Gathering Note
Notes from the concert hall
Tag: Richard Strauss
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Klaus Mäkelä is back in Chicago for one program before taking the orchestra on a week-long tour of the Northeast. A performance at Carnegie Hall—featuring the same program he conducted this weekend, a survey of two heroic depictions in Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben and Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen Suite—anchors the tour. This isn’t Mäkelä’s first journey to Carnegie…
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After finally seeing Lyric Opera’s current Salome, I’m convinced more than ever that this isn’t just a fine opera, it’s riveting theater. For this run, Lyric is using David McVicar’s darkly disturbing 2008 production for the Royal Opera House, and it works. The upstairs/downstairs staging pits Herod’s decadent elite against quarreling religious factions in a…
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Originally published at Seen and Heard International “It was intimidating and it was thrilling. That’s what I remember about my first audition week,” John Sharp says, reflecting on his first moments with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “To see Solti conduct and the way the orchestra played—it was really something incredibly exciting.” Sharp, now the CSO’s…