra’s season news conference to the effect that “we will see what happens” in Berlin. It had been assumed here that the 72-year-old was not a candidate, considering the health problems that led him to resign from Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. Apparently he is.
Thielemann would be the first German to hold the lofty post since Wilhelm Furtwängler died 61 years ago, no minor consideration in this resurgent and recently enlarged nation. He might be perfect for it. Imaginative and commanding, magnetic and familiar, he would bring skills in Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner and Strauss that are unquestioned.
More pertinently he appears the best-attached of any potential candidate to prospects for robust earned incomes for the players, what with the global viewership he pulls in Dresden and the rapture he engenders in such disparate places as Beijing and Baden-Baden, Abu Dhabi and Vienna.
But for several reasons the Thielemann candidacy could collapse. He sits pretty at present in the refurbished Saxon capital, tied majestically to Salzburg through leadership of the Herbert von Karajan-founded Easter Festival, and so he may push for too much from an interested Berlin, for instance by seeking lifetime tenure in emulation of Karajan. Rumored to be right-wing politically, and not shy, he may open his mouth in ways that portend headaches for Berlin’s politicians, city or federal: he already has, in fact, in guarded support of the anti-Islam Pegida movement, crossing Angela Merkel’s position.
Most ruinously, and quite realistically, the entrenchment of his voting support among the musicians may produce an equally stubborn, larger, anyone-but-Thielemann faction that would only need to agree on someone else.
The divided nature of the non-Thielemann vote points to the dilemma facing the Berliners should electing him prove impossible. Far from a glittering array of options, the promise is of awkward rounds of eliminations driven by commercial requisites, institutional pride and vital timeframes. These are clear enough to seem to leave just one candidate, a dark horse as the grapevine discussions presently go.
To state the obvious, the orchestra needs a renowned, enthusiastic, hugely talented money-maker. Someone it can successfully promote and who can reciprocate. Someone who can put in a decade or more on the job, history suggests. The choices thin out abruptly.
Age, health, or crested fame surely bars Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Chailly, Charles Dutoit, Bernard Haitink, Marek Janowski, Jansons, James Levine, Zubin Mehta, Mikhail Pletnev, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Michael Tilson Thomas. What kind of signal about the future would such an appointment send? Sensibly, and maybe on advice, Barenboim has publicly withdrawn.
Conversely the Berlin organization takes itself too seriously to reach down to the unknown, as the Los Angeles Philharmonic once boldly did with Esa-Pekka Salonen, and in any case has no Ernest Fleischmann to guide and impose such an initiative. Even if it could, a number of superb young conductors have not yet proven themselves in the orchestra’s core repertory (and indeed Salonen never did): Lionel Bringuier, Constantinos Carydis, Eivind Gullberg Jensen, Tomáš Hanus, Michele Mariotti, Diego Matheuz, Vasily Petrenko, Krzysztof Urbański.
No, the Berlin Philharmonic is restricted to what should be a plentiful middle field: men and women mainly in their 40s and 50s. The talent is there, as always, but the “names” are few thanks to a generational blip in the star system.
Reputations used to be sealed by the record industry, where imagery, repertory assignments and regimentation by label created and conferred prestige — not least on the future Berlin Chefdirigents Karajan, Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle (all using English orchestras).
But when the industry imploded after 1990, so did this system. And two exceptions to the implosion do nothing for Berlin’s musician-voters today: in the Russian repertory, where pent-up demand for Western-controlled recorded surveys (suddenly enabled under the coincident Yeltsin regime) catapulted the name Valery Gergiev; and in the ongoing period-instrument movement, elevating William Christie, John Eliot Gardiner, Marc Minkowski and lesser talents.
The result is a dearth of famous conductors in precisely the age group Berlin must select from now. Stéphane Denève? Thomas Hengelbrock? Manfred Honeck? Known and most worthy, but not today the stars they would have become had the labels continued with their earlier promotional practices.
