Your guide to classical music online
Vienna, May 30, 2019; Musikverein—I don’t know about you, but I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Hector Berlioz in the AM is a terribly bright idea. Certainly not the ingeniously over-egged, self-important frivolity of his Symphonie fantastique, not even with Mariss Jansons leading the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikverein’s Golden Hall, as was […]
Vienna, May 11, 2019; Vienna Konzerthaus—Even in times of inflationary Mahler performances, a Mahler Eighth is something special. It was notable from the moment you set foot into the Vienna Konzerthaus on this past Saturday afternoon. The mood was different. A little tense, a little hushed in anticipation of an “event”. The big wigs were […]
Lehman College, Bronx, N.Y; April 28, 2019—A visit last weekend to the Bronx Opera’s spring presentation at Lehman College of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado was a delight. Updated and free of any japanoisserie or yellow-face to “now”, with a back wall projection of the White House and signs reading “Titipu.gov”, we find ourselves in […]
Vienna, April 26, 2019: Vienna Konzerthaus—Perhaps it was a way of sending belated Easter Greetings to its audience, when the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, opened its set of concerts at the Vienna Konzerthaus this week with Wagner’s Good Friday Music. That greeting was loud, more impressive than mystical or pious, with capricious […]
Vienna, March 14, 2019; Musikverein—The Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna (ORF SO), soon to be Marin Alsop’s band, is—when it isn’t diving headlong into modernism for ideology’s sake—in charge of repertoire that’s mildly, mercifully off the beaten path. That makes it the interesting orchestra in town, because the other three orchestras don’t bother: The Vienna […]
Musikverein, Vienna; Saturday, March 16, 2019—There is either a glut of Mahler on the concert circuit or you can’t ever get enough Mahler. There is no middle ground. Mahler is appealing stuff on many levels, not the least that you can easily impress with the music at rather less rehearsal expense than you could with, […]
Vienna, February 20, 2019—For opera that’s lightly coated by the dust of centuries, Vienna’s State Opera House is just the thing: A marvel of a musical museum with mainstay works in workmanlike productions and with – all too often – surprisingly shoddy musical contributions. Anyone looking for musical theater with a pulse in the Austrian […]
Vienna, Musikverein, October 10, 2018—Orchestras have gotten better and better over the last 100 years (the time frame we can reasonably judge). Choirs have gotten audibly better every decade, too. But perhaps nowhere has the improvement—technically and expressively—been more astounding than in the field of string quartets. In the past, the outstanding ensembles stood out […]
The Vienna State Opera, better known as one of the foremost museums of opera, staged a world premiere–the first in eight years–on Saturday, December 8. The Tyrolian Johannes Maria Staud, steadfast contributor to Wien Modern and collaborator with the Klangforum Wien, had been asked to write the work and turned to German poet and essayist […]
92nd Street “Y”, New York, NY; December 1 , 2018—Peter Serkin’s Mozart interpretations have always stood out for their intimacy, transparency, and classical reserve. These characteristics certainly revealed themselves in the opening half of Serkin’s 92nd Street “Y” recital, along with a pronounced freedom and intensification of detail. Unlike pianists who play the B minor […]
Exclusive music reviews and news, created specifically for classical music listeners, from the serious collector to the inquisitive newcomer. This is not a fancy, high-gloss “e-zine,” but rather a simple, straightforward newsletter-style section of our website designed for ease of reading and packing the maximum amount of useful information into each issue.
©1999 - 2015 Classics Today All Rights Reserved - Website by FirstTracks Marketing
