Stefan Blunier News
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2019-02-14 15:00:52
Bruch: Die Loreley review – a forgotten Rhine maiden makes it on to disc | Andrew Clements's classical CD of the week
Kaune/Hinterdobler/Munich Radio SO/Blunier (CPO, three CDs)The second of Bruch’s three operas is an example of the byways of 19th-century Romanticism Max Bruch’s place in the musical pantheon is guaranteed by a single work. His First Violin Concerto regularly ranks high on lists of the most performed classical pieces, while little else from his 60-year career has achieved anything like the same popularity. Born in 1838, Bruch lived through some of the greatest stylistic upheavals in the history of European music, but remained impervious to all of them; right up to his death in 1920, he remained faithful to the Romanticism he’d inherited from Mendelssohn and Schumann. Among the raft of his forgotten works are three operas, of which Die Loreley was the second. Premiered in Mannheim in 1863, it had a few years of success before lapsing into obscurity, and though Bruch revised the score in 1887 for performances conducted by […]
2019-01-15 00:06:00
Allluring Die Loreley - Max Bruch opera
Max Bruch Die Loreley recorded live in the Prinzregenstheater, Munich in 2014, broadcast by BR Klassik and now released in a 3 CD set by CPO. Stefan Blunier conducts the Münchrener Rundfunkdorhester, with Michaela Kaune, Magdalena Hinterdobler, Thomas Mohr and Jan-Hendrick Rootering heading the cast, with the Prager Philharmonischer Chor. Bruch (1838-1920) may be best known for his Violin Concerto no 1, but this first ever recording of his full opera should broaden interest in his output as a whole. Bruch's Die Loreley is a very early work indeed, written between 1860 and 1863, and shows how the composer responded to the influences around him. The text, by eminent poet Emanuel Giebel (1815-1884) was conceived for Felix Mendelssohn, whose music Giebel loved dearly. he so identified the text with Mendelssohn that he was reluctant to give Bruch permission to use the libretto. But Bruch (in an era before copyright enforcement) was […]
2015-08-14 02:03:30
Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”: Two versions. The premiere of Stravinsky’s ‘Le sacre du printemps ’ is legendary. It caused a full-blown scandal in Paris in 1913 even though the previous year the composer had participated in the premiere of the duo piano version of this epochal work. On this CD, we hear both the piano version and the orchestral version. Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring for piano four hands, performed by the Piano Duo Trenkner Speidel. The Rite of Spring, as performed by the Beethoven Orchester Bonn, Stefan Blunier conducting. On this CD, the Trenkner-Speidel Piano Duo presents first the version for piano four hands. Even years later Claude Debussy wrote that the memory of this premiere was like “a beautiful nightmare.” He supplied the second pair of hands during its performance, and from that time forth his admiration for his colleague, who was twenty years his junior, went over into […]
Norman Lebrecht - Slipped disc
2015-05-17 14:48:27
German orchestra vote 98-2 for next maestro, and get vetoed
Trouble at the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn, where music director Stefan Blunier is on his way out. The players held a ballot for his successor and voted overwhelmingly – and with a decisive clarity that must be envied in Berlin – for the experienced, Munich-born Jun Märkl as the next chief conductor. But a selection committee consisting of Beethovenfest director Nike Wagner (pictured), the Bonn theatre manager, Bernhard Helmich, and a musicologist Peter Gülke have ignored the musicians’ decision and handed a contract to the Frenchman, Marc Piollet. Our man on the spot says local bureaucrats wield far too much power in Bonn, believing they are still running the German capital, rather than an aimless ghost town. This will not end well.
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