The names that can be shortlisted soon dwindle upon mundane consideration. Gustavo Dudamel, Gergiev, Riccardo Muti and Yannick Nézet-Séguin are contracted elsewhere until at least 2020. A Briton to follow a Briton would not sit well politically, nixing Ivor Bolton, Gardiner, Daniel Harding and Antonio Pappano. Limited appeal in Germany precludes Myung-Whun Chung, while Simone Young has rather overstayed in Hamburg. Nor can the musician-voters take someone who has stormed out: Fabio Luisi or Franz Welser-Möst.
Electing a conductor who is just getting started in another job, or on a sure separate trajectory, would cast the Berliners as unimaginative poachers, ruling out Iván Fischer, Philippe Jordan, Andris Nelsons, Kirill Petrenko and Tugan Sokhiev. And despite the admirable broadening of the orchestra’s operational scope under Rattle, it would never work to bring in a specialist: Giovanni Antonini, Christie, Emmanuelle Haïm, Minkowski.
Tough and vague, but key, is the matter of charisma. Rattle has little of it, and this fact has gnawed away below the patina of the Berlin brand, a mistake not to repeat. Star quality — promotability — is not the first strength of several theoretical contenders for this grand post: Marin Alsop, Semyon Bychkov, James Conlon, Andrew Davis, Ádám Fischer, Alan Gilbert, Louis Langrée, Ludovic Morlot or David Robertson.
Deduction, then, leaves one feasible conductor of renown. He’s thought of as Russian but in fact is Russian-German, having come to this country as a teenager. His name does not immediately come up in the context of this transition because he is little associated with the Berlin Philharmonic: he has led just a few concerts with the orchestra — his last program, in 2011, featured the rare Das klagende Lied — perhaps a cleverly planned fact that will allow non-Thielemann consensus, there being no “damage.” The players know him further, however, through other engagements in Berlin, where he happens to live, and no doubt through personal interactions. This season he conducts the Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, the Konzerthaus-Orchester, and at the Komische Oper.
He may well be a friend of Rattle’s. The two have Glyndebourne Festival Opera in common and serve as principal artists of London’s period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. If he is Rattle’s own idea of the right successor, the incumbent is assuredly now gauging and conveying the interests on both sides.
Tactful and politically astute, he maintains ties to two Moscow orchestras yet manages to stay out of the fray over Vladimir Putin, and after years as music director of Glyndebourne he made a public point of praising the festival as a place to work. Diplomacy goes far in a capital city.
His repertory is cosmopolitan, even if weighted toward Russian and German music. He is not celebrated for Haydn or Mozart but does embrace period-instrument practices. At the same time, he remains intellectually curious, venturing Schnittke’s Third Symphony for example this season. Critics are generally positive, especially in London, where his Brahms made waves two seasons ago for its traditionalism, but also in New York (Hänsel und Gretel and Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Metropolitan Opera) and Philadelphia, where he regularly guests.
Interestingly his present contract as principal conductor and artistic advisor of the London Philharmonic ends at the same time as Rattle’s in Berlin. Where will he be May 11? At home, probably. He conducts the Komische Oper’s Moses und Aron the night before. So a prediction: if naysayers thwart Thielemann in the vote, or his own hubris does, the next Chefdirigent of the Berlin Philharmonic will be Vladimir Jurowski.
Photo (modified) © Sheila Rock
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 29, 2015
MUNICH — Tomorrow, a year behind schedule but 70 years to the day since Munich fell to the Allies, a six-story-high, slatted white cube opens for visitors here: the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, or NS-Dokumentations-Zentrum. Significantly, it stands directly on the site of the former Brown House, where the fascist leaders maintained offices. As the center’s website points out:
“The City of Munich is aware of its special obligation to keep alive the memory of the Nazi era and its crimes and to inform citizens and visitors about it. After all, it was here in Munich that the rise of the National Socialist movement began after the First World War. Munich was also the scene of the beer-hall putsch of 1923 and of Hitler’s subsequent trial. Here Hitler found influential patrons who gave him entry to bourgeois circles. And it was here in 1938 that Goebbels called for the nationwide pogrom against the Jewish population. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Munich was chosen by Hitler as the place to celebrate the cult of Nazism and given the titles Capital of German Art and Capital of the Movement.”
