Alexander Vustin News
Russian composer
- opera
- Russia, Soviet Union
- composer
Last update
2024-04-24
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2022-12-22 12:58:00
I had a curtailed season this year, on account of illness: last night and tonight should have been my final concerts of the year. No one needed my bronchial insights, I am sure. As ever, calculation offers a blunt instrument, showing a little more than what has interested me—I cannot go to a performance if it does not take place—but how much more is open to debate; for by the same token, I am unlikely to go out of my way to attend performances of music that does not interest me. Likewise, as in previous years, I have counted one appearance in a programme only, so a Mahler symphony counts for the same as a Schubert song. Anything else becomes too complicated. Operas are both staged and in concert, and include anything treated as an opera in that performance, e.g. Handel’s Theodoraand Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire at the Royal Opera House. […]
2022-11-24 12:00:00
Wigmore HallAleksandr Vustin: Lamento Janáček: Piano Sonata 1.X.1905, ‘From the Street’ Valentin Silvestrov: Bagatelle, op.1 no.3 Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.31 in A-flat major, op.110 Dvořák: Poetic Tone Pictures, op.85 Leif Ove Andsnes (piano)Leif Ove Andsnes’s performances are always very well worth hearing; this programme, mixing the familiar and unfamiliar was no exception. The first half offered short pieces by Russian and Ukrainian composers, either side of Janáček’s tribute to František Pavlík, a worker killed demonstrating for a Czech university in Brno, followed by Beethoven’s penultimate sonata: however one considers it, and however clichéd this may sound, a sublime song from and to the human spirit and what it might yet achieve. Aleksandr Vustin, invited by Andsnes in 2019 to his Rosendal Chamber Festival, in what was only Vustin’s second journey outside Russia, died the following year, an early victim of the coronavirus pandemic. His Lamento, itself inspired by the funeral […]
2022-03-29 19:43:00
San Francisco Symphony 2022-23
Esa-Pekka Salonen Photo by Minna Hatinen, courtesy of San Francisco Symphony San Francisco Symphony announced its 2022-23 season today. I'm going to start out with the two most jaw-dropping items on the schedule: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Busoni! Piano! Concerto! with Igor Levit. This program includes the men of the SF Symphony Chorus, because of course no piano concerto is complete without a men's chorus. This will be the SFS premiere of the work. Levit also plays a solo recital, a chamber music program, and LvB piano concerto No. 5 on a program with the Eroica (Salonen conducts). Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater, the composer's second opera, staged by Peter Sellars. I reviewed this opera at its US premiere at Santa Fe Opera in 2008; it's a great piece and Sellars did a fine job directing it then. There's nothing in the press kit about who the […]
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