Anna Yuryevna Netrebko, born September 18, 1971 (age 38) in Krasnodar, Russia, is an operatic soprano. She now holds dual Russian and Austrian citizenship and currently resides in Vienna. [...]
In 2003, Netrebko released her first studio album, Opera Arias, which became one of the best selling classical recordings of the year. [...]
CD: Souvenirs When I hear Anna Netrebko sing, live, I don’t want her to stop...Netrebko, on a good night, offers intoxication…given a choice, or offered a ticket, I’d take Netrebko over anyone out there, any time. - Anne Midgette, Gramophone _____________________________________________
LA BOHEME La Boheme: Preview of the Film THE pairing of one of the most beloved operas of all time with a contemporary “dream team” of singers sets the stage for a silver screen romantic blockbuster. Released theatrically in October, the lush new film version of La Bohème makes its U.S. television debut on Great Performances during the holiday season – a perfect fit, given the first two acts of the plot unfold on Christmas Eve. [...]
A STELLAR review in Opera News raves: “It’s probably fair to say that this Bohème is one of the best filmic realizations of an opera since Francesco Rosi’s 1984 Carmen. Although the entire production was filmed within the confines of studio sound-stages, it is very much a movie, rather than an embalmed theater presentation. [The] camera sweeps the viewer right into the center of the action with decisive tracking shots and intimate close-ups; languid dissolves, superimpositions and subtle split-screen effects emphasize the sensuality of the plot, and of Puccini’s score.”
Discussing the differences between live performance and film, Netrebko remarks, “…the camera is very intimate. It’s coming really close to you. Your expressions…the eyes opening, the mouth, it’s reduced here to minimal. But instead of that, you have to put a lot inside your eyes, so you have the expression inside yourself.”
The theatrical film is helmed by director Robert Dornhelm, Oscar nominee for The Children of Theater Street and more recently Karajan, or Beauty as I See It, which aired on Great Performances in August 2009, offering a fascinating career retrospective of the great conductor Herbert von Karajan on the occasion of his 100th birthday. [...]
COMMENTS [PBS.org] I HAVE seen La Boheme many times , but this performance envelopes one into the soul of the story more than I dreamed possible. Anna Netrebko and Roland Villazon were so believable in their roles and their voices divine.
I WAS moved deeply, by this intimate version of La Boheme, beautifully done. The connection and passion between the two performers, is incredibly real, emotions exuding off the screen. Everyone should experience this .
I HAVE just watched this opera on Great Performances. La Boheme is one of my two favorite operas and I’ve seen it performed in Rome, Venice, New York and elsewhere but this is the most riveting performance I’ve ever seen. Anna Netrebko as Mimi and Rolando Villazón as Rodolfo sing superbly in a match made in heaven.
WHITE subtitles against white snow: Brilliant!
ALL I really waited for was ” Quando m’en vo” and then I never found out who sang Musetta. Poor show. Insulting to the other singers.
I TUNED in just as the overture was finishing. I came to your website to find the credits for the best realization of La Boheme that I have heard or seen. You have disappointed me. You can still fix this!
MANY people are wondering who was in the cast besides Netrebko and Villazon. It is almost an IMPOSSIBILITY to find them anywhere, but this is what I discovered after a tedious search: Nicole Cabell (Musetta), George Von Bergen (Marcello), Adrian Erod (Schaunard). Other cast members included Stephane Degout, Boaz Daniel, Tiziano Bracci. If any of these are in error, please correct me.
THANK you PBS for the broadcast of such a beautiful story with song. At least regular folk here in the country have a way of enjoying classical performances without going to the opera itself and paying through the nose for what may be some very bad performances!
FILMED opera sometime can be an oxymoron. You can do a lot of things otherwise impossible to be done in an opera stage. Sure all the dramatic effects are obvious in this production, but you can also tend to notice flaws, such as poor dubbing, overacted characters. I think the director just wanted to profit from one of most bankable opera couples at that time, dubbed with recording, and voila! a mediocre production. Poor Mr. Villazon, the camera seems not to love him during close ups…
"It's for your love that I stopped feeling lonely."
Anna Netrebko Graces the Silver Screen ANNA Netrebko is a reluctant movie star. She’s graced the big screen for the past three years in The Met: Live in HD Broadcasts, and now she’s about to star in a fully fledged feature—La Bohème, due to open at movie theaters around the United States on September 23. But still, Netrebko reminds me, she’s first and foremost a soprano. “Movie star? The words are too big.”
Well, we’ll see. The camera never lies and it happens to love her dark brown eyes, flowing tresses and undeniable charisma. (She’s presciently been called “Audrey Hepburn with a voice.”) Combine that with her celebrated soprano voice and surely it all adds up to something a little starry and sumptuous.
Still, the 38-year-old Russian admits there is something cinematic about La Bohème that lends itself to the fast-paced editing of a movie. “There are so many phrases, here, there and everywhere,” she says. “Only the camera can capture it.” [...]
Herbert von Karajan (5 April 1908 – 16 July 1989) was an Austrian orchestra and opera conductor and one of the most renowned conductors in music history. His obituary in The New York Times described him as "probably the world's best-known conductor and one of the most powerful figures in classical music." Karajan conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for thirty-five years. He is the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, with record sales estimated at 200 million. [...]
Karajan's membership of the Nazi Party and increasingly prominent career in Germany from 1933 to 1945 cast him in an uncomplimentary light after the war. While Karajan's defenders have argued that he joined the Nazis only to advance his own career, critics such as Jim Svejda have pointed out that other prominent conductors, such as Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini, fled from fascist Europe at the time. However, British music critic Richard Osborne argues that among the many well-known conductors who worked in Germany throughout the war years—a list that includes Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ernest Ansermet, Carl Schuricht, Karl Böhm, Hans Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss and Karl Elmendorff—Karajan was in fact one of the youngest and least advanced in his career. [...]