Designed by Georg Scheel Wetzel Architekten, the 5,000-square-meter facility also happens to be a few feet from Germany’s top conservatory, the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, itself housed in the Nazi-built former Führerbau. Harshly its positioning and aspect interrupt Bavarian King Ludwig I’s two-century-old, Neo-Classical civic plan between Königsplatz and Karolinenplatz. Munich moved at a snail’s pace to realize the cube, which provides permanent and temporary exhibition space as well as study rooms. In contrast, Cologne and the Obersalzberg resort area, location of the Eagle’s Nest, have long operated similarly purposed learning facilities. Now this city can do the strongest job in furtherance of “nie wieder.”
Photo © Georg Scheel Wetzel Architekten
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: April 17, 2015
MUNICH — Although no news release hailed its arrival, a revamped website was launched today for the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. It is faster, navigationally flatter, and better geared to mobile platforms than the old pages, criticized here. To enable the advance, domains have been set up liberating the orchestra from the giant br.de, which until today hosted all three BR Klassik entities — the BRSO, the BR Chor and the Münchner Rundfunk-Orchester — as well as a panoply of services of parent Bavarian Broadcasting. In the bureaucratic context, this is revolutionary. Domain br-so.de will serve German readers while br-so.com is for everyone else. Simple tasks, such as finding the orchestra’s managers, are now as easy as they should be. Corresponding domains br-chor.de and br-chor.com have been established for the excellent chorus but for the moment resolve elsewhere. The MRO, currently on a two-week homeland tour playing operetta behind Jonas Kaufmann, retains its present site arrangement.
Screenshot © Bayerischer Rundfunk
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: March 13, 2015
MUNICH — This morning the Munich Philharmonic detailed the rehearsal hours put in by Valery Gergiev for a Stravinsky program here in December 2013. They totaled 14¼, a lavish allocation by the heavily branded maestro given his skimpy work in Poland and Russia the same week, to wit:
Dec. 11, 2013 — day of “unexpected circumstances”
Dec. 12, 2013 — Warsaw: sole local Gergiev rehearsal for Iolanta and A kékszakállú herceg vára, postponed by a day
Dec. 13, 2013 — Warsaw: opening night of Tchaikovsky-Bartók double bill
Dec. 14, 2013 — flight to St Petersburg; evening: Verdi Requiem
Dec. 15, 2013 — St Petersburg: La traviata
Dec. 16, 2013 — flight to Munich; late afternoon: 5¾ hours rehearsing Stravinsky
Dec. 17, 2013 — morning: 6 hours of rehearsals; afternoon: news conference about pedophilia, Putin, and so on
Dec. 18, 2013 — morning: 2½ hours of rehearsals; evening: Stravinsky concert
The rehearsal details, a response to a question last year, arrived after a vague outline from the orchestra of its quantitative expectations of Gergiev. Late this month the MPhil will announce its first season with the Russian conductor as Chefdirigent, and in May an ad hoc conference is promised at which he will reveal his long-term Ideen, Ziele und Projekte for Munich.
Photo © Wild und Leise
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By ANDREW POWELL
Published: February 24, 2015
MUNICH — Fourteen months ago irate journalists confronted Valery Gergiev at a news conference here amid his preparations for a Stravinsky program with the Munich Philharmonic. The confrontation wasn’t over music, rather politics, but it did lead to questions for the orchestra’s management about his hours and pay, made more pertinent when the Stravinsky proved artistically hollow and the conductor’s rehearsing habits became better known in this city. Management demurred, until now, just ahead of the announcement of Gergiev’s first season (2015–16) as MPhil Chefdirigent.
