| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 5-Mar-2013 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | In Europe series, Klangforum Wien surveys Greece |
 Give the Austrian body politic a victim complex to nurse, and it will gladly let off xenophobic steam. By now this well-oiled masquerade is possessed with Pavlovian inevitability. So nothing unusual then, when populist indignation about perceived Austrian vulnerability to the ongoing Greek crisis rapidly descended into ugly national stereotyping.
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| 23-Jan-2013 Theater an der Wien | Come dine with Trimalchio: Maderna's Satyricon at the Theater an der Wien |
 Born in 1920 to a Venetian bandmaster, Bruno Maderna became famous during his formative years as a violin prodigy and was told by his grandfather that he could gravitate to the mafia later in life and God would still look kindly on one who played the violin so wonderfully. As Maderna later became closely associated with the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, which have been spoofed in musicological discourse as the militant wing of the Euro-serialist tradition, the story carries a certain irony.
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| 20-Jan-2013 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Iberian curios at the Wiener Konzerthaus, with Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI |
 An aesthetic of tradition whose past appears as its present and vice versa, that resists or smudges the shifts of meaning which occur through time, informs music-making in Austria ranging from the waltzes performed by the Vienna Philharmonic on New Year’s Day to the more idiosyncratic impulses of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Extending beyond music, what is often packaged as the cultural present is defined by a perspective of the past so foreshortened and nostalgic that it frequently teeters into the realm of kitsch.
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| 12-Dec-2012 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Meister, Mozart and Martinů with the RSO Wien |
| Cornelius Meister has long been a champion of young Czech composer Miroslav Srnka, not only as chief conductor of the RSO Wien but also in Heidelberg, where he was Generalmusikdirektor from 2005 until earlier this year. Reading Lessons is a work commissioned by Heidelberg that now comes to Vienna as part of a broader Srnka focus in the current RSO season (just last month Nicolas Hodges premiered a piano concerto with the orchestra), though presentation as part of the staid overture-concerto-symphony format has done his voice fewer favours this time around. Read full review... | |
| 11-Dec-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays Debussy's Préludes in Vienna |
| Having only heard Pierre-Laurent Aimard on disc for the last few years it was curious to experience something rather different in the flesh, by way perhaps of that phenomenon, so often invoked as to be meaningless, of the artist for whom two concerts are never the same. I can say with some certainty that it will be some time before we ever hear a piano sound quite the same in the Mozart Saal, a room that habitually bestows brightness and brilliance in unforgiving quantities regardless of model or manufacturer, but which on this occasion was filled with a plush and intimate roundness.
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| 9-Dec-2012 Kammeroper | Kafka's Ghosts at the Vienna Kammeroper |
 Over the 60 years of its existence, the Vienna Kammeroper has commissioned chamber operas by Maxwell Davies, Henze and Glass and made figures including Reimann and Birtwistle better known to the Viennese.Read full review... | |
| 5-Dec-2012 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Grigory Sokolov in recital at the Wiener Konzerthaus |
 Grigory Sokolov’s annual visit to the Konzerthaus – always in December, always half-lit, always a lengthy affair – is an object of cultish appreciation for the Viennese, who are drawn to mystique like moths to a flame. Public reverence on this occasion did not however extend to the silencing of mobile phones and such a persistent chorus of ringtones I do not recall since hearing Arcadi Volodos, supposedly another local favourite.
