There’s always something inspiring about a veteran conductor working with young musicians – a special energy that flows between youth and experience, to the enrichment of all. In 1990, as tyrannies crumbled across Central Europe the great Czech maestro Vacláv Neumann joined forces with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the distinguished British baritone Thomas Allen for a programme of Mahler (his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen) and Dvorák (his final symphony). The result – captured live at the Alte Oper Frankfurt – has a quite extraordinary sense of occasion, as Neumann imparts a lifetime’s emotion and experience to his audibly inspired young players.
Salzburg Festival 2022: Bluebeard’s Castle & De Temporum Fine Comedia
The Salzburg Festival presented Bluebeard’s Castle in a double bill evening together with Carl Orff’s De temporum fine comoedia. In his staging of the two works, Romeo Castellucci, reveals the profound connections in their juxtapositio between interiority and explosion of violent power.
Salzburg Festival 2022: Bluebeard’s Castle
A pinnacle of early 20th-century musical theatre, Bluebeard’s Castle was composed to a text by Béla Balázs in 1911. The story of Bluebeard has its literary archetype in Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and tells of a wife-murderer who forbids his latest wife, who is driven by curiosity, to open a door behind which he has hidden his previous victims. Bartók’s opera develops entirely out of the dialogue between the two protagonists, Bluebeard and Judith, revealing an approach to the drama as a kind of spiritual and emotional force field. ‘Where is the stage: outside or within?’, as the prologue puts it, an invitation to the audience to ask themselves questions about the enigmatic nature of theatre as an allusive reverberation of the real. “Truly fascinating […] Outstanding: Mika Kares and Ausrine Stundyte.” (La Stampa)
Salzburg Festival 2022: De Temporum Fine Comedia
De temporum fine comoedia (A Play on the End of Time) is the Last Judgement, in a reinterpretation rooted in Carl Orff’s personal religious beliefs. The writing of the text in Ancient Greek, Latin and German took the composer a whole decade, from 1960 to 1970, with the essence of the work being increasingly determined by the apocalyptic vision of the Alexandrian theologian Origen, in which at the end of time even demons will be granted forgiveness and salvation. Brought to the Festival stage by Romeo Castellucci and Teodor Currentzis for the first time since ist premiere in Salzburg in 1973, Orff’s opera-oratorio overwhelms the listener with its primeval energy. The latter results not least from persistently iterated rhythmic patterns that involve a host of figures animated by a mechanical principle of motion that is translated into bodily movement scores by the choreographer Cindy Van Acker. “Castellucci and Currentzis celebrate music theatre of monumental sparseness in its images and an exuberant opulence in its means.” (TAZ)