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latest on Forbes:106 Years Mahler Eighth: The Best Recordingshttp://www.forbes.com/sites/jenslaurson/2016/09/12/106-years-mahler-eighth-the-best-recordings/#2da82ef9be0c
The Herrenchiemsee Festival is a royal treat for music, musicians, and especially audiences. Music doesn’t, in times where there are few kings and still fewer royalty that actively stoke the flames of high culture, enjoy surroundings like this anymore. Imagine, if you are familiar with it, the Versailles Hall of Mirrors. Now add six feet by which this hall beats out Versailles’, think the mirrors clear rather than dull, the arches of the windows higher and wider… and then sunlight flooding the floor, reaching through the white chiffon curtains as the evening sun goes down over Lake Chiemsee and the Herreninsel where Ludwig II’s castle sits like a golden Bird of Paradise (actually made of brick but clad with stone and marble) on an isolated nest of green, amid the sky-blue lake. Just behind the lake, the Alps begin to rise. On a sunny day, the setting is not just breathtaking, it is surreal.
These world premiere recordings will undoubtedly initiate a wonderful journey of rediscovery. I’m startled by the originality and immediacy of all the included works: High baroque magnificence woven with silver threads of austere Renaissance style… largely set in minor keys. Think of a melancholic Zelenka, perhaps.
See my 'signature' if you're interested, also my section in the composer’s corner.
Jörg Widman’s Violin Concerto (reviewed in concert here) is a lyrical tour-de-force in which the violinist, dedicatee Christian Tetzlaff, who has performed the world premiere in 2007 in Essen, doesn’t get to take the bow of the strings for 30 minutes. You can hear the composer’s will to make contemporary violin concerto with every chance to enter the repertoire. You enjoy the success of it; it is a 21st Century concerto for the ages...
...If David Bösch’s direction was short on story, whether imposing or revealing, it succeeded in its chatty ways and bleak-to-lively-in-10-seconds sets by Patrick Bannwart. The curtain opens to a naked black stage, scaffolding, and archival ring binders...
