Kurt Sommer News
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2024-03-29
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2023-07-13 09:43:52
2022-04-14 14:14:00
Richard Wagner and the Nationalisation of Feeling, exhibition at Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin
[…] more common recently. We have scenes from Barrie Kosky’s (to my mind) misguided production of Die Meistersinger presented quite uncritically, along with an intriguing sound-installation of Kosky’s, ‘Schwarzalbenreich’, in which he makes the case you would expect, yet far more interestingly—and with evident commitment—than the rest of this section. The ‘Epilogue’ again has some excellent exhibits: a Lohengrin chocolate bar, a 1933 Bayreuth playbill for Die Meistersingerand an August 1939 poster for a Berliner Sommer-Festspiele Rienzi. It also, incredibly, claims that when Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow ‘coined the term Nibelungentreue (Nibelung loyalty) in 1909, he was using something that went back all the way to the Ring. Apparently, Bülow and the person who wrote this were both unaware of a certain mediaeval epic. Wagner, you see, was responsible for the First as well as the Second World War. A 1952 edition of Adorno’s Versuch über Wagner is, bafflingly for […]
2021-10-20 08:37:41
Birdsong on the River: Ailish Tynan, Ian Wilson and James Gilchrist at the Oxford Lieder Festival
[…] setting but one by Hugo Wolf which brings out more the sense of rapture and sexual anticipation in the text with Tynan delivering it with a sense of wonder allied to slow sensuality. Birdsong in music would not be complete without Olivier Messiaen and Ian Wilson was accompanied by Libby Burgess in Messiaen's haunting Vocalise from 1935, in fact commissioned for a vocal tutor which included vocalises by Ravel and Rachmaninov! Mahler's early Ablösung im Sommer from Lieder und Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit gave us an engaging story complete with hints of more popular music in the piano. Then Judith Weir's intriguing Fish Bird, setting an English version of a text from Taoist philosophy, a deceptively simple piece which had you both entrance and wanting to learn more. This group ended with a final recorder piece, Music for a bird by Hans-Martin Linde (born 1930) from 1968, which uses all […]
2021-10-12 18:12:00
Wigmore Hall Zemlinsky: Walzer-Gesänge nach toskanischen Volksliedern, op.6 Berg: Sieben frühe Lieder Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn: ‘Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?’, ‘Das irdische Leben’, ‘Ablösung im Sommer’, ‘Scheiden und Meiden’, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, ‘Rheinlegendchen’, ‘Die himmlische Leben’ Christina Gansch (soprano) Malcolm Martineau (piano) Song in particular and vocal music more generally were of great importance to Zemlinsky, Berg, and Mahler. In Zemlinsky’s case, more than half of his songs were composed in a short period from 1898 to 1901, these Walzer-Gesänger(1898) after Tuscan folksongs (translated by Ferdinand Gregorovius) included. One falls, perhaps as much out of habit as conviction, upon the word ‘Brahmsian’, but are they really, the obvious Liebeslieder precedent notwithstanding? There are certainly elements that look so on the page; perhaps they would sound more so in certain performances. Here—only here—I felt at times a mismatch between vocal performance and material. Perhaps it was more a matter […]
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