— How many hours of rehearsal took place for the [Dec. 18, 2013] Stravinsky program? How many were with Gergiev?
MPhil: No answer.
— What does the MPhil normally expect of a guest conductor, in number of days with the musicians and number of rehearsals?
— What is expected of any MPhil Chefdirigent as regards: physical presence in Munich; number of weeks of concerts per year; rehearsals; behavior or ambassadorship, including guest conducting, while away from Munich?
MPhil: Valery Gergiev has in the past as guest conductor rehearsed to the same measure and extent as all chief and guest conductors of recent years. At this unchanged intensity will he rehearse in his role as Chefdirigent from September 2015. [The number of weeks of concerts will not be detailed until the 2015–16 announcement] but will be in the same measure as for all other chief conductors. This applies to both Munich and tour concerts.
We have talked with him about the currently practiced quantitative framework (das bisher praktizierte Mengengerüst), a basis that ensures that he and the orchestra can collaborate artistically at the highest level.
Despite the Russian conductor’s future status as a City of Munich employee, the city-run Munich Philharmonic has refused to disclose the value of his contract, which runs as far ahead as August 2020. Says the MPhil, apparently overlooking their different status, “all guest conductors and soloists are treated exactly the same way,” i.e. with remuneration kept confidential. The contrast with the U.S. could not be starker: while Riccardo Muti’s mostly privately funded pay in Chicago, as example, is publicly stated, Gergiev’s earnings, paid essentially from public funds, are private.
Photo © Alexander Shapunov
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Sunday, November 22nd, 2015By ANDREW POWELL
Published: November 22, 2015
MUNICH — At five o’clock last Sunday afternoon, Munich time, three Mariinsky Orchestras began to play. Two of them launched into Pikovaya dama and Die Zauberflöte at the Mariinsky complex in St Petersburg. The third, here at the Gasteig, opened the accompaniment to a witty Shchedrin vocalise. Such are the possibilities with a roster of 335 musicians, the world’s largest. At the concert, though, the Mariinsky name was bizarrely buried. “MPhil 360°,” screamed the program book cover, “das Festival der Münchner Philharmoniker,” nowhere mentioning the Russian orchestra. The missing credit no doubt mattered less to Valery Gergiev, who now helms both orchestras (or all four, depending on how you count), than the furthering of his new goals: to better relate the Munich Philharmonic to citizens of all walks of life and to programmatically “bridge … German and Russian orchestra culture.” And in this the first MPhil 360° went far, as a lobby- and hall-based three-day jamboree with interviews and attractively priced music in varied formats. Indeed Gergiev himself went far, conducting as festival climax on Sunday five hour-long, off-subscription concerts centered on the Prokofiev piano concertos. Nine hands of Herbert Schuch, Denis Matsuev, Behzod Abduraimov (pictured), Alexei Volodin and Olli Mustonen partnered him at 11, 1, 3, 5 and 7 o’clock, respectively, while scores by Haydn, Mozart, Weber, Reger, the Munich composers Hartmann and Widmann, besides the Munich-based Shchedrin, offered mostly pertinent, mostly Germanic counterforce.
Fortunately for the MPhil’s amenable Intendant, Paul Müller, the extravagant project, at least Sunday’s marathon part of it, proved a logistical and artistic success, even if attendance hovered at 50% of the Gasteig’s capacity. It may or may not have been smart to let the Russians do 60% of the work — assigning them the first two concerts in addition to the five o’clock and leaving less than two hours of music to the day’s titular heroes — but orchestral standards held up throughout as numerous manned Medici TV cameras rolled. As if conducting 300 minutes of music was not enough, Gergiev amiably stood through solo encores and was available for interview during the intermissions. Not incidentally, he dedicated all the concerts to victims of the Islamist murders in Paris.