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| 22-Nov-2012 Theater an der Wien | Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide at the Theater an der Wien |
 Institutional violence has been a running theme in Torsten Fischer’s series of Gluck operas at the Theater an der Wien, albeit with a lid kept firmly on the idea of actual conflict.Read full review... | |
| 13-Nov-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Ingolf Wunder in recital at the Wiener Konzerthaus |
 At this Mozart Saal recital the latest addition to the bumf which routinely overfills concert programmes was a flyer for an autumn sale at Austria’s main Steinway dealership, drawing one’s attention a fraction more than usual to the unremarkable fact that like the overwhelming majority of his colleagues, Ingolf Wunder is a Steinway artist.Read full review... | |
| 30-Oct-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Klangforum explores focused, southern side of Austrian new music scene |
 The Klangforum Wien has had its own row of subscription concerts at the Konzerthaus for the past 22 seasons, and a constant during that time has been the regular programming of Austrian composers.Read full review... | |
| 18-Oct-2012 Theater an der Wien | Il trittico scores a hat-trick at the Theater an der Wien |
 Following a string of misses, the Theater an der Wien emerges from its recent dry patch with a new production of Puccini’s triptych which offers a winning cast, the best playing heard at the house in months, and a smart production.
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| 6-Oct-2012 MuseumsQuartier Wien: Hall E | Le grand macabre at the Neue Oper Wien |
 With sub-Ionesco doggerel for a libretto, a patchy score and a disjointed plot, it takes deft stage direction for farce and satire to blend credibly in Le grand macabre, Ligeti’s 1977 operatic spoof on doom-laden prophesizing. It’s hard to say whether this production for the Neue Oper Wien, directed by Carlos Wagner, genuinely did that, at least judged against the lurid anti-materialist theatricality of the La Fura dels Baus co-production put on at ENO in 2009, and yet one image left purposefully unaccounted for amid the slapstick focused attention for the evening.
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| 1-Oct-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Spanish night opens the Klangforum Wien's Europa, global concert series |
 Featuring seven concerts programmed according to nationality, the Klangforum Wien’s 22nd Konzerthaus subscription series, titled Europa, global, wants us to listen with socially conscious ears. The aim is to determine how globalization’s impact on cultural identity has influenced the musical avant-garde, defined conveniently as the music the Klangforum chooses to play.Read full review... | |
| 15-Sep-2012 Theater an der Wien | Ulisse returns to the Theater an der Wien |
 Productions of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria which make the title character a returning war veteran, preferably one returning from a juicy topical war, are nothing new, and director Claus Guth doesn’t stretch the well-worn conceit much further in this listlessly vague staging for the Theater an der Wien.Read full review... | |
| 12-Sep-2012 Theater an der Wien | Vienna Philharmonic disappoints in Manfred concert |
 The risen Christ and a dramatic figure who resists the Christian promise of redemption make for odd conceptual bedfellows, not least of all in a Vienna Philharmonic programme which here saw Messiaen’s L’Ascension sandwiched between the Schumann and Tchaikovsky treatments of Byron’s Manfred.Read full review... | |
| 9-Sep-2012 Wolkenturm | James MacMillan conducts Britten, Vaughan Williams and his own music at Grafenegg |
 The position of Composer in Residence at the Grafenegg festival may as well be called Composer-Conductor in Residence, as the appointments of Tan Dun, HK Gruber, and now James MacMillan have established a tradition whereby the lucky candidates are not only required to be intimately involved with the programming and preparation of their music, but also to stand in front of an orchestra and lead the festival’s closing night.Read full review... | |
| 8-Sep-2012 Wolkenturm | Grafenegg Festival: Christian Thielemann conducts Bruckner |
 The success of Grafenegg, a relative newcomer to the Austrian summer festival scene, lies in the timing: held in the last week of August and first week of September, the festival has become an additional tour date for international orchestras engaged at the BBC Proms and Salzburg and Lucerne festivals, as well as a stop for German orchestras looking to take their first concert of the new season on the road.Read full review... | |
| 6-Sep-2012 Theater an der Wien | Joyce’s Ulysses and Evelyn Glennie open new season at the Theater an der Wien |
| There is a famous scene in the noir classic The Third Man in which Joseph Cotten returns to his hotel and is swiftly bundled into a cab that speeds off recklessly through the streets of Vienna. His kidnapping comes minutes after he has been fingered as a murder suspect by the locals, and once the car screeches to a halt he emerges, a nervous wreck, to encounter a gathering he’d forgotten about, or more precisely, never bothered to remember in the first place. Read full review... | |
| 1-Sep-2012 Großes Festspielhaus | Salzburg's first spiritual festival closes with Verdi's Requiem |
 Faith and glamour have bookended this year’s Salzburg Festival, a move met with incredulity in certain quarters and yet one not entirely alien to Austrian customs, if one looks to the 20 or so most glittering events of the Viennese ball season, which is promptly curtailed by Ash Wednesday (still observed by much of the population here with high Catholic asceticism).Read full review... | |
| 31-Aug-2012 Großes Festspielhaus | Leonidas Kavakos, Mariss Jansons and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Salzburg |
 Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw can claim the most enduring historical connection with Mahler’s symphonies of any orchestra due to their erstwhile principal conductor Willem Mengelberg, who invited Mahler to Amsterdam to conduct the Third and Fourth Symphonies in 1903 and 1904 respectively and after the composer’s death became one of his chief disciples.Read full review... | |
| 26-Aug-2012 Felsenreitschule | Zimmermann's Die Soldaten at the Salzburg Festival |
 The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant. The reason Berg’s opera Wozzeck succeeded, he argued, was not simply because Berg was Berg, but also because he had acquired the necessary historical distance to begin adapting the text to his own musical ends. Almost a century separates the play and the opera, and as Adorno puts it, ‘what Berg composed is simply what matured in Büchner in the intervening decades of obscurity’.Read full review... | |
| 25-Aug-2012 Haus für Mozart | Giulio Cesare in Salzburg |
 Giulio Cesare, an opera populated with manipulative characters that only interact with each other when shared interests are at stake, is a receptive vessel for a scornful indictment of imperialism and the dubious alliances it forges. With recourse to the obvious present-day target it is perhaps also a concept already fully mined by Peter Sellars, who in the late 1980s presented Caesar as a high-handed U.S. president out to further American interests in the Middle East, and revisited themes of Western moral hypocrisy in his 1996 Glyndebourne staging of Theodora.Read full review... | |
| 25-Aug-2012 Großes Festspielhaus | In Salzburg, unflinching Bruckner from Bernard Haitink and the Vienna Philharmonic |
 The Vienna Philharmonic has received a mixed reception at the Proms in recent years, but this programme of Beethoven and Bruckner with Murray Perahia and Bernard Haitink, which was performed in Salzburg this weekend and tours to London next week, will be sure to be met with critical approval.
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| 17-Aug-2012 Theater an der Wien | Rarely produced Rossini at the Theater an der Wien |
 Written in 1819 and belonging to the opera seria chapter of Rossini’s career, the florid score of La donna del lago doesn’t so much respond to as resist its unabashedly romantic libretto. Within twenty years of the opera’s composition Sir Walter Scott’s Highland epics had spawned a further two dozen operatic spin-offs, but far from venturing onto psychodramatic territory as Donizetti did in Lucia di Lammermoor, Rossini only seldom permits the emotional immediacy of an unadorned vocal line.Read full review... | |
| 6-Aug-2012 Großes Festspielhaus | Eschenbach, Lupu and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra in Salzburg |
 Established in 1987 by Leonard Bernstein, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra last year joined the exclusive club of youth orchestras to have performed at the Salzburg Festival and was immediately invited back for a return appearance this season. Performing under their principal conductor Christoph Eschenbach, the current crop of young musicians lost no time showing us why, with ebullient playing supported by athletic discipline.
