Musical Heroics

October 30, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, MUSIC |

(Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Festival Theatre, Saturday 29 October 2016) On this warm spring evening, a presage to summer, Adelaide’s creaking, soi-disant theatre played triumphant host to an evening of welcome nostalgia: the legendary Jeffrey Tate, conducting the grand and magisterial prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (described as “one of the great milestones of music…if Wagner had written nothing else this one would have put him up there with the greats.”*)  The ASO, celebrating its 80th birthday, responded to Tate (who conducted the seminal Adelaide Ring Cycle in 1998) as they would have to Bülow, who conducted the Mastersinger premiere in Munich (curiously, not Nuremberg as Wagner…

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South Australia Venerates the Maestro

September 13, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, Classical Music, LIFE, MUSIC, Opera, OPERA, WAGNER |

12 September 2016: Thirty Years of the Richard Wagner Society of SA Inc. 1986: what a year!  South Australia’s 150th birthday.  John Bannon was Premier – remember him?  Ronnie Reagan was U.S. President; Bob Hawke was Prime Minister.   Glenelg won a stirring Grand Final against the odds. And SA State Opera, eclectic as ever, staged Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, at Her Majesty’s Theatre, then the Opera Theatre, which inspired three men of letters, Professor Andrew McCredie, Malcolm Fox and Ralph Middenway (with spiritual father Brian Coghlin absent but there in spirit), to convene a hasty public meeting on 20 June 1986, in…

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Wolfie’s Wheel Turns

August 30, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, MUSIC |

"Where's my 'Best Of' Compilation?" - 'Mozart's Last Days' by Hermann Kaulbach (1873)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was identified in Charles Murray’s Curious historiography, Human Accomplishment, as ‘measurably’ the most eminent and significant person in Western Music (along with Beethoven). Mozart finally gets his collected hits properly done.  (Now that Mrs Gibb has passed, we can note that Andy Gibb got a greatest hits record after one hit single).  Now, we see not only Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi, et al, but just about everything the great prodigy ever scribbled, a huge undertaking that will pose a giant test of his admirers. Deutsche Grammophon & Decca Records are marking Wolfie’s…

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Walk on the Wild Side

August 10, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, Modern Music, MUSIC |

Graffiti photo by By Thierry Ehrmann

Songs in Our Heart # 38 Walk on the Wild Side (Lou Reed) (Written by Lou Reed; released November 1972) [Dave Brubeck meets Nelson Algren meets William Burroughs meets Andy Warhol.  Lou’s most famous slice of urban depravity.]

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Simone Young, Schubert & Mahler

July 23, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, MUSIC, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

Adelaide Festival Theatre, 23 July 2016 The ASO, under the great Simone Young, performed a brilliant version of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, the conductor superbly engaged, dominant, physical; synthesizing and wrangling the musicians.  The highlight was her cajoling of the cellos in the sonorous solos, extending their moment and heightening the gothic mood of the piece. It made one yearn for the composer’s increased application.  If only he had resisted the lure of the pub, and not stayed in his brother’s filthy apartment, he might have finished the Symphony! (And damn you, syphilis!) After the break, we were treated to an intense and fiery 6th Symphony by Mahler. …

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