Live from Salzburg is a new CD featuring music recorded live at Salzburg during the pandemic. The performers are Elīna Garanča, The Vienna Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann. There are two sets of songs; Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder (recorded in 2020) and Mahler’s Rückert Lieder (recorded in 2021). Both recordings were made during live performances in the Großesfestspielhaus.
I like Garanča a lot in this music. Sometimes I find her a bit “cold” but here there’s a really nice balance of emotion and clarity. Her articulation of the text is excellent and she sounds good throughout her range. The lower and middle ranges have a kind of burnished quality; not really dark but definitely not soprano like , while her upper register is controlled and smooth. The low end is perhaps best heard in Um Mitternacht where she shows real power and depth of emotion.
The schedule for the Royal Conservatory’s 2022 21C festival has been announced. As usual it’s heavy on premieres and this year showcases the Kronos Quartet. The three things that are likely of most interest to OR readers are:
I came across Hans Thomalla’s 2019 opera Dark Spring when the record label Oehms gave me access to a pre-release of the CD version which is to be released in a couple of days time. Listening to a couple of scenes and looking at the photos in the accompanying booklet suggested to me that this was really an opera I needed to see to fully appreciate and, indeed, it turns out that there’s a lot going on that isn’t explicit in the libretto. Fortunately, as it turns out, there’s a full video recording on Vimeo. It’s not the greatest technical quality of all time but it is drawn from the same live performances at the work in Mannheim in the fall of last year as the CDs. The CDs are excellent high quality (48kHz, 24 bit) CD quality. So I think there’s a case for tracking down the video and the CD recording.
Saturday’s concert at Koerner Hall featuring Stewart Goodyear and others has been rescheduled for the usual reason. The new date is February 9th next year; same time, same place.
So the latest Toronto organisation to announce a return to “live” is Toronto Operetta Theatre. There are three shows:
My main reason for getting my hands on a new CD of mainly orchestral music by Sibelius featuring the Bergen Philharmonic and Edward Gardner was to listen to the couple of tracks that feature soprano Lise Davidsen. I first saw her with the TSO in 2019 and I thought 
Cathedral City was the (2010) debut album of Missy Mazzoli’s ensemble Victoire. All the tracks are music composed by Mazzoli and give a pretty good feel for her non-operatic output. It’s been described as a “distinctive blend of post-rock dreamscapes and quirky minimalism” and that seems as good a description as any. Virtuosic instrumental playing is mixed with live vocals, electronics and distorted recorded speech fragments. Often the material is looped and the basic acoustic changed to create a different sound scape. The music is by turns, drivingly energetic, brutal and gently lyrical. It’s like the work of no other composer I know and I find it really compelling.
operaramblings 