„In the midst of chaos, how do you find peace?“, is one of the pressing topical questions that Joyce DiDonato asks in her powerful work In War & Piece – Harmony through Music. The Grammy Award winning mezzo-soprano fashions an intense semi-theatricalized concert production, including works by George Frideric Handel and Henry Purcell. Organizing a set of Baroque arias along thematic lines, DiDonato contemplates the interwoven worlds of external conflict and serenity, internal war and peace, and the challenges which they provide for every citizen of the world. Together with the period-instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro under Maxim Emelyanychev, the singer creates a dramatic atmosphere on the stage of the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. In the music of Handel, DiDonato achieves a “purity that enhances the composer’s signature formula” (Washington Post).
In dulci jubilo – Alison Balsom & The Balsom Ensemble
The trumpets’ carolling sound and the festive baroque repertoire associated with it are the key ingredients for this most atmospheric of Christmas concerts. Award-winning British musician Alison Balsom explores dazzling original compositions by Bach, Bendinelli, Biber, Zamboni, and Handel. The trumpet’s lyrical voice is also present in her transcriptions and arrangements of songs by Dowland and Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerto grosso in G minor, known commonly as the “Christmas Concerto”. The Balsom Ensemble, accompanying the “Queen of trumpet” (Hamburger Abendblatt), consists of “splendid musicians of historical performance practice” (Die Welt), all hand-picked by Balsom.
Daniel Harding conducts Purcell and Mahler
Daniel Harding and the BR Symphony Orchestra performing Henry Purcell’s stunning Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 6.
Salzburg Festival 2020: Sonya Yoncheva sings baroque arias
Contemplative, dramatic, spirited, lively – and all these facets united by absolute beauty and perfection: This describes the Baroque Evening in Salzburg’s Haus für Mozart. Sonya Yoncheva dedicated her recital to 17th- and 18th-Century music, together with Argentinian conductor Leonardo García Alarcón and his Cappella Mediterranea, all renowned specialists in baroque music. Vocal and instrumental music by Monteverdi, Purcell, Cavalli, Dowland and many others enchants the public – and a surprise, when Sonya Yoncheva proves with an encore how much Folk & Pop and Baroque music have in common… “Bulgarian Sonya Yoncheva currently has one of the most sensual soprano voices in the world of opera. Yoncheva stirs and soothes, with delicately sparkling melodic jewels of Stradella, Monteverdi, Cavalli and Caldara, but also with Spanish, Gibbons, Dowland and Purcell” Die Welt
Il crepuscolo dei sogni
Music from operas by Henry Purcell, Verdi, Monteverdi, by Richard Strauss and Rossini, by Boito and other composers from over 200 years of music history. A so-called pastiche opera. The conductor is Omer Meir Wellber and the director is Johannes Erath. Soprano Carmen Giannattasio, baritone Markus Werba and bass Alexandros Stavrakakis sing on stage and in the stalls. The new season of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo opens with a completely new form of musical theatre. An opera vision – without a plot that is concrete at first glance, explains director Johannes Erath: “But of course there is a common thread. Not in the narrative sense, in the storytelling sense, but it’s more of an emotional journey, like a rollercoaster of emotions.” PRESS “A hymn to the empathic magnificence of opera” (La Repubblica) / “An unprecedented opening” (La Repubblica Palermo)
Moment Musical – Hera Hyesang Park
As concert halls are silent and theatres dark during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, bringing performers and audiences together demands creative solutions. C Major Entertainment, in collaboration with Arte Concert and DG, is set to launch a series of professional live relays of concerts given by artists at Berlin’s legendary Meistersaal. The programmes focus on solo or duo works. This approach limit the number of artists, technicians and backstage staff involved, in compliance with government regulations, while drawing on the endlessly rich repertoire of chamber pieces past and present. Using remote cameras, members of the audio and video crew are safely dispersed in different rooms. The sixth episode featuring Berlin-based Korean soprano Hera Hyesang Park and pianist Sarah Tysman.
Moment Musical – Anna Prohaska
As concert halls are silent and theatres dark during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, bringing performers and audiences together demands creative solutions. C Major Entertainment, in collaboration with Arte Concert and DG, is set to launch a series of professional live relays of concerts given by artists at Berlin’s legendary Meistersaal. The programmes focus on solo or duo works. This approach limit the number of artists, technicians and backstage staff involved, in compliance with government regulations, while drawing on the endlessly rich repertoire of chamber pieces past and present. Using remote cameras, members of the audio and video crew are safely dispersed in different rooms. The second episode featuring Berlin-based soprano Anna Prohaskaand and pianist Caspar Frantz.
LSO Opening Night 2021: Rattle conducts 100 years of British music
Tradition is about the present – and the future – as well as the past. Sir Simon Rattle opens the new season with a concert that spans 100 years of British music. When Ralph Vaughan Williams conceived his Pastoral Symphony, it wasn’t the misty fields of an imaginary England that inspired him. He was in France, on the Western Front – where the sound of a distant trumpet unlocked a vision vast enough to transcend the noise (if not the anguish) of the First World War. But then, British music has never conformed to easy stereotypes. In this opening concert of the new season, Judith Weir reads ancient Taoist poetry, and finds ideas of radical simplicity. Peter Maxwell Davies attends an all-night party (and finds a bracing hangover cure) on his adopted home of Orkney. And because music never stands still, Sir Simon Rattle introduces the world premiere of two movements from a new choral work by Julian Anderson, inspired by the poetry of exile. Not what you might expect … PROGRAM Purcell: Remember not, Lord, our offences; Tippett: Praeludium; Julian Anderson: Two movements from ‘Exiles’ (world premiere); Judith Weir: Natural History; Vaughan Williams: A Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No 3); Maxwell Davies: An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise