Otto Klemperer News
German conductor and composer
Commemorations 2025 (Birth: Otto Klemperer)
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2024-03-15
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2024-01-14 14:18:00
Die Zauberflöte, Deutsche Oper, 11 January 2024
[…] of the cuts sometimes made motivation and even straightforward action unclear. Many will have known what to fill in, but many in such an audience also will not. No one need be bored in a largely German-speaking audience by a little more pertinent spoken content. The other major problem was Giulio Cilona’s conducting. We all, of course, have different conceptions of the work and how it should ‘go’. Not everyone responds as I do to Klemperer, Böhm, or Furtwängler; nor do I expect everyone to do so. In any case, the question is largely irrelevant since none of them is with us, and no one conducts Mozart quite like any of them any more. (Having heard Colin Davis several times in this and other Mozart operas, I have surely had my share of good fortune for a while, perhaps even for a lifetime.) Disconnection between pit and stage can happen […]
2023-12-23 13:03:00
Argerich/BPO/Barenboim - Beethoven and Brahms, 20 December 2023
[…] pianist, as conductor, and as both, I do not think I had heard him conduct the BPO in Beethoven. Even with him, it offers a different sound from the Staatskapelle Berlin, but needless to say, there was absolutely no rebarbative faddishness to it, whether in tonal quality or tempo. Instead, the opening tutti spoke in a heart-rending beauty of tone in direct line from Mozart, and owing as much in its fundamental harmonic rhythm to Klemperer as to Furtwängler (as has generally been the case in Barenboim’s Beethoven of the last decade or so). Every note mattered—and meant: as noble as the Fifth Symphony or Fidelio, though with requisite lightness of touch. Argerich responded in kind, though not without (quite rightly, as soloist) a certain wresting of initiative that yet always furthered collegial, chamber-music give-and-take. The piano part sang and scintillated, Barenboim and Argerich both bringing particular, complementary gifts to […]
2023-12-14 04:30:00
Is It Time for New Classic Recordings?
[…] satisfying as those gems from the past. I yield to no one in my admiration for the achievements of legendary conductors, orchestras, chamber groups, and soloists from the time when I was a mere pup. But to suppose that their artistic achievements never will be equaled is a poor bet. Fritz ReinerSo by all means, check out the acknowledged masterworks from the heyday of analog stereo. You deserve to hear how Szell, Munch, Klemperer, and Mravinsky conducted** or how Rubinstein, Horowitz, and Fleisher played. I also admit, quite cheerfully, that some of my go-to recordings still are those classics, ones on which the virtues of the performance are so amazing that they outweigh any other considerations. But the number of those "matchless" classics keeps shrinking as I discover alternatives. For all of us, there should come a time when we start updating – or let's say "evolving" – […]
2023-12-11 07:57:00
Opera & Democracy: Transatlantic Conversations & Concerts celebrating the centenary of the reopening of the Krolloper in Berlin
Krolloper in Berlin in 19302024 is the centenary of the reopening of the Krolloper in Berlin. It reopened in 1924 with a performance of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, as an offshoot of the Berlin State Opera, but under Otto Klemperer from 1927-1931 the Krolloper took on independent artistic significance, becoming a gathering space for the avant-garde as well as promoting the idea of inclusive and accessible opera. It was forced to close in 1931 and after the Reichstag fire in 1933 served as the seat of the last parliament – it was there that the Weimar Republic came to an end. Many Krolloper artists, including Otto Klemperer, were persecuted and forced into exile.The Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, the former residence of the Mann family in American exile and today an important German American cultural forum, is cooperating with renowned opera houses in Germany and partners in the USA to bring together […]
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