QUOTES Those who have achieved all their aims probably set them too low.
I don’t just want it to sound beautiful, I want it to look beautiful as well - for music is an embodiment of beauty.
Explaining why he preferred conducting the Berlin Philharmonic to the Vienna Philharmonic: If I tell the Berliners to step forward, they do it. If I tell the Viennese to step forward, they do it. But then they ask why.
Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music (Hardcover) REVIEWS VON KARAJAN (1908-1989), an Austrian-born conductor who was a controversial figure because of his membership in the Nazi party at an early stage of his career and because of his lifelong autocratic behavior, receives an exhaustive, penetrating biography. Music critic Richard Osborne, who published Conversations with von Karajan shortly before the conductor's death, has drawn on a huge number of sources to create a notably balanced account of a career that still divides many music lovers into energetic pro and con parties. Von Karajan spent his early years as a provincial opera conductor and orchestra builder in Aachen (where he joined the Nazis as a career move in 1933), then endured years of struggle during the war--when, Osborne convincingly demonstrates, his career was in fact held back rather than encouraged by the Nazis because his wife was partly Jewish. It was not until after the war, when British record producer Walter Legge hired him for a series of recordings with his new Philharmonia Orchestra, that von Karajan began to build an international reputation. After a drawn-out struggle with Wilhelm Furtwangler, von Karajan took the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic. This, combined with his vastly successful recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon, finally established the conductor as a world figure whose wide-ranging recordings sold at almost pop-star levels. Osborne is particularly good at showing the wide swings in the quality of von Karajan's performances, from the totally committed to the polished but banal; his material on the conductor's now largely forgotten efforts (to which he devoted large sums of his own money) to immortalize his performances on videotape is riveting. Beautifully written, eminently fair-minded and full of enthralling anecdotes, this book will be catnip to any serious music lover. Photos. [Publishers Weekly]
THIS IS probably the ultimate biography of a complex and controversial personality in recent musical history. The book is conventionally structured: it is based on a detailed chronology supported by a rich factual database on Karajan's accomplishments as an orchestra builder and manager, recording artist and film maker. Stretching to more than 700 pages, the rich detail of Osborne's account certainly is one of the main attractions of this book. We learn a tremendous amount about Karajan's working methods, contract negotiations, concert tours, recording schedules, casting policy, press reviews, etc. As the story progresses Osborne branches out in all kinds of directions, gradually weaving more and more threads into the basic narrative. Given the quality of Osborne's prose this never becomes tedious. And it really does teach us something substantial about the breathtaking speed, economy, tenacity and versatility of the Karajanesque genius. There is no doubt that the book as a whole transcends the merely anecdotal. What emerges is a rich, multifaceted, holographic image of a great artist. What is even more impressive about Osborne's book is that it gives us an idea of what constitutes the essence of great conductorship. Instead of being confronted with woolly and simplistic generalizations about a certain 'Factor X' that allows an individual to coax exactly the right sound from a full symphony orchestra, we see the conceptual foundations of this most elusive of disciplines emerge in all its technical, psychological and somatic richness. Therefore, this book is definitely a must-read for any classical music lover, irrespective of personal predilections with respect to the man himself.
Downfall - and the Mystery of Karajan's Personal Photographer I worked at EMI in the 1970s when Karajan was one of our artists and I was fascinated by the 'court' that surrounded him and was intrigued by their background. It is documented that Karajan joined the Nazi Party on April 8th 1933 in Salzburg, two months after Hitler came to power. He was cleared by an Austrian Governement denazification tribunal in February 1946 which concluded that Karajan was not involved in any illegal activity between 1933 and 1938. A transcript of the tribunal is given in Richard Osborne's Karajan - A Life in Music. The following exchange is taken from that transcript:
Dr Zellweker, Deputy Chairman of Tribunal:Surely you must have had some thoughts about (politics), and then there you were in 1935 joining the Party.
Karajan:I'm prepared to admit that it was an error, but we artists live in another world, a self-contained one. Otherwise it would be impossible to play music properly, and music is the highest and only thing for me.[...]
Something creepy is happening in the world of classical music.
It started a few months ago, when a long-forgotten face started to appear on posters in record shops. Soon it spread to billboards and magazines. Suddenly, those rapturously closed eyes, those springing grey locks and that clenched jaw seemed to be everywhere.
It seemed as if Herbert von Karajan, one-time Nazi, the most tyrannical, reviled, and lavishly rewarded conductor in history, had returned from the dead.
Frankly, I wouldn't put it past the old devil. Before his death in 1989, Karajan talked of having himself cryogenically preserved so that he could be resurrected at some future date, and this was a man who always got what he wanted.
Fortunately, it's only an illusion, brought on by the determination of the music industry to make the most of the 100th anniversary of Karajan's birth, which falls next month. [...]
In Praise of Herbert von Karajan, with a Selective Critical Discography My immediate reaction to Michael Miller's commentary on the Karajan centenary [Oh No! He’s Not Back Again, is He? - May 2, 2008] was rather choleric, but I've settled down a bit since then and can write this from a relatively balanced perspective.
I bought those 1962-63 Beethoven symphonies, too, which by the way are in such bad sound that three remasterings later, including the most recent in SACD, they remain boomy and muddy. I'm not sure where you heard them praised. But Karajan's quasi-hypnotizing style didn't appeal to me back then. I dropped out until the mid-80s. Since then -- don't be shocked -- I've bought his entire EMI output from 1947 until the early Eighties, all his Decca recordings (which are relatively few), a huge chunk of his DG catalogue, and many highlights from the historical archives. As a result, I incline toward his English biographer, Richard Osborne, in believing that Karajan was among the greatest conductors of the century. And not just in the Fifties, that canard notwithstanding.
Since a reverential regard for Karajan was common in his heyday but sneered at now -- not by you but by taste-benumbed pygmies like Norman Lebrecht -- I won't fight upstream. Time levels out these matters. Sheerly in the interest of offering your readers access to less well known great recordings, along with many that belong on every serious collector's shelf, here's a long list of my favorites. Its length may convince you that I suffer from Karajan monomania. Not at all. I rarely turn to Karajan's Mozart, Haydn, Handel, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Bartók, or Stravinsky (with a few exceptions like his wonderful Haydn Creation). I'm distressed by his later Beethoven cycles from the 70s and 80s, which as you point out sound slick and bored. I'm not often convinced by Karajan as accompanist for Mutter, Weissenberg, Anda, Ferras, Kremer, Kissin, and other soloists he favored (again, with some outstanding exceptions like the Beethoven Triple Concerto with three great Russians).
Carlos Kleiber used to get enraged when he heard anyone disparage "the Karajan sound," insisting that such a profound musical mind had to be judged one performance at a time. I beg of you and other detractors to stop branding Karajan as at best a careerist and at worst a semi-charlatan. Subordinate your prejudices to the high opinion that you have of Kleiber, a vast admirer of the older master. (One could also fill a volume of encomiums from all the great singers who considered Karajan the pre-eminent opera conductor of his generation.)
Now to the list. It's not an olla podrida. I've limited it to Karajan's very best -- in my opinion, of course. [...]
Herbert von Karajan's Richard Strauss Recordings I have been listening to classical music virtually my whole life. At around thirteen, I dove in head deep and started buying CDs like mad until I had a collection of over 500 classical and opera CDs. If one were to browse this collection it would be immediately apparent that I have more Herbert von Karajan recordings than I do of any other conductor. I suppose I just dig his style. There are many detractors to Herbert von Karajan's style, apparently. Most of the criticisms I've read pertain to the orchestral sound being too glossy or lethargic, for Karajan had a prediliction for perfection from his players and typically employed broad and expansive tempi that in some cases could drag the music down. These criticisms are valid to some degree with certain recordings, but on the whole I believe Karajan created a wonderful catalog of his own, offering most of what comprises the standard repertoire, with good to excellent performances and generally excellent sound quality. There are some true gems in Karajan's catalog, and I think most of his recordings of Richard Strauss's works with the Berlin Philharmonic are among them.
Karajan and Strauss, a Shared History Herbert von Karajan was an up-and-coming young celebrity when he first met Richard Strauss in 1940, nine years before the composer's death. He looked up to Strauss very much, already a great admirer of his music. Strass was attending a performance of his own opera Elektra, conducted by Karajan. Strauss later told him it was the best performance of the opera he had ever heard, and was even more impressed that Karajan could conduct the entire score from memory, without the assistance of the score in front of him during the performance. Karajan had occasion to meet Strauss later and received a few pearls of wisdom regarding music and conducting that he later admitted had an influence on his own approach to conducting.
Karajan and Strauss also shared another similarity in their personal histories: they were both involved with the Nazi party in Germany. Richard Stauss served for a time as the President of the Music division of the Reichskammerkultur, a branch of the Nazi government tasked with identifying what was to be considered "degenerate art" in Nazi Germany. At first, Strauss accepted this position in an effort to reign in the growing atonal movement, due to the backlash against Romantic music it had created. Strauss was never an actual member of the Nazi party, and he did not last long in the position of president, due to the fact that he continued to collaborate with Jewish artists during his tenure. Considering Strauss's own wife was also Jewish, it seems clear that he did not buy into some of the Nazi party's more nefarious ideals, but simply felt a duty to his country to oversee the quality of music that was to be played in Germany. He became disenchanted with the Nazi party, but managed to survive the war years with his family intact.
Karajan joined the Nazi party in the early 1930s, presumably in order to remain in Germany under Nazi leadership and continue to further his ambitions. While he conducted several concerts for Nazi politicians and added the requisite fanfares to the beginning of concerts, there is little indication that Karajan had any real political aspirations. Furthermore, his wife at the time was of partial Jewish descent, and in fact he later became unpopular amongst the higher echelon of Nazi power players. This may have been influential in his decision to spend a few years in England developing his craft with the newly formed Philharmonia Orchestra, before ultimately taking over the directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1955, a post he was to hold until 1989.
To this day, much has been said of Karajan and Strauss's involvement with the Nazis. Several famous musical figures, such as Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern, refused to work with Karajan throughout his life as a result of his Nazi membership. Despite the moral judgments people make decades after the fact, it seems clear to me that both Strauss and Karajan were men of their time; they loved Germany and they loved music. While many conductors and composers fled Germany in protest of Nazi leadership, for better or worse, these men stayed and continued to make music. Whatever one may say about them as men, I for one can enjoy the music as the gift they gave the world despite their human flaws. [...]
Herbert von Karajan conducts A Hero's Life by Richard Strauss
Gross Misconduct? The Centenary of Herbert von Karajan [Neil Fisher - TimesOnline.co.uk - 06/28/08] Herbert von Karajan was a maestro whose monstrous life has obscured his musical genius
For many it is the stuff of pure nightmare. The old enemy back from the dead – on posters, on websites, even on coins. For it’s the centenary of Herbert von Karajan, and, 19 years after his death, the maestro with most recordings to his name, the man who led the Berlin Philharmonic for an astonishing 34 years, is being fêted again.
Forget Liverpool ’08 – in Germany and Austria it is definitely Karajan 2008, with a celebratory website (Karajan.org), a commemorative €5 coin, a sprawl of tribute concerts and a tonne of repackagings of some of his crucial cuts on Deutsche Grammophon. Next Saturday Radio 3 joins the party, with a Karajan Week devoted to picking through the conductor’s discography, and including a detailed documentary on his life and times.