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| 4-Aug-2012 Großes Festspielhaus | Mariss Jansons conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg |
 Strauss’ Don Juan has a long tradition as one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s more dazzling curtain-openers but a recent tendency, even with Gustavo Dudamel, who conducted this work with the orchestra last autumn, has been for more subdued accounts which downplay the brilliance and virtuosity of the orchestral writing.Read full review... | |
| 6-Jul-2012 Theater an der Wien | Tales retold: Hoffmann restaged at the Theater an der Wien |
 The venerable Viennese tradition of airing dirty operatic laundry in public found an unlikely proponent this season in the form of the Theater an der Wien’s mild-mannered director Roland Geyer, who, unhappy with William Friedkin’s production of The Tales of Hoffmann in March, abruptly sacked the American director and announced he would devise a new staging himself a matter of months before the second run.Read full review... | |
| 21-Jun-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Transcendental Song: Mark Padmore and Christianne Stotijn at Vienna's Konzerthaus |
 Dichterliebe is a Lieder programme staple but performances of Schumann’s anti-song cycle, the Op. 39 Liederkreis, are much harder to come by. The latter work fascinates me more, with its themes, in the twelve Eichendorff poems carefully selected by Schumann, of broken, alienated subjects longing for that from which they are cut off, namely love, nature, and some guarantee of existential wellbeing.Read full review... | |
| 19-Jun-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Lars Vogt plays Haydn, Chopin, Thomas Larcher and Brahms at the Vienna Konzerthaus |
 Lars Vogt’s unorthodox pianism knocks at Glenn Gould’s door without ever daring to fully enter his outlandish realm, and since there can only be one Glenn Gould that is perhaps just as well. In addition to the counterintuitive articulation and other Gouldian stylings his performances offer masterful soft playing and, when convincingly maintained, a taut sense of drama. Were all of this to somehow cohere, his interpretations would be formidable.Read full review... | |
| 15-Jun-2012 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Weinberger's Wallenstein in first Viennese performance since 1937 |
| Counting this present concert performance, public outings for Jaromir Weinberger’s 1937 opera Wallenstein may possibly have reached double digits, and such reception details, or indeed any information about the opera beyond a basic synopsis, would have made a welcome addition to the programme. With nothing but a few passing references in the scholarly literature this would have been a job for a specialist, but Vienna is not lacking in these and the programme note writer’s importance, after all, increases in direct proportion to the obscurity of the work performed. Read full review... | |
| 1-Jun-2012 MuseumsQuartier Wien: Hall E | Luca Francesconi's Quartett at the Wiener Festwochen |
 A first impression of Quartett, a 2011 chamber opera composed by Luca Francesconi and staged by Àlex Ollé (of the innovative Catalan theatre group La Fura dels Baus), may be that it presents an unapologetically modernist take on the Liaisons dangereuses story which will impenetrably hang together as some fearsomely Teutonic total artwork. But beyond a strain of radical music-theatre common in – if not exclusive to – postwar Europe, it does not succumb so readily to easy categorization.
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| 27-May-2012 Theater an der Wien | Wiener Festwochen's new Traviata: The wood and the trees |
 Deborah Warner’s new production of La Traviata for the Wiener Festwochen is dotted with dramatic ideas to much the same extent as flowers are strewn and champagne is uncorked in the Act I ‘Brindisi’ (drinking song), which is to say sparingly. A minor updating of look, done on the cheap if costumes and props are anything to go by, proceeds according to Verdi’s conception of a contemporary tale, but seems at odds with Warner’s reluctance to pursue the work’s modern resonances.Read full review... | |
| 22-May-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Mozart, Lachenmann and postmodern Beethoven from Ensemble Resonanz |
 1.jpg) The Ensemble Resonanz is a Hamburg-based contemporary chamber orchestra committed to finding bridges to modernism amid works from centuries past, and to that end this concert featured Helmut Lachenmann set alongside Mozart, and Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles rescored by Manuel Hidalgo. At times these seemed liked interesting propositions, but in forcing resemblances into resonances and not allowing for similarities and contrasts to arise dialectically this exercise inhibited the connections it was intended to make.
