This staging of the Mozart/da Ponte masterpiece took place in 1977, at the Glyndebourne Festival. Although the conductor is Dutch, and members of the cast come from Eastern Europe and the States, a more British performance would be hard to imagine.
MAHLER: Symphony No.8 in E-Flat
Every so often there appears a recording so good, so almost revelatory, that we find ourselves re-examining the work recorded and our relationship to it, no matter how well we thought we already knew it. Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake’s recording of Schumann’s Dichterliebe was one of the more recent recordings to do this. Now we have Kent Nagano’s amazing reading of (and Harmonia Mundi’s equally amazing engineering of) Mahler’s massive Symphony No. 8. Many excellent recordings of this work already exist, and all of them bring a number of insights and extraordinary performances to the work. None of them, however, quite equals Nagano’s overall vision of the work, and no recording of the symphony can match the impressive acoustic accomplishments found here.
HELLER: Emblems of Eloquence — Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice
In her awesome Emblems of Eloquence, Wendy Heller tirelessly investigates treatises, myths, libretti and letters to illuminate the natures of “real” and “imagined” women who reigned over seventeenth-century opera as subjects of musical portraiture. From Dido to Semiramide, Poppea to Calisto, Heller argues that women and women’s issues dominated the Venetian stage. Librettists struggled with issues of women’s sexuality, dominance, suppression of desire, overt desire, covert desire, homoeroticism and misogyny. And all at the time when, “Venice’s absolute exclusion of women in public life was written into the organization of the Republic.” This apparent contradiction is at the heart of her eminently readable text that displays Heller as a musicological Simon Schama.
RACHMANINOV: Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op.13; The Isle of the Dead, Op.29.
The initial reception of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1 marked an unhappy yet decisive moment in the composer’s life, one that propelled his stylistic development and the trajectory of his career in new directions.
HGO Introduces Anthony Freud
http://www.houstongrandopera.org/press/press_releases.aspx?PressReleaseID=115
Festspiel Baden-Baden Begins Tchaikovsky Series with The Sorceress
http://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/stn/page/detail.php/954710
Il barbiere di Siviglia at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence
Like Glyndebourne, Aix treats Mozart and Rossini as “house” composers, but Rossini has traditionally taken second place. This summer, in Provence as much as in Sussex, Rossini comes off better. After its two disappointing Mozart productions in the Théâtre de l’Archevèche at the weekend, the Aix festival decamped to the gardens of a dilapidated but enchanted estate outside the town for an evening of pure joy, courtesy of a new Barber.
The Highpoint of Festivals Styriarte
http://www.diepresse.com/Artikel.aspx?channel=k&ressort=ke&id=494355