No other conductor could possibly inspire all that – and no other conductor could possibly have prompted such a backlash in response. The party year dawned with a flurry of anti-Karajan polemics. He was, we were told, a bully. A barely repentant fascist. A self-publicist. And, worst of all, his music-making was facile: seductive, perhaps, and certainly disciplined, but empty of meaning.
It’s a tempting narrative – indeed, it’s a story that’s been given so much airtime that it is practically canonical. Growing up without any direct experience of the man, my first impressions were only the slurs: it was his great rival, Leonard Bernstein, who seized the imagination, even to the point of claiming Karajan’s home ground for his epochal performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at the recently fallen Berlin Wall.
Perhaps the most interesting release this year from Karajan’s record label is Robert Dornhelm’s biopic, Herbert von Karajan – or Beauty as I See it, a revealing clutch of interviews with those who knew the man. Fast forward through the toadying montages and you hit some fascinating observations.
The soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf recalls his instructions to one hapless cast: “And if any of you are unwilling I’ll twist the screws so tight that every one of you comes crawling to me on your stomachs.” That’s a story that sounds dramatic until you hear that at Karajan’s very first orchestra his sacked concert-master turned up to rehearsals with a loaded pistol in his pocket – such was his hatred of the jumped-up twentysomething who had the arrogance to dismiss him.
That this maestro took no prisoners isn’t up for debate: no, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to have a pint with him. But what emerges most strongly from the film is his artistic credo, indivisible from his personality: the pursuit of total perfection. He had an unflinching desire to control every aspect of music production, even including directing Wagner on stage at the Salzburg Festival (badly) to masterminding the bizarrely dated tableaux of his filmed concerts.
The error is to mistake this musical authoritarianism for the political kind. It’s a terrible and dangerous diversion to align Karajan’s moral cowardice (like many of the artistic community in 1930s Germany, he never considered exile and joined the Nazi party to further his ambition) with that artistic vision. To crave total power on the podium is not some warped adaptation of Nazi doctrine: he simply accepted no other authority. Or as the soprano Gundula Janowitz puts it on film: “he was the locomotive, we were the carriages.”
What were Karajan’s real crimes? He deliberately cultivated an image of cool self-control during performances. He shaped the craggiest of the Romantic repertoire into cogent, seamless wholes. And he believed that everything was subservient to music. One astute observer in the film points out that: “Politics came to art rather than vice versa.” No, Karajan didn’t do outreach.
All that clashes with our image of the perfect 21st-century maestro. We want him sweating like Valery Gergiev, or warmly beatific like Simon Rattle: we want to feel what they feel. The period movement has wiped out our image of rhapsodic Beethoven or Brahms, who now sound fitter, leaner, and meaner. And no maestro would ever dare to demand that politics serve art. Music rests uneasily within culture’s service industry: we hope this will do you some good – please don’t be intimidated.
Much of that may be for the better. But the biggest tragedy of Karajan year would be dismissing his masterworks: that never so-silky Rosenkavalier, the riveting Tchaikovsky symphonies, a Mahler Ninth brimming with tears and anguish. To call any of those empty, fascist or facile is simply giving in to the dogmas of today rather than fairly judging the dogmas of yesteryear. So, roll on Karajan Week: hold your nose, perhaps, but don’t shut your ears. END
Karajan - A Film by Robert Dornhelm REVIEW This documentary is a masterpiece - a classic - the gold standard by which all film biographies of musicians will be measured in future. It's editorially balanced, showing Karajan's faults as well as his strengths.
It's also wonderfully crafted, effortlessly blending modern interviews and archive material - black and white and colour. The editing is so subtle you hardly notice it at first viewing. You just concentrate on the content which is riveting. But repeated viewing shows master-craftsmen at work. All the clips are cut back to sound bites so the film moves at a cracking pace, but never too fast. Underneath the clips are long lines of music - scrupulously chosen. These punctuate the comments and are brought up at strategic moments for a few seconds to illustrate the words, often with dramatic effect.
This film explains conducting better than any I've seen. It should intrigue musicians. It's also an object lesson in how to make a documentary with class and style - a must-see for anyone interested in the art of film-making.
Having read these rave comments you may ask if I'm a friend of the director, or linked to Deutsche Grammophon? No! But I am a professional broadcaster and appreciate a good documentary when I see it. This is a real life-enhancer. I watched it four times in three days and am still getting a lot out of it. The film is densely packed with information and wonderful images. Above all it's intelligent. You'll want to become a conductor - or film-maker - after watching this documentary.
Karajan Revealed (vids) STEP ASIDE BBC and your poxy Maestrocam. Here's how you make a film about a conductor. Via YouTube - Robert Dornhelm’s 2008 biopic, Herbert von Karajan – or Beauty as I See it, attempts to decipher Karajan's dark art with the aid of archive footage and interviews with the likes of Christa Ludwig, Mariss Jansons and Gundula Janowitz.
He emerges, unsurprisingly, as a bullying perfectionist, ruthlessly dedicated as the film's title suggests to the pursuit of beauty. Watch the Berlin Phil take it on the chin as Karajan berates them as "brainless". Hear the tale of the sacked concertmaster who snuck a loaded pistol into rehearsal with the intention of taking out the maestro right there on the podium. Shield your eyes from Simon Rattle's retina-searing HvK tribute pullover.
As Karajan himself says in the film, when you have a hundred and twenty people acting as one, conducting is just an exercise of the mind.
Herbert von Karajan - or Beauty As I See it (Part 1)
Karajan, centerstage, in Salzburg at a Götterdämmerung rehearsal
Masterpiece Theater During his long career, Herbert von Karajan amassed a formidable recorded legacy. As the music world marks the conductor's centennial year, Peter G. Davis determines which Karajan records have stood the test time — and which ones haven't.