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| 21-May-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Batiashvili and Leleux: When soloists come together and make chamber music |
 The husband and wife team of acclaimed concert violinist Lisa Batiashvili and solo oboist François Leleux forms the backbone of this as-yet-unnamed chamber group, which performs as often as busy individual schedules permit. For some the main draw of an ensemble of like this might be hearing the music buffeted around by strong personalities. But, not entirely unpredictably, the self-assertion typical of many a concerto performance was not to be found, and indeed was scrupulously avoided.Read full review... | |
| 9-May-2012 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Eliahu Inbal rescues Wiener Symphoniker's Mozart and Bruckner |
 The Wiener Symphoniker has suffered recently from more late conductor cancellations than most orchestras, and things reached a peak last season when their chief conductor Fabio Luisi pulled out of a string of engagements in order to substitute for James Levine at the Met.Read full review... | |
| 5-May-2012 Volksoper Vienna | Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Volksoper Vienna |
 How to stage The Abduction from the Seraglio in Vienna, a city not exactly known for its sensitivity towards its Turkish minority? Mozart’s opera doesn’t, it should be said, contain nearly as much politically incorrect embarrassment as the rhetoric of some of Austria’s modern-day political parties, but the abusive boor Osmin and the Western women enslaved by his short-fused ganglord are images which no self-respecting German director worth their conceptual salt is going to allow appear – at least unmediated – on an operatic stage.
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| 28-Apr-2012 Theater an der Wien | Olivier Py’s uncertain Hamlet |
 Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet has riled and infuriated ever since its 1868 première, though for many it is merely an object of derision: one 1869 correspondent to the satirical magazine Punch admits not having seen the work but nevertheless disparages it as ‘Omelette’, a musical ‘burlesque’, and pillories Thomas’s fondness for drinking songs with the lines ‘To drink or not to drink?Read full review... | |
| 27-Apr-2012 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | RSO Wien ends season with Elisabeth Leonskaja |
 For a description of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s formidable and eloquent pianism I find myself drawn to the opening bars of Rachmaninov’s G sharp minor Prelude, given in this concert as an encore. Fierce attack and rigidity in the right-hand semiquavers brought harshness to the rapid movement of the opening, though when the rhythmic pattern repeats itself you realized how perfectly even and, by extension, desensitized it was.Read full review... | |
| 23-Apr-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Schoenberg before Beethoven: Peter Serkin in Vienna |
 Peter Serkin is a pianist of Brendelian demeanour whose interpretations of the classics are full of striking rhetorical contrasts: controlled but unpredictable dynamic extremes, always urgent and occasionally strident rhythmic expression, and a keyboard manner which is aloof one minute, playful the next.Read full review... | |
| 18-Apr-2012 Konzerthaus: Berio-Saal | Compelling Henze and Larcher song cycles from Mark Padmore |
 Tirolian composer Thomas Larcher has always struck me as a musician in the mold of that great Austrian stylistic dabbler, Ernst Krenek. A great deal of the twentieth-century finds itself reflected in Krenek, who rode the wave of numerous landmark ‘-isms’, a master of all (and his twelve-tone opera Karl V, the first full-length instance of operatic serialism, is a masterpiece) and exemplar of none.Read full review... | |
| 15-Apr-2012 Konzerthaus: Mozart Saal | Romantic sextets from the Quatuor Ebène |
 Regarded as one of the best young string quartets around today, the Quatuor Ebène have made a name for themselves with their homogeneity of sound, in equal parts vibrant and mellifluous, and the powerful immediacy of their playing. Hearing them for the third time in this concert, I was no less taken with this or their considerable musicianship, but had my reservations about the prominence of a certain Gallic sensibility in Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.
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| 12-Apr-2012 Musikverein: Großer Saal | The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra's Easter Tour in Vienna |
 It isn’t often that the Musikverein programmes Webern, the most underperformed of Vienna’s major musical sons, alongside a Liebestod from Bayreuth’s reigning Isolde, but then this was no ordinary Musikverein concert. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester is currently on their annual Easter tour and the programme on Thursday night, while eclectic in appearance, was consistent with their commitment to the European late-romantic and modernist traditions.
