Carl Bohm News
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2024-04-20
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2024-03-23 15:27:00
R.I.P. Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)Maurizio Pollini was one of the guiding lights of my musical life: which is to say, he and his music-making were with me from the moment in my teens when I became seriously interested in music. More, composers and performers alike, are gone now than remain with us; I shall not tempt fate by naming those who are left. One of my very first cassette purchases – it may even have been the first – was his recording of Mozart’s Piano Concertos nos 19 and 23 with Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic. I love it more than I can say. Mozart’s music requires but one thing: perfection. Perfection it receives in what, I suspect, will always be one of my Desert Island Discs. In my first London concert, a Prom for which I took the bus up to London and back to Sheffield for a birthday treat […]
2024-03-16 09:57:00
From Early Music to contemporary: the Royal Festival Hall organ is 70 and organist James McVinnie is celebrating with a Southbank Centre residency
James McVinnie performing at the Royal Festival Hall organ with Bedroom Community - Sept 2015The Royal Festival Hall organ is 70. Built from 1950–1954 to the specification of the London County Council's consultant, Ralph Downes, it was restored and re-configured by Harrison & Harrison as part of the hall's reconstruction during 2005-2007 and it was re-inaugurated on its 60th anniversary in March 2014. Now, to celebrate the instrument's 70th birthday, organist James McVinnie has a residency at the Southbank Centre featuring organ recitals including a wide range of repertoire as well as an appearance by the James McVinnie Ensemble.Though James had played the organ once before the rebuild, he was not familiar with it until he came to play it as part of the 2014 celebrations. But he spent two years as an organ scholar at St Albans Cathedral where the organ was also designed by Ralph Downes and built […]
2024-02-03 12:46:00
BPO/Gatti - Schoenberg, Strauss, and Wagner, 2 February 2024
PhilharmonieSchoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, op.4 (1943 version for string orchestra) Strauss: Tod und Verklärung, op.24 Wagner: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and ‘Liebestod’ Berlin Philharmonic OrchestraDaniele Gatti (conductor)Images: Stephan RaboldRepertoire, orchestra, and conductor: a marriage made in heaven—or, if we are to be Nietzschean about it, in the ‘voluptuousness of hell’ with which he diagnosed Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. In this cleverly devised programme, Daniele Gatti and the Berlin Philharmonic took us through three works of explicit transfiguration, that transfiguration, transcendence, or whatever we want to call it in each case following something darker, more malign, more voluptuous and yes, both heavenly and hellish—or, as Nietzsche would have it, beyond good and evil. The Berliners followed their outstanding Schoenberg programme of the previous week, under Kirill Petrenko, with a Verklärte Nacht of equal distinction. I often have my doubts about the version for string orchestra – what does […]
2024-01-30 12:30:00
Salzburg Mozartwoche (3) - Mozart and Salieri, 28 January 2024
Grosser Saal, MozarteumMozart: Die Zauberflöte, KV 620, Overture; Andante for flute and orchestra in C major, KV 315/285e; Rondo for flute and orchestra in C major, KV 373/285c (arr. Pahud) Salieri: Concerto for flute and oboe in C major Mozart: Symphony no.38 in D major, KV 504, ‘Prague’Emmanuel Pahud (flute)Camerata SalzburgFrançois Leleux (oboe/conductor)Images: Wolfang Lienbacher This was an interesting concert of music by Mozart and Salieri, the lesser known music faring better for me than the celebrated symphony on the programme. There is nothing unusual in that, of course, especially in repertoire in which very different aesthetics are in play—and ultimately, it may be of greater importance to grant an opportunity to rarely heard music than to present a Prague Symphony to rival Karl Böhm or Daniel Barenboim. The Magic Flute Overture, well known though it may be, stood somewhere in between. Tempi were apt and François Leleux took […]
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- timeline: Composers (Europe). Performers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): B...