NO IMPORTANT conductor of his generation was busier in the recording studios than Herbert von Karajan, a musician fascinated by the media technologies of his time and how they could best be put to use. Karajan made his first recording — of the overture to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte — in 1938 and his last fifty years later, with a performance of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera completed just a few months before he died. In between came hundreds of other recordings, a discography that could easily fill a small book.
Those who heard Karajan conduct frequently in the opera house and concert hall might dispute how faithfully these documents reflect the true measure of his music-making, but the conductor himself — a man who usually got what he wanted — seemed more than satisfied with his recorded legacy. And, thanks to the celebratory nature of centenaries — Karajan was born on April 5, 1908 — virtually every disc he made has been reissued recently in one form or another. EMI has certainly done its part by cramming everything the conductor recorded for that company between 1946 and 1984 into two huge anniversary compilations: one set of eighty-eight CDs devoted to orchestral music and the other, seventy-two CDs, containing opera and vocal works. Karajan's other major recording affiliation — to an umbrella organization now called the Universal Music Group, which includes the Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips labels — has not been so ambitious, but most of his work for that conglomerate is also currently available. [...]
Generalized assessments of musicians as protean and prolific as Karajan can be dangerous, but I find some merit in the conventional wisdom that tells us early Karajan is generally better than late, or that his live performances often offer more gripping statements than the corresponding studio recordings. Certainly a strong argument can be made that the conductor's interpretations, while never less than cogently imagined and ravishingly played, tended to become increasingly mannered, aloof and self-consciously groomed as he aged, robbing the finished product of spontaneity and vitality. [...]
Rather than dwell on such still-hotly-disputed recordings, I've selected several Karajan opera sets that seem to me to represent him at his best. What better way to lead off than with the one that so vividly recalls the conductor of the Vienna Ring — his 1952 performance of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth, long available in the pirate underground but now released in optimum sound on the German Orfeo label and with the official blessing of the Wagner shrine. To say that this interpretation of Tristan is an incandescent reading of the score is to understate the case: it is positively radioactive. Karajan seems to release the music in one gigantic, unbroken breath that is even sustained through the intermissions. Other old-time German conductors schooled in Wagnerian performance practices could also pull off this feat, but few combined continuity and structural design with the sort of instrumental transparency, luminously observed detail, forward-moving drive and sheer lyrical expansiveness that Karajan achieves here. [...]
When examining Karajan's lifelong work in opera, even a work as central as Lucia seems like something of a detour for him. With very few exceptions, the conductor focused on the undisputed masterpieces of the opera repertory, rather than reviving worthy neglected works that fascinated other conductors, let alone seeking out and preparing new operas by prominent young composers. Even as an apprentice in the provincial opera houses of Ulm and Aachen, Karajan seldom wasted his time on passing novelties that were liable to have brief lives, although there are a few works that he puzzlingly set aside and never returned to once he could pretty much set his own agenda. [...]
Some of the stranger omissions in Karajan's performing repertory, both live and on disc, can surely be explained by circumstances, but on the whole he went where he felt the call, and his musical instincts seldom betrayed him. What he left us on records and video can be infuriatingly willful much of the time, but the results are never less than provocative, and when the elements were all in the right place, simpy miraculous. END
Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore (final scene) With: Plácido Domingo et. al. Conductor: Herbert von Karajan, Vienna, 1978
Karajan: Symphony Edition - box set REVIEWS ADMIRERS of Karajan will probably own most or all of these symphony cycles from what was probably the pinnacle of the conductor's prolific career. However, if you are unfamiliar with Karajan's work, or well enough acquainted with it to desire further exploration, then this amazingly inexpensive anthology can be enthusiastically recommended. [...]
VETERAN collectors will be disappointed to know that none of these recordings have been remastered, only repackaged. A great shame, since the Bruckner cycle, one of Karajan's great achievements, suffers from a poor digital transfer that is glaring, shallow, and afflicted with tape hiss left over from its LP incarnations. [...]
I AM stunned at what DG has put into one box here, and I have already recommended it to friends galore. We have in one box the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Bruckner, and a selection of the best of Haydn and Mozart. You can make a very convincing argument that the Beethoven, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, and Schumann sets in this box are the best complete sets ever recorded by anyone. And the remainder are never anything less than compelling. [...]
IN THE eyes of the world, the name Herbert von Karajan is inseparably connected with Salzburg. The conductor, born in Salzburg in 1908, shaped and dominated cultural life in Mozart's city for decades. [...]
The large building is the Hotel Sacher, one of the most expensive hotels in Austria (I learned). The white buidling on the left of the hotel was the home of Herbert von Karajan, the world famous conductor.[Flickr.com__EricB2005]
HvK's private residence (detail)__[Wikipedia]
The Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin-Tiergarten is one of the most important concert halls in Berlin. It is home to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. It was built by the architect Hans Scharoun in the years 1960–1963.
It is a singular building, asymmetrical and tentlike, with a main concert hall in the form of a pentagon. The seating offers excellent positions from which to view the stage through the irregularly increasing height of the benches. The stage is at the center of the hall, providing an extraordinary atmosphere for both the artists and the viewers. The acoustics are excellent.
The building is located on Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, named for the Philharmonic's longest-serving principal conductor. [Text: Flickr.com__*Checco*] [Pic: Flickr.com__Umschauen]
1. Herbert von Karajan Is Dead; Musical Perfectionist Was 81 (obit) He also made more than 800 recordings, more than any other conductor. Deutsche Grammophon, the West German record company that shared him with EMI, an English label, said his albums sold "probably hundreds of millions" of copies. Der Spiegel, the West German newsweekly, reported that the conductor earned more than $6 million annually from record sales and conducting fees. 2. HvK Tribute site 3. Karajan on the Music of Today As for myself, I can tolerate wrong notes, but I cannot stand unstable rhythm. Perhaps I was born in Africa in another existence. Once in Vienna after we had finished a recording session, I surprised everyone by telling them I was going to hear a Louis Armstrong concert. When they asked why? I told them that to go to a concert and know that for two hours the music would not get faster or slower was a great joy to me.
