Rosalind von Schirach News
German opera singer (1898-1981)
- soprano
- opera singer
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2024-04-23
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2021-06-09 07:13:42
Festmusik: The gorgeous textures of Richard Strauss writing for brass stand out on this disc from Onyx Brass and friends inspired by a family cache of letters
[…] No. 1 (1861 – 62), Mendelssohn's chorus Die Frauen und die Sänger (1845), Rubinstein's piano Nocturne, Op. 71 No. 1 (1867), and Robert Franz's song Frühlingsblick, Op. 52 No. 6 (1884).Strauss' Festmusik was written in gratitude for having been awarded Vienna's Beethoven Prize. By the time he came to write it in 1943, Strauss' relationship with the Nazis was sour indeed with worries about his Jewish daughter-in-law and her sons. But Vienna’s Gauleiter, Baldur von Schirach, was a long-time admirer of the composer so Strauss felt somewhat more comfortable in Vienna. The work was commissioned for the Viennese Corp of Trumpeters, whose players were drawn from three of the city’s orchestras which perhaps explains the music's complexity and challenge. It is, however, a terrific piece, and the players on this disc do it full justice. It starts out wonderfully mellow late Strauss, but there are more complex passages and some […]
2018-06-13 11:48:00
Capriccio, Garsington Opera, 9 June 2018
[…] apolitical, especially at times such as this, may actually be read as highly political, whatever Strauss’s – or anyone else’s – straightforward intention. Perhaps the beauty of the costumes, the Countess (Miah Persson) truly resembling a star from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the servants’ livery truly impeccable, hints at something more; perhaps it does not. That ambiguity is welcome, but might we not have had a little more? One need not have Baldur von Schirach on stage to listen to the opening sextet – although why not? – to hint at something more troubling. (The sextet had its private premiere at Schirach’s villa, the Vienna Gauleiter having helped Strauss secure his Viennese Belvedere home. In return, moreover, for the composer playing his part in furthering Viennese musical life, Schirach, the only defendant other than Albert Speer to speak against Hitler at Nuremberg, had offered protection for Strauss’s Jewish daughter-in-law, […]
Norman Lebrecht - Slipped disc
2017-08-03 12:41:35
The papers of the Austrian conductor Karl Böhm have been consigned to the University of Salzburg, which will curate and make them accessible to researchers. Although the acquisition is being presented in a positive light, the announcement makes clear that Böhm twice accepted key positions from Adolf Hitler – as music director of the Semper Oper in Dresden and later at the Vienna State Opera. He also lived in a mansion that had been stolen from Jewish owners and presented to him by the Vienna Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach. Curiously, Böhm never joined the Nazi party though he made no secret of his enthusiastic support for its aims. Böhm died in August 1981. Read on here. Tha Salzburg Festival describes him as its most influential post-War conductor, after Herbert von Karajan.
Norman Lebrecht - Slipped disc
2016-12-12 17:05:06
Vienna completes return of Nazi-stolen art
[…] illegal NS organization cells at the Austrian state theaters, which included the Vienna State Opera. The close ties between Loos and Wilhelm Jerger (of the VPO) were initiated at that time, and Jerger made use of this contact to obtain the release of Josef Geringer from the Dachau concentration camp. The actual handing-over of the painting, probably in Vienna, is not documented in the sources. The question as to whether the inauguration of Baldur von Schirach as the new Reichsstatthalter only a few days earlier played any role in this context remains unanswered. Among the audience at the concert in France was Field Marshall Wilhelm List, the commander of the 12th Army and thus a key figure in the war campaign in France. The Vienna Philharmonic expressed their gratitude by awarding him the orchestra’s Ring of Honor “as a visible token of admiration […] for the victorious German army”. The […]
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