Hearing five pianists emphasized the disparity of the concertos. The scoring of the compact D-flat-Major work (1912) favors the orchestra, which was dazzlingly unchecked in this performance so that Schuch’s fleet playing could not consistently be heard. Volodin’s sparkle and linear integrity in the left-hand Fourth Concerto (1931) could not overcome the perception, in context, of a drop in creativity in the writing; the pianist more fully advertised himself with a blistering account of the Precipitato from Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7. Mustonen presented the first three movements of the madly insistent Fifth Concerto (1932) as a unit, with its Toccata a backstop on essentially percussive ideas. But he attempted a round open sound for many figures, quite divergent from, say, Ciani or Béroff. His Larghetto and Vivo offered unforced contrast.
The concertos from 1921 and 1923 fared best. Although Abduraimov’s light touch demanded cupped hands to the ears, he breezed fluently through Concerto No. 3, finding playfulness in its angularity, nonchalance in its lyricism. His reading had a crystalline quality underpinned by decisive, shapely phrasing in the left hand, qualities that rendered uncommon detail in the Variations. To the G-Minor Second Concerto, summit of Prokofiev’s work in this form, Matsuev brought power and evident consideration of its 32-minute arc. Robust rhythms, neatly accented quiet passages, a frame to justly billet the big cadenza, flashes of droll humor in the Intermezzo — and the pianist barely glanced at Gergiev, who took his cues where he could. As encore came Rachmaninoff’s picture etude The Sea and the Gulls, equally intense and played with command of the long line.
If support from the podium in the concertos wasn’t always sensitive, repertory choices elsewhere mostly played to Gergiev’s strengths. The day got off to an alert start with a technically fine performance of Prokofiev’s First Symphony (1917) from the Mariinsky Orchestra. Next came a real Classical symphony, Haydn’s Bear (1786), but this lacked elegance and, consequently, expressiveness. Weber’s Romanticism bookended the second concert and concerto. His Freischütz Overture (1821) benefitted from the maestro’s energy shots at vital moments; the 1841 Berlioz arrangement of his Invitation to the Dance shimmered transparently.
When the MPhil showed up at three o’clock, a closer rapport was apparent between conductor and players (versus two years ago). Reger’s harmonically alluring Vier Tondichtungen nach Böcklin (1913) showcased first the strings (in an Elgarian picture with chances for the concertmaster), then the refined winds, next the whole orchestra (in the duly macabre third tone poem, Die Toteninsel), and finally Munich’s percussion section (in an exuberant bacchanal colorfully scored).
Two hours later the Mariinsky musicians were back, still on superb form, for that vocalise, the episodic and folksy Tanya-Katya (2002) with creamy-toned lyric soprano Pelageya Kurennaya; Hartmann’s Suite from Simplicius Simplicissimus, assembled in 1957 from the revised version of his 1935 opera, in a lively, at times jazzy mix of styles relished especially by the principal trombone; the concerto with Volodin; and, wrapping up a long haul for them, Naughty Limericks, the gaudy 1963 Shchedrin piece, which poorly followed the Prokofiev but was loudly applauded in the presence of the elderly composer, a friend of Gergiev’s. The MPhil’s second concert began with Jörg Widmann’s raucous concert overture Con brio (2008), again unhelpfully programmed with Prokofiev. The composer-clarinetist then played, or rather milked, Mozart’s A-Major Concerto, K622, jumping about the stage like an excited six-year-old, before Mustonen walked on to conclude this engrossing, unrepeatable venture.
Photo © Andrea Huber
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Tags:Alexei Volodin, Aufforderung zum Tanz, Behzod Abduraimov, Commentary, Denis Matsuev, Gasteig, Hartmann, Haydn, Herbert Schuch, Jörg Widmann, Mariinsky Orchestra, Mariinsky Theater, München, Münchner Philharmoniker, Munich, Munich Philharmonic, Naughty Limericks, Olli Mustonen, Pelageya Kurennaya, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Reger, Review, Shchedrin, Valery Gergiev, Vier Tondichtungen nach Böcklin, Weber, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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