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (called a libretto) and musical score. Opera is part of the Western classical music tradition. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery and costumes and sometimes includes dance. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble.
SETS Renee Fleming as Rusalka
Das Rheingold
Madame Butterfly
It's only a couple of years old, but Anthony Minghella's production of Madame Butterfly is already on its second revival at English National Opera, where it opens the Sky Arts 2008 season in stylish form.
The production remains extremely handsome and atmospheric. Minghella looks to the theatrical traditions of the East for inspiration and comes up with numerous gorgeous tableaux, most noticeably the nocturnal close to the first act, featuring curtains of cherry blossom and gently glowing balloon lanterns as the ideal erotic backdrop to Butterfly and Pinkerton's ravishing love duet. Mimed scenes bookend the opera, with the huge swathes of red fabric being unravelled from Butterfly's dying body at the end - a particularly effective piece of imagery to end the show.
Werther
Opera Set for Pelleas et Melisande Using a computer numerical controlled machine tool, MDM Props Ltd. fabricated individual sections of the set. After assembly, a steel structure was built around the final shape to make it robust enough to support the performers.
Nabucco
Tom & Frances Design Verdi’s Nabucco Dallas sculptors Frances Bagley & Tom Orr have designed an opera. It took them more than a year, and when I saw them at the dress rehearsal Wednesday November 8, 2006 they were exhausted. Excited certainly and brimming with information and enthusiasm, but seriously sleep-deprived. [...]
I tentatively asked: I don't suppose you'd want to say how much they paid you? I didn't think so. I hope it was enough. I can't imagine how much enough would be.
Frances: "It is probably not cool to say how much they paid us, but if all it had been was some designs, it would have been ok, BUT it was so much more than just designing. We worked on it every day for the last 6 months and at least twice — three days a week for a year prior. I think our involvement was necessary for the success of it, but how much money it would take to do it again is a big question.
"It cost the Opera more in other ways also because they gave us so much support. They hired Drew Field, the technical director to work with us on the sets and the costume shop worked on this more than a usual show, partly because of our complex designs and partly because we needed guidance. The Opera and the stage director took a big risk working with artists who had no experience in stage design."
I also asked: You (or Tom) said earlier you weren't interested in doing this again, are you still not interested?
Frances answered carefully, "We can't say if we would do it again until the dust has settled and we remember what our lives used to be like." [...]
La Damnation de Faust
Faust Goes Techno A still from a new high-tech production of Berlioz's Damnation de Faust, premiering this weekend at the Met. An "interactive opera," the production synthesizes performers and sets through technology: flocks of digital birds fly in sync with an aria, video grass parts its blades for oncoming soldiers, high-def water reflects a passing boat, a JumboTron mirrors a singer's love song in flames.
COMMENTS What's cool about the Met is that you can see simulcasts of the opera at movie theaters around the country if you're interested:Live in HD
Well, what do you know. The Met is finally recognizing the existence of the downtown crowd. Took 'em long enough, particularly given how long Phillip Glass and Steve Reich operas have been selling outBAM(uh...decades!). I saw the Glass's Voyage there some years back and the response was incomprehension. I heard one guy said, "Well, I liked it but it wasn't really opera". No doubt this has something to do with James Levine's waning influence (and his slow steady stream of arrests). Anyone up for seeing Alban Berg's Lulu?
Techno-Alchemy at the Opera This sort of spectacle-producing technology is more often used by performance artists and by companies like Cirque du Soleil. Perhaps not surprisingly, Cirque’s Las Vegas production “Kà” and this “Faust” share a director: the Canadian Robert LePage, who is making his Met debut.
Between Heaven and Hell, a World of Morphing Imagery The imposing, four-tiered wall of Carl Fillion’s set is subdivided into 24 cubicles. When individual screens drop into place, the set becomes a continuous surface, like some supersize flat-screen television, on which enormous images can be projected.
The stage set for the opera performance of Leos Janacek’s Aus einem Totenhaus is the hardware of the performance. The stage set is developed as an abstract machine and does not aim to look for direct references to the libretto itself. It is an instrument used by the director to produce time and spatial sequences of the action on the stage.
New Orleans Opera Related Stuff This is a set for anything I've made, or photographed at the New Orleans Opera, whether it be for fun or for work. _________________________________________
'Don Giovanni' at Washington National Opera "Don Giovanni is sort of a personification of the sex drive," says John Pascoe, director and designer of the new production of Mozart's classic, Don Giovanni, which opened last weekend at the Washington National Opera. "He's just undiluted sexuality, the idea of 'I'm going to get what I want: sex.'" And that, says Pascoe, is what Giovanni's costume is meant to express. "It's very much an internal statement rather than being something limited to a very specific period."
The chest-baring suit, with its fetishistic undertones, is not, Pascoe concedes, something too many singers could don. But Erwin Schrott, who sings the role Nov. 1 and 4, and Ildar Abdrazakov, who performs it Nov. 7, 10, 13 and 16, more than fill it out.
Though he himself identifies as gay, the 58-year-old, British-born Pascoe stresses there is no explicit homoeroticism in his direction of Giovanni. Still, he notes, "the important fact [to viewing] any great work of art is, 'What does this work of art have to do with my life? To be very specific about it, what relevance does it have to do with gay life? And I think it has an enormous interest for the gay world.