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| 7-Apr-2012 Wiener Minoritenkirche | Magisterial Bruckner from Vienna's Chorus sine nomine |
 A fair amount of Bruckner gets performed in Vienna, but it’s rare to hear a Bruckner Mass and even rarer to hear one programmed alongside a piece like Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna. The Viennese love these slightly outside-the-box mainstream programmes, to the extent that it’s rather puzzling as to why we don’t hear more of them, and especially given the surprising ways lesser-known hometown ensembles like the Chorus sine nomine can respond to the challenge of unfamiliar repertoire.
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| 6-Apr-2012 Wiener Minoritenkirche | A One-Per-Part St Matthew Passion in Vienna |
 Joshua Rifkin’s theory that Bach had no ‘choir’ in the modern sense may have gradually inched its way towards acceptance, but for all the heated discussion his research has generated, one-per-part Passions are rarer than one might suppose. Austrian conductor and choral director Martin Haselböck is absolutely convinced of the theory’s authenticity and promised in an excitedly worded programme note that this performance would give us a St Matthew Passion as Bach conceived it in scale and interpretation.
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| 3-Apr-2012 Theater an der Wien | A mixed St. John Passion from Stephen Layton and the OAE |
 They are sadly few in number, but some things in this St. John Passion I can report in mildly positive terms would include Stephen Layton’s hand-selected choir Polyphony, whose members dealt with Bach’s demanding vocal lines capably and sang in clear, idiomatic German; bass-baritone Neal Davies (a perfectly respectable if not overly engaging Christ); and Derek Welton’s robustly sung Pilate.Read full review... | |
| 2-Apr-2012 Theater an der Wien | Strong storytelling in the Theater an der Wien’s Tales of Hoffmann |
 Director William Friedkin doesn’t put a dramaturgical foot wrong in his Theater an der Wien production of The Tales of Hoffmann and yet doesn’t challenge, or even engage with, any of the opera’s Romantic positions. Did the notion that serious artists aren’t entitled to live life, for instance, ever have much currency outside of the 19th-century?Read full review... | |
| 31-Mar-2012 Theater an der Wien | Passion week begins in Vienna with Beethoven's Christus am Ölberge |
 This opening concert to Vienna OsterKlang festival was a reproduction of sorts: on 5th April 1803 a slate of Beethoven works including the first and second symphonies, the third piano concerto and the oratorio Christus am Ölberge was performed in this very theatre. All except for the first symphony were premières, though it is astonishing to think that Beethoven’s original plans for the event were even more ambitious (it is not known what was excluded, but he was forced to cut the programme short).Read full review... | |
| 29-Mar-2012 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Brahms rarities with the RSO Wien and Wiener Singakademie |
 The German Requiem is an unbudgeable fixture on the Viennese musical calendar, and yet selections from Brahms’ more obscure choral output are seldom programmed, with chorus directors typically citing the unfeasible ratio of rehearsal to running time for complicated works like Nänie (which is less than 15 minutes long).Read full review... | |
| 28-Mar-2012 Volksoper Vienna | Hans Werner Henze introduced at the Volksoper |
 On Saturday, Vienna’s Volksoper will premiere a double bill with a twist: Pagliacci will not be paired with Cavalleria Rusticana, but rather Hans Werner Henze’s first opera, Das Wundertheater. Based on a Cervantes tale, Henze’s forty-minute chamber piece uses an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ plot device to expose bourgeois hypocrisy and prejudice: a troupe travels from town to town putting on what is billed as a stunning theatrical spectacle, but only true Christian believers who were born in wedlock will be able to see the action.Read full review... | |
| 24-Mar-2012 Oper Leipzig | Redemption and Renewal for All in Oper Leipzig’s Parsifal |
 Leipzig routinely honours its native son with performances of Parsifal scheduled on and around Good Friday, which tempts a state of ritualized enactment best confined to the opera itself. (Vienna maintains the same tradition and is a magnet for self-appointed enforcers of the Bayreuth applause customs and their confrontational silencing of the ‘transgressors’.) The permissive atmosphere in Leipzig was a great deal more pleasant, with much of the audience applauding at the end of Act I and those with a need for solitude just quietly slipping away.
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