Mostly Mozart, but definitely Beethoven

This year’s Mostly Mozart Festival’s opening concert featured the three great Austro-German masters of Classicism under Louis Langrée’s styilish conducting. The evening’s first soloist, Leif Ove Andsnes offered the dictionary version of what classical piano playing should be about in Beethoven’s third Piano Concerto – perfectly articulated, rhythmic alert, sensitive to tone colouring and never [...]

Read Full Post »

An English staging of Schiller’s English play

Schiller’s Mary Stuart is probably his most popular play outside Germany – maybe because the theme is so dear to English and the royal characters such a treat for actresses. In any case, this is a play that would resent the Regietheater treatment more immediately than others because of the instantly recognisable historical characters. In [...]

Read Full Post »

A hard day work for actors

Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage too deals with the theme of civilization and nature: a boy hits a playmate with a stick and disfigures his face. The victim’s parents invite the aggressor’s parent to discuss the situation and the situation escalates from uncomfortable to downright brutal. The whole concept is very clever – civilization [...]

Read Full Post »

Build it and they will come

Let’s be frank – everbody should guess that Lohengrin could represent the process of civilization and Ortrud nature’s underlying instinctive forces. Actually, you don’t have to guess that, the libretto clearly tells you that Ortrud is pagan and Lohengrin is a force of Christianity. Director Richard Jones is probably the only person in the world [...]

Read Full Post »

Babylonia has gone soft

Nabucco is a difficult opera to pull out. Although it is considered to be Verdi’s first truly “Verdian” opera, it is rather a torso of a Verdian opera. Without a truly commited approach from all involved, its many uneffective passages drain the dramatic power of the whole performance. The Bavarian State Opera has a good [...]

Read Full Post »