| Date and venue | Title | Submitted by |
|---|---|---|
| 17-Apr-2013 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | A musical thrill at the Wiener Konzerthaus: Simon Boccanegra recorded live | Snapdragon |
 With the business situation in the recording industry being what it is, studio recordings of operas are more or less ruled out. The positive side of this is that the general public gets the chance to be part of concerts that are recorded and enjoy the tension such an event creates more often.Read full review... | ||
| 13-Mar-2013 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Luisi brings logic and inevitable joy to one of his last Vienna Symphony concerts | Caitlin Smith |
 The great jazz composer Bob Brookmeyer used to instruct his students that they should never write a solo section in their composition until it was absolutely inevitable that a solo should take place. In other words, he encouraged composers never to use a form simply because that form had previously existed; rather, they should create new musical events only when the internal logic of their piece, or their musical intuition, dictated. In this well-balanced program, Fabio Luisi’s direction provided a clarity that revealed the internal logic of all three works.Read full review... | ||
| 22-Nov-2012 Theater an der Wien | Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide at the Theater an der Wien | Zwölftöner |
 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... | ||
| 6-Jul-2012 Theater an der Wien | Tales retold: Hoffmann restaged at the Theater an der Wien | Zwölftöner |
 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... | ||
| 9-May-2012 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Eliahu Inbal rescues Wiener Symphoniker's Mozart and Bruckner | Zwölftöner |
 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... | ||
| 28-Apr-2012 Theater an der Wien | Olivier Py’s uncertain Hamlet | Zwölftöner |
 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... | ||
| 2-Apr-2012 Theater an der Wien | Strong storytelling in the Theater an der Wien’s Tales of Hoffmann | Zwölftöner |
 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... | ||
| 1-Jan-2012 Konzerthaus: Großer Saal | Vienna’s other New Year’s concert | Zwölftöner |
 Tradition has it in Vienna that while the Wiener Philharmoniker ring in the New Year to the strains of the Blue Danube and other Strauss family hits, the Wiener Symphoniker give festive performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Konzerthaus. The contrast between light music and more substantial fare was particularly pronounced this year, with the Symphoniker’s chief conductor designate Philippe Jordan leading a performance so lean and mean that ‘Ode to Austerity’ would not be an inapt description. I sometimes wondered if he was being too inflexibly joyless.
Read full review... | ||
| 13-Nov-2011 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Fabio Luisi and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra bring grace to warhorses | Zerbinetta |
 The Italian conductor Fabio Luisi has become an increasingly familiar and welcome face to New York audiences. Recently appointed Principal Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, he is primarily known here as an operatic conductor. But he has also been the chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (known as the Wiener Symphoniker in German) since 2005, and on Sunday the Viennese joined him in Avery Fisher Hall. While the warhorse program recalled the taste of the city’s other major orchestra--the arch-conservative Vienna Philharmonic--it was a fine afternoon.
Read full review... | ||
