Paul Dessau News
German composer and conductor (1894-1979)
Commemorations 2024 (Birth: Paul Dessau)
- opera, symphony
- German Democratic Republic
- composer, conductor, musicologist, university teacher, film score composer, musician
Last update
2024-04-21
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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2023-12-19 16:22:40
Locke’s List for 2023: Notable Operatic Recordings Plus
[…] is filled out with a splendid performance of Weill’s Four Walt Whitman Songs, featuring Thomas Hampson who, in 2001, was in his mid-career prime. Other quite viable and even fascinating works for the musical stage that have drifted out of general consciousness now prove their credentials on disc (or, of course, streaming): Swiss composer Richard Flury’s 1962 Der schlimm-heilige Vitalis (about a sex-obsessed early Christian priest who learns to lighten up), East German composer Paul Dessau’s 1996 Lanzelot (satirical and, in its music, stylistically kaleidoscopic), and Bohuslav Martinů’s Larmes de couteau and Comedy on the Bridge (one-act operas, with music deftly pointing up the semi-comical, sometimes surrealistic librettos). From our own day and country come Jonathan Berger’s Mỹ Lai, an enormously effective retelling of an American officer’s attempt to stop a massacre, by American troops, of innocent civilians in that Vietnamese town—the work features tenor Rinde Eckert, multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Vanessa […]
2021-07-01 16:26:00
Waterloo Festival (5) – Isserlis, Haywood, Bruch, Strauss, Dvořák, and Le Beau, 24 June 2021
[…] darkest of times, merits our deepest gratitude; it certainly has mine. This long-delayed concert from Steven Isserlis, now with pianist Sam Haywood, made for a splendid finale—at least for now. First up was Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, treated to a performance of High Romantic expressivity, balanced with great dignity, Haywood’s sensitivity as accompanist crucial here. Bruch’s piece is very different, of course, from Schoenberg’s Kol nidre for speaker, chorus, and orchestra. Schoenberg wrote to Paul Dessau that ‘one of my principal tasks’ had been to ‘vitriolize away the cello-sentimentality of the Bruchs etc., lending this decree the dignity of a law, of an “edict”.’ Whatever one thinks of that, one probably knows what he meant. Dignity takes many forms, however, as does sentimentality. It would have taken a harder heart than mine not to admire and enjoy so committed and freely romantic a performance. The way the music subsided just […]
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