Helmuth Rilling: The Weimar Bach Cantata Academy – Lecture and Concert I

For this edition of the Weimar Bach Cantata Academy, which forms part of the Thuringia Bach Festival, the great Bach interpreter and promoter, Helmuth Rilling, invited young musicians from across the world to come to Germany to study and perform Bach’s cantatas in their authentic location in Weimar. 63 musicians from 18 countries were chosen from countless applicants who evolved in the shortest time into an excellent choir and orchestra with immense enthusiasm and great musical talent. This documentation by director Tilo Krause shows impressions of the Academy as well as of concerts in the historic Bach places in Muehlhausen, Arnstadt and Eisenach. With the Bach Cantata Academy Ensemble and selected soloists Helmuth Rilling performs and explains two cantatas in lecture concerts – an intensive course on the cantatas with one of the leading specialists of our time. PROGRAM Bach: Cantata “Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir”, BWV 131

Helmuth Rilling: The Weimar Bach Cantata Academy – Lecture and Concert II

For this edition of the Weimar Bach Cantata Academy, which forms part of the Thuringia Bach Festival, the great Bach interpreter and promoter, Helmuth Rilling, invited young musicians from across the world to come to Germany to study and perform Bach’s cantatas in their authentic location in Weimar. 63 musicians from 18 countries were chosen from countless applicants who evolved in the shortest time into an excellent choir and orchestra with immense enthusiasm and great musical talent. This documentation by director Tilo Krause shows impressions of the Academy as well as of concerts in the historic Bach places in Muehlhausen, Arnstadt and Eisenach. With the Bach Cantata Academy Ensemble and selected soloists Helmuth Rilling performs and explains two cantatas in lecture concerts – an intensive course on the cantatas with one of the leading specialists of our time. PROGRAM Bach: Cantata “Christ lag in Todesbanden”, BWV 4

Baden-Baden Opera Gala

“An extraordinary evening full of emotions!” that is how the press called “the concert event of the year”: Anja Harteros, Ekaterina Gubanova, Jonas Kaufmann and Bryn Terfel, four singers in a league of their own presented an extraordinary summit of classical music superstars. The star-studded cast took the audience on a long journey, exploring some of the most remarkable and popular operas and combining all the features of this supreme musical genre in a single concert: beauty, magical sound, tragedy, and overflowing passion.

Buchbinder plays Mozart

The Austrian piano virtuoso Rudolf Buchbinder, widely acclaimed for his technical perfection, is also a known expert for Mozart. Together with the Staatskapelle Dresden, where he was the first pianist to hold the title of “Capell-Virtous”, he plays and conducts three of Mozarts most beloved Piano Concertos, the concertos Nos 20, 21 and 27. The concert was recorded in Dresden in an unique setting, which matched not only the musical perfection, but also the first ultra-high definition recording of this work: right inside the Gläserne Manufaktur, a luxury car manufactory in the heart of Dresden, a stage was set up next to the assembly line with glass walls and oak floors.

Thielemann conducts Bruckner No. 4

Conductor Christian Thielemann lives up to his name yet again as a “Bruckner specialist” (Klassik Akzente). The Fourth Symphony is given in the presumed original version recovered by Robert Haas. This version differs considerably from the first, effectively published score, which Bruckner had only accepted as a stopgap so that the work could easily be performed. Thielemann brings out the tone painting very vividly in Baden-Baden: “These are tone paintings of the finest quality”, wrote one reviewer enthusiastically.

Thielemann conducts Bruckner No. 9

Bruckner’s Ninth – presented in the unfinished version in three movements – calls for no fewer than four “Wagner tubas” at the beginning and end of the Adagio, an instrument which Richard Wagner had specially made for his Ring of the Nibelung. As an avowed fan of Wagner, Bruckner included them in several of his works. Thielemann now lets them sound at full volume. The press verdict: “a musical and spiritual event”.

Anne-Sophie Mutter – The Club Concert

For a change, rather than standing on stage in one of the worlds renowned grand concert halls, Anne-Sophie Mutter spent two evenings playing in a tiny graffiti-scrawled nightclub in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin, jam-packed with hip young people. “I definitely wanted to put the audience in touch with the music I love and believe in, music that packs such a huge emotional punch. An audience which I’ll never find in the Philharmonie. So I thought to myself: If there’s a bunch of people who will never go to the Philharmonie, I’ll have to go to them”. Accompanied by pianist Lambert Orkis, Mahan Esfahani and her own Virtuosi – young scholarship holders from her foundation – Mutter performed works ranging from the Baroque to the present day – from J.S. Bach and Antonio Vivaldi (Four Seasons) to George Gershwin and John Williams. The music she otherwise plays behind a sort of cordon sanitaire in the world’s great concert halls acquired an incredible intensity, if only from her proximity to the listeners. The audience, to Anne-Sophie Mutter’s great joy, was equally euphoric in ist response: “The applause was moving. I will always cherish the enthusiasm of the audience in these intimate club appearances.”

Thielemann conducts Bruckner No. 6 & Beethoven

Bruckner’s music has played a central role in Thielemann’s relationship with the Staatskapelle; he launched each new concert season with a Bruckner symphony – now the Sixth, this recording of which completes Thielemann’s cycle of the mature Bruckner symphonies. For the Sächsische Zeitung this performance marked “another Bruckner triumph for Dresden” by revealing “the greatness of the work with a rarely heard transparency and clarity. It could hardly have been better!” Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 featured one of today’s outstanding keyboard virtuosos, the Soviet-born Israeli-American pianist Yefim Bronfman, in a performance marking the start of his residency as the Staatskapelle’s “Capell-Virtuos”. In the words of the Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten: “He has music ‘in his fingertips’ (…) ‘High School’ of piano playing.”

Festive Advent Concert at the Frauenkirche Dresden 2015

Since the first of these annual events in 2000, when the magnificent Frauenkirche was still a building site – destroyed during World War II, it was painstakingly reconstructed out of the ruins – the Advent Concert has become a new holiday tradition in Dresden, to be enjoyed by music lovers throughout the world. That appeal is reflected in the concert’s lineup of artists. This time they are headed by renowned Scottish maestro Donald Runnicles, featured “in the solid, German repertoire which is his chief glory” (Financial Times). His soloists are rising-star soprano Sonya Yoncheva, “charismatic” (New York Times) and bass-baritone Luca Pisaroni. Beginning in a blaze of glory with the opening chorus from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, the thoughtfully compiled programme features seasonally appropriate selections by Handel, Seidel, Weber, Mendelssohn, Humperdinck, Gounod and Reger. “A thrilling concert, festive, ambitious and impressively filmed.” (Sächsische Zeitung)