"The story that Don Giovanni tells us," he continues, "is of this man who's on a sexual rampage...without concern to the effect he has on other people. It takes two seconds to translate the reality of what Mozart has given us into any of our own lives or any of our own experiences. It's dealing with the idea of sexual freedom vs. responsibility."
Still, notes Pascoe, "[The opera] goes to a very specific place in personal development, one that is not concerned at all with human relationships and is only concerned with sex. We all know there is such a thing as Sexaholic Anonymous and that there's a reason for it." [MetroWeekly.com - Nov.07] _____________________________________________
PERFORMERS (l-r) Mariusz Kwiecien, Polish baritone; Maija Kovalevska, Latvian soprano; Rolando Villazón, Mexican tenor; Nathan Gunn, American baritone; Danielle de Niese, Australian-born soprano; Erwin Schrott, Uruguayan bass; Anna Netrebko, Russian soprano.
HIGH C IN HIGH-DEF Meet seven international opera stars who are putting to rest the “fat lady sings” cliché, via live broadcasts to movie theaters.
Opera is ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille. Or, rather, Mr. Gelb, for Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb is responsible for bringing this high art to the silver screen. Since 2006, when the Met first broadcast live in high definition to selected movie theaters—now up to about 850 screens in 36 countries — audiences have been able to feel on intimate terms with world-class singers. “It’s like seeing somebody eye to eye,” says the Australian-born soprano Danielle de Niese, whose performance this past January in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice was beamed out to far-flung aficionados. Given the new craze, it’s a pleasure to have artists who are as easy on the eye as on the ear. A clear leader is Russian soprano Anna Netrebko, whose vocal and physical charms will be staged and screened in the Met’s new production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann in December, opposite Rolando Villazón, the dashing Mexican tenor. Offstage, her fiancé is the Uruguayan bass Erwin Schrott, who this winter was seducing audiences and maidens alike as Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Another leading man fond of the unbuttoned shirt is American baritone Nathan Gunn, who will be flexing his voice in the upcoming Met season as Papageno in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Joining him in the lower registers, Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien will portray the toreador Escamillo in the Met’s new production of Carmen, opening on New Year’s Eve. He’ll be teamed later with Maija Kovalevska, the Latvian soprano, whose high cheekbones and shimmering voice in the role of Micaëla will no doubt cause swooning in cineplexes around the world. Popcorn and Bizet? Why not? [VanityFair.com - May 09]
Renee Fleming
Bring the Noise! This season, superstar soprano Renée Fleming claims the city as her own, rocking the Met and appearing on the side of a bus near you.
Taking Renée Fleming for granted is far too easy. We should know; we’ve been doing it for years. A prominent lyric soprano for more than two decades, Fleming, 49, has been a creative force at the Metropolitan Opera since the mid-’90s. She is without question the reigning American opera singer worldwide, and one of the few to attain a broader general appeal. At a time when the memory of Beverly Sills guest-hosting The Tonight Show verges on the surreal, Fleming sings on Letterman, and Daniel Boulud has named a dessert after her.
Opera News feature Renée Fleming is an icon. Now, let's discuss what that means. There are singers, including Fleming, who enjoy a charmed beginning, when critical approval and popular demand are bestowed as a single, delicious benediction. Some of those careers don't survive the fad. Then, there are very good singers who travel just below the radar, but their names fail to linger in the air after their final bow; they usually become the obsession of connoisseurs. And of course, there are the living legends who dominate the industry but don't pursue a larger brand outside of it. An icon enjoys a status that is more enduring than youth and, most of all, a presence in the culture that is undeniable. An icon becomes associated with a time. Twenty years from now, when people sit in their living rooms talking about opera in the '90s and aughts — after grumbling about the uncontained proliferation of director-driven opera — conversation will arrive promptly at Renée Fleming: what it meant to be Renée Fleming, how one became Renée Fleming, how nice it would have been to have a recording contract like Renée Fleming's, and whether or not it was possible to be happy as a singer if one wasn't (or was) Renée Fleming. That makes her an icon. [...]
Fleming has been a pioneer in the industry for the way she matched such a voice to a look and formed her own brand. She has given a very pretty face to her music, and in doing so, she has also given a face to the opera industry as it is perceived by a wider public that understands her as its spokeswoman. A beautiful image can do many things. As Fleming wrote in her memoir, The Inner Voice, it can prompt the purchase of a CD. It can also transform the girl next door with bouncy hair into a sexy sophisticate (as it did around the release of the Renée Fleming album). And if it's just right, it can even book a cover for Town & Country and sell a perfume. Check and check. [...]
Few sopranos can carry an evening in the theater as elegantly as Fleming can. She has held audiences in a spell of serene devastation at the end of Desdemona's willow song; defended herself desperately in the Violetta–Germont duet; and embodied the vulnerable but still unattainable beauty of Tatiana in the finale of Eugene Onegin. Fleming rarely reaches the end of a performance without having said something eloquent about her heroine. Icon or not, that gift makes her a diva of the old school and the highest rank.
Erwin Schrott (born 21 December 1972 in Montevideo, Uruguay) is an operatic bass-baritone, particularly known for his interpretation of the title role in Mozart's Don Giovanni.
Figaro's a First for NBA-loving Baritone For baritone Erwin Schrott, who will sing the role of Figaro for the first time in the Los Angeles Opera production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro beginning tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, there couldn't have been a better time to be in Southern California.
Schrott, who lives outside Milan, Italy, with his wife and daughter, is not only one of the world's most in-demand baritones, but also an NBA fan. "In Italy, everybody loves the NBA,' he said in his dressing room the Friday after Derek Fisher's last-second heroics turned the tide for the Lakers in their series with San Antonio. And Schrott announced with a smile that he had managed to get tickets to the next game, which the Lakers won.
