Zdeněk Lukáš News
Czech composer
- classical music, opera, liturgical music
- Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia
- composer, choir director, teacher, record producer
Last update
2024-03-29
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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-02-17 13:50:36
On a Saturday evening some 70 years ago I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra live for the first time. Melville Smith, then director of the Longy School, had given me two tickets he couldn’t use. Charles Munch conducted. Before the intermission came Honegger’s Symphony no. 1; the program notes mentioned harmony that “trends toward C major,” which amused me and my 9th-grade classmate George Nelson — it must have meant that the symphony was “modern.” After the intermission we heard Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C Major, a work I had never heard before, but George knew it well. “This symphony begins with a solo horn,” he said. (Actually it turned out to be two in unison.) I was deeply impressed by the experience, and especially by the slow movement, but never imagined that I would write a book about this symphony a few years later (2011). Eventually I began to […]
2024-02-06 08:59:00
Clarity of musical purpose & remarkable intimacy: Regents Opera in Wagner's Siegfried
Wagner: Siegfried - Peter Furlong, Catharine Woodward - Regents Opera (Photo: Steve Gregson)Richard Wagner: Siegfried; Holden Madagame, Peter Furlong, Ralf Lukas, Oliver Gibbs, Craig Lemont Walters, Corinne Hart, Mae Heydorn, Catharine Woodward, director: Caroline Staunton, conductor: Ben Woodward; Regents Opera at the Freemason's HallReviewed by Florence Anna Maunders, 4 February 2024Regents Opera reaches the third instalment of its Ring Cycle with a dramatic, intense and deeply intimate production of SiegfriedThis was the third instalment of Regents Opera's ambitious and successful Ring - performed in the round at the Freemason's Hall (4 February 2024), directed by Caroline Staunton and with a brand new chamber orchestration by conductor Ben Woodward. Das Rheingold and Die Walküre [see Florence's review], the previous two operas in the series impressed enormously, both with their clarity of musical purpose, but also with the remarkable intimacy born from the scant metre or so which separated the singers from the audience, enabling […]
2024-01-31 12:10:00
Salzburg Mozartwoche (5) - Hagen Quartet, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, 30 January 2024
Grosser Saal, MozarteumHaydn: String Quartet in D minor, op.76 no.2, Hob. III:76, ‘Fifths’ Mozart: String Quartet in D minor, KV 421/417b Beethoven: String Quartet in C-sharp minor, op.131 Lukas Hagen, Rainer Schmidt (violins)Veronika Hagen (viola)Clemens Hagen (cello)Image: Wolfgang Lienbacher Three string quartets in minor keys, two of them in the same minor key, might sound like an overload of misery, or at least darkness, but matters were more mixed in this Hagen Quartet Mozartwoche recital. It was not exactly full of the joys of spring, but then we have some way to go in our Winterreise before we reach such joys. More to the point, we could enjoy a cornucopia of invention from three of the supreme masters of the genre, Mozart rightly at the centre. Haydn was, of course, as close to the inventor of the string quartet as makes little matter, certainly its ‘father’ in a way he […]
2023-12-25 02:05:00
Last month, I reviewed San Francisco Symphony playing Steven Stucky's orchestral arrangement of Stravinsky's great ballet score Les Noces. Stravinsky struggled over how, exactly, to orchestrate the work, and in 1923 eventually settled on four pianos and percussion. But before that, in 1917, he created a version for woodwinds, brass, strings, harp, piano, harpsichord & cimbalom. In the 1980s, Peter Eötvös recorded this version as well as the 1923 version.A friend was kind enough to lend me his copy - I'll probably buy it eventually - and it makes interesting listening. It is considerably more astringent and Stravinsky-like than Stucky's too-soft orchestration, and of course it's by Stravinsky and sounds and works better than the Stucky. It's not entirely successfully; the trumpet playing what eventually became piano glissandos just isn't as good as the pianos, for example. If you want to hear this version, and it is certainly interesting, someone has uploaded it to a […]
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