Alban Berg News

The Staunton Music Festival is kicking off its 11th season with a busy Aug. 15-17 weekend.

The Park Avenue Armory, that massive Victorian hulk situated between 66th and 67th streets, is well known for hosting the Annual Winter Antiques Show, where a well-heeled crowd enjoys its elegant preview ...

In David Pountney's staging, brutality threatens to become trivialized, but the grandeur of his conception makes the Armory a scenic landscape of the deadly sins.

In Theodor Adorno's famous dictum, writing poetry "after Auschwitz" was a barbaric notion, but what about opera after the war? The genre was pronounced dead by modernists who wanted a clean break from the past.

The concept of feedback is illustrated in an April 20, 2008 New York Times report : an extraordinary noise-related argument between the conductor and the Bern Symphony Orchestra disrupted the opening night of ...

The opera "Die Soldaten," written in 1965 by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, is nearly impossible to perform.

Sunday, May 4, 2008; Posted: 5:19 PM - by Chicago News Desk Lyric Opera of Chicago 2008/09 season preview to air live on 98.7WFMT Saturday, May 3 & 9 - 11 a.m. William Mason/general director, Sir Andrew ... via BroadwayWorld.com Featured Content

Viennese music of two very different eras continued to resound at the Lincoln Theater on Saturday and Sunday as the New World Symphony concluded its mini-festival focusing on the works of Franz Schubert and Alban Berg.

Michael Tilson Thomas' soulful, ruminative interpretation of Schubert's Symphony No.8 in B minor (Unfinished) commenced Saturday's program. The conductor stressed high drama and an aura of tragedy through the melodic glories of this two-movement torso.

Berg's cataclysmic Three Pieces for Orchestra (in the revised 1929 version) was a jolt to the senses after the well-ordered world of Schubert's romantic discourse. Even when the composer suggests a lilting waltz in the second movement Dance Round, the Viennese charm turns to horror. The ominous final March then recalls the concluding movement of Mahler's 6th Symphony, complete with repeated hammer blows of fate from the percussion section. Tilson Thomas offered an illuminating performance of this early 20th century masterwork, marked by lucidly delineated timbral variation and vast dynamic and tonal spectrum. Read more

Gerard Mortier , the brilliant Belgian-born director of major European music festivals and opera houses, is poised to shake up the cultural scene in New York when he takes charge of the New York City Opera in ... via New York Times

“The Red Detachment of Women": "The music mixes second-hand American pop with second-hand Strauss and Wagner, at one point mashing the Jokanaan theme from Salome into "Wotan's Farewell”

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century Alex Ross Fourth Estate, 624pp, 20 Bestselling books on classical music tend to be salacious exposes of monstrous egos or jeremiads on the death of high art. via New Statesman

Tyrol Styria Salzburg Carinthia Burgenland Vienna Music - Johann Georg Albrechtsberger He was a musician and musictheorist. via Austria.org

New York City Opera has hired the bad boy from Belgium, Gerard Mortier , as its new majordomo. via New York Sun

In the closing years of the 19th century, the German playwright Frank Wedekind penned a scandalous play called "Lulu." Published in two parts - Earth-Spirit in 1895 and Pandora's Box in 1902 - depicted a ... via Ottawa Citizen

NEW YORK -- Benjamin Britten's 'Peter Grimes' is one of the greatest operas of the 20th century. It's also funny and colorful, as well as tragic, and when it opened in 1945, some commentators criticized it as smacking of Broadway.

The Metropolitan Opera's new production, which opened on Thursday night (and will be broadcast live to movie theaters around the country, including the D.C. area, on March 15), incorporates both musical quality -- through a notably strong cast led by Patricia Racette and Anthony Dean Griffey, the leading Peter Grimes today -- and Broadway. The latter is evoked by the involvement of John Doyle, the British director whose English productions of Sondheim's 'Sweeney Todd' and 'Company,' in which the performers played musical instruments in addition to acting their parts, were big successes on Broadway in 2006 and 2007. Read more

Please submit listings by going online to metromix.com/listings. CRITICS' PICKS Apollo Chorus of Chicago : Stephen Alltop leads the choristers, orchestra and soloists in Bruckner's Mass in E Minor and ... via Chicago Tribune

James Levine conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra Thursday with violinist Isabelle Faust and pianist Peter Serkin. via The Boston Globe

Hugo Wolf String Quartet Ensemble Music Society Indiana History Center Feb. 6 Sometimes it isn't how well you play as much as what it is you're playing. via Nuvo Newsweekly

There are parallels between the Canadian Opera Company's current production of Leos Jancek's From the House of the Dead and a searing two-year-old production of Alban Berg's Wozzeck at the Gran Teatre del Liceu ... via The Toronto Star

“A daily plague, which in the aggregate / May average on the whole with parturition.”

I. As Sweeney Todd croons to his razor, "My friend, my faithful friend," more in love with its sharp blade than with Mrs. via New Republic

The Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society began its Bridges Festival of young string quartets Monday night, traveling physically to the North Side and musically to Vienna. via Pittsburgh Tribune-Review