That smile seems to be pretty much a permanent part of Schrott's personality. There are artists who suffer for their art, but the young Italian isn't one of them. He loves life, and especially the life he has as an opera singer who travels the world to perform. His only regret is that he can't spend as much time with his wife and daughter as he would like. He had just flown into Los Angeles from Montevideo, Uruguay, where he was born in 1972. He had been visiting his parents.
"I love traveling, and I love performing,' Schrott said. "I am a very happy man. If you get to do work that you love, you are very lucky, and I love my work and I love to travel. [...]
As Don Giovanni
Sure Fire The dynamic Uruguayan bass Erwin Schrott has been making his mark internationally as Mozart’s Figaro and Don Giovanni. This month he is at the Met as Escamillo in Carmen.
On opening night of Los Angeles Opera’s 2003–04 production of Le Nozze di Figaro, partway through Act I, a dislodged light filter floated down from the flies and landed in the middle of the stage. To the Figaro that night — Erwin Schrott, looking hunky in a tank top and suspenders — the filter was merely so much rubbish on the floor of his new apartment. Staying in the scene, Schrott strolled over to the offending impurity, picked it up, crinkled it, and carried it around awhile before depositing it in a convenient nook.
“Ah, yes,” Schrott says by telephone from his home in Montevideo, “I remember that.” What was he thinking? “Nothing. I was being Figaro at the moment,” he states emphatically. “A piano can fall down to the stage, I would play it at that moment.”
It’s not difficult to believe him. Onstage, in his first Figaro, the singer projected ease and confidence; he was loose and enjoying himself. His demeanor seemed to combine equal parts charisma and a kind of Zen-like calm. Even on a bad phone connection to Uruguay, Schrott’s charm comes through loud and clear. [...]
Welcome to a very good production of Mozart's Don Giovanni.
Friday's staging at Vienna's Theater an Der Wien did not break new ground - the production first premiered in 2006.
But it has weathered well.
Directed by Keith Warner, this Don is more than a manic Casanova who has had his way with more than 2,000 women in his life. The man is funny, tender, menacing - and ultimately pitiable, as he expires on stage in a plexi-glass case smeared by his own blood, rather than renouncing his licentious life.
Much of the credit goes to Erwin Schrott, a.k.a. Mr. Anna Netrebko.
Built like a god, and with a voice to match, Schrott's Don Giovanni captivated the sellout crowd in the sculpted and gilt theater on the banks of Vienna's huge farmer's market.
Brutal? Yes, stabbing the father defending the honor of his daughter. Contemptible for the way he treats women as playthings? Surely.
But above and beyond all, Schrott's Don was human, from the beginning - as a young rake concerned only with improving his "score" - to the final moments, when old but unrepentant, he goes to his own private hell.
A sinner? Yes, but above all, a man who remains true to himself. [...]
Opera Chic: Erwin Schrott Erwin Schrott Gets Sued For Breach Of Contract By Rosenblatt Recital Series: "Gross Unprofessionalism and Disrespect", "Cowardly". "For our audience to be treated with such gross unprofessionalism and disrespect by Mr Schrott, on two occasions, is something that shouldn’t be tolerated.
"This is a regrettable situation, but for the reputation of my Series I cannot allow artists, with no lawful excuse, to renege on their contractual commitments.
"In the seven years I’ve been running our recital series I have been impressed time and again by the dedication of singers to their art and their public. Singers such as Mr Schrott give opera a bad name and a reputation for not caring for the people that pay to hear them sing.
"I am disgusted by Mr Schrott’s callous disregard to his contractual obligations. His behaviour is cowardly and I can only wonder if he has the guts to appear on a London concert platform as this is the second time he’s backed out of appearing here.”
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RELATED Rufus Wainwright
Interview Magazine feature After releasing six albums, appearing in a handful of films, and single-handedly resurrecting the songbook of Judy Garland, Rufus Wainwright took the next logical step: He spent three years writing a two-hour opera. [...]
GANZ: The opera also lasers in on the idea of the comeback, which, from Mickey Rourke to Britney Spears, is one of the most compelling tropes in our culture right now. WAINWRIGHT: Well, in a way I’m kind of making my own comeback. I’ve been in the business now for 20 years. I’ve had my ups and downs, and I definitely have a sense—in America, especially—that once you’ve made your mark and gotten your Rolling Stone piece and your Grammy nomination, that they’re on to the next piece of meat, and they don’t necessarily like to follow the twists and turns of an artistic career. Throwing an opera at them is something they have to notice. There’s nothing subtle about it. I don’t know if it will be my big comeback, but I think it is a statement—that I am a self-sustaining, vibrant, long-term artist, and I’m not going away! And if you don’t give me credit, then the musical gods will! [...]
GANZ: I read in a New York Times profile that you saw a production of Strauss’s Elektra at the Met high on drugs. Do you recommend people come to your opera in a similar state? WAINWRIGHT: Well, my great lesson with that was I went to the same production twice—once completely high and once completely sober—and both times were equally wonderful. Opera is above drugs and alcohol and you don’t have to be fucked up to either write it or see it. It’s about transcendentalism. It’s not of this world. So I’d suggest not being fucked up, because you’re just wasting your money.
Anna Yuryevna Netrebko, born September 18, 1971 (age 38) in Krasnodar, Russia, is an operatic soprano. She now holds dual Russian and Austrian citizenship and currently resides in Vienna. [...]+CHOPARD.jpg)
Anna Netrebko and tenor Erwin Schrott (husband)
Anna Netrebko - official site
Good Morning America interview (vid)
Classical BRIT Awards - red carpet interview (vid)
Anna Netrebko - blog
CD: Souvenirs
La Boheme: Preview of the Film
Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón
"Mimi is fatally ill."
"It's for your love that I stopped feeling lonely."
