Happy Birthday Hector!

December 11, 2017 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, MUSIC, Opera |

Berlioz conducting (by Louis Reybaud)

Hector Berlioz (11 December 1803 – 8 March 1869) was treated shamefully by his countrymen.  His works were seminal and influential upon, among others, Wagner himself. He certainly didn’t get the best press in his career, and his somewhat doleful nature made him the butt of those with a skerrick of natural humour: Yet as his great memoir shows, Berlioz knew he had something and you only have to play a few of his recordings to appreciate that: For example,  the Symphonie fantastique. And his Faust. Even Les Troyens, with its Wagnerian length, is worth its salt. And then consider his overtures based…

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Being Wagner

(by Simon Callow) (2017) Wagner was the Richard Nixon of Art: Revered, and reviled. Hugely accomplished and hugely flawed. Shining Knight and Scaly Dragon. So many words have been written by him, about him, for him and against him that when our literary friend Janelle sent us this book as a gift, it evoked a wan sigh – another Wagner book by an enthusiastic amateur, you might say!  Quelle Horreur you might say! Well, you all ought to be ashamed of yourselves!  This is a lovely book, full of sound insight and as easy to slip between its sheets as…

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The Screaming Skull

October 21, 2017 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, MUSIC |

Sir Georg Solti was born today (21 October) in 1912. The screaming skull with the over-paced tempo came from the Max Reinhardt school of conducting… But his passion was for exactitude, and that’s what the greatest conductors exact from their orchestras. Whether they are beloved, feared, or roundly hated, is beside the point. They wring the great performances from their thoroughbreds – that is the point.

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Vale Jeffrey Tate

June 7, 2017 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classical Music, MUSIC, Opera, OPERA |

Sir Jeffrey Tate (28 April 1943 to 2 June 2017) will be greatly missed. He died of a heart attack in Italy, after a lifetime dedicated to great music. Initially mentored by the ‘Screaming Skull’ (Georg Solti), he overcame profound disabilities to become one of the great modern conductors, appearing at Covent Garden and the New York Met, among others. He was principal conductor at Covent Garden, English Chamber Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic, San Carlo Theatre in Naples, and the Hamburg and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras. It was whilst he was in Adelaide that he conducted the first Australian Ring Cycle (1998) and he recently returned…

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How Much I Lied

(Image by Jo Kuehn)

THE LIEDER TRADITION Schubert’s Winter Journey – Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge (2015) Deborah Humble sings Wagner & Brahms (Adelaide, 11 February 2017) The German lieder tradition sets romantic poetry to music and performs it with raw emotion, usually to a very simple musical accompaniment such as piano or guitar.  It is a broader part of a long line of love songs, from the French troubadours like Villon to the German lieder composers up to and in the nineteenth century, all the way to Tin Pan Alley and the torch songs floating out the windows of the Brill Building.  And beyond – modern pop songs have often…

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