Press

Critic’s Notebook

5 Breakouts From Classical Music’s Most Prestigious Festival

The Salzburg Festival is synonymous with excellence and fame. But it’s also a place where artists on the cusp of stardom can shine.

The New York Times By Joshua Barone

August 20, 2024

The Salzburg Festival has, since its founding more than 100 years ago, been known as a gathering place for the world’s finest musicians.

That’s still true: During a visit there earlier this month, I heard Grigory Sokolov play Bach with unfussy authority; Jordi Savall lead his period orchestra in magisterial accounts of Beethoven’s final two symphonies; Igor Levit muscle through another Beethoven symphony, the bacchic Seventh, with just a piano.

But Salzburg is also a proving ground for artists on the cusp on stardom. The soprano Asmik Grigorian, for example, was busy but hardly world famous until she gave a career-making performance as Salome there in 2018.

This year, there were breakthroughs to be found throughout Salzburg’s theaters. If you looked past the top billing, past the Cecilia Bartolis and Teodor Currentzises, they were even at some of the most high-profile events this summer. Here are five of them.

 A triumphant return for Italian conductor Noseda as US orchestra receives rare La Scala ovation

Associated Press By Colleen Barry

February 27, 2024

MILAN (AP) — Conductor Gianandrea Noseda made a triumphant return to Teatro alla Scala in an informal role as cultural ambassador, leading the U.S. National Symphony Orchestra that he has made more “luminous” with his personal loan of centuries-old Italian-made instruments.

Noseda’s energetic performance Monday evening marked the emotional highlight of the NSO’s nine-city European tour, its first in nearly a decade. It was both a homecoming for the 59-year-old and the orchestra’s debut to the famously exacting La Scala audience.

The concert, which included an original composition by the Kennedy Center’s in-house composer Carlos Simon and Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho playing Beethoven, received a rare standing ovation.

“It is so meaningful to perform in the theater of the city where I studied at the conservatory and where I regularly attended concerts when I was a teenager and as a young man,’’ Noseda told a private reception that included his parents and brother.

From his student days living in the scrappy, industrial Milan suburb of Sesto San Giovanni and commuting to the Milan Conservatory, Noseda has risen to become one of the world’s most sought-after conductors.

the best conductor by the German international opera awards. Besides his role as NSO music director, he is also general music director of the Zurich Opera House and founding conductor of the Pan-Caucasian Youth Orchestra in Tsinandali, Georgia, created in the spirit of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra uniting Israeli and Palestinian musicians.

His past roles have included principal guest conductor at the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre, Italy’s RAI National Symphonic Orchestra and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

With two of his former host countries waging wars, Noseda sees even more need for cultural diplomacy, if only to offer hope to suffering populations.

December 11, 2023

CNN Amanpour

John Williams and Anne-Sophie Mutter: Music takes us to a spiritual place.

In their cherished collaboration, the violin virtuoso and the world's most acclaimed film composer build musical bridges through their personal connection.

April 14, 2023

The Washington Post by Michael Brodeur

WITH A SECRET STASH OF INSTRUMENTS, NOSEDA FINE-TUNES THE NSO

There’s a secret to the sound of the National Symphony Orchestra.

I’d been trying to figure it out for three years, and I kept coming back to the strings, nearly tapping out my supply of reasonable adjectives to describe the special sauce at work across the NSO string section. I’ve called them “pining” and “shining,” “deep” and “shimmering,” and “gorgeously sculpted” by NSO music director Gianandrea Noseda.

A hint hid in plain sight, in the fine print of the programs: “Select musicians of the National Symphony Orchestra play instruments provided by the Pro-Canale Foundation through the Tarisio Trust.”

But what next to nobody knew until now — including NSO players — was who lent the orchestra this low-key treasure trove of fine antique instruments. Take a bow, maestro.

Since 2011, Noseda, 58, has quietly amassed an impressive collection of string instruments, and since 2019, he’s been covertly feeding those instruments into the orchestra. Currently, eight of Noseda’s secret stash are in the hands of NSO players – seven violins and one viola.

March 10, 2023

Associated Press by Ronald Blum

Meeting Muti at Age 10, Rustioni knew he wanted to conduct

NEW YORK (AP) — Daniele Rustioni was a 10-year-old in the La Scala children’s chorus when he saw Riccardo Muti for the first time.

“I want to be him,” Rustioni recalled thinking. “I was very — how can say? — loud as a kid. He said: `You should be a conductor because you are very extroverted.’”

With his 40th birthday approaching on April 18, Rustioni is music director of the Lyon Opera in France and the Ulster Orchestra in Northern Ireland. He serves as principal guest conductor of Munich’s Bavarian State Opera and will be on the podium for the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of Verdi’s “Falstaff” starting Sunday.

“Rustioni belongs to the old style of conductors that take music and operas very, very seriously,” the 81-year-old Muti said from his home in Ravenna, Italy. “He’s a very good conductor and a serious musician — I underline the word serious because I see that today many conductors don’t concentrate, especially in operas, and they are not prepared. They don’t know anything about the vocal technique, about composition, and just they move the arms.”

Rustioni’s mother was a chorus singer and encouraged him to join the children’s choir at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala during the tenure of Muti, music director from 1986-2005. After appearing in Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” Prokofiev’s “Ivan the Terrible,” Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and Puccini’s “La Boheme,” Rustioni got the solo role of Third Boy in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute)” late in a 2005 run led by Muti.

Aug. 14, 2022

The New York Times

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

By Zachary Woolfe

At the Salzburg Festival, Riches, Retreads and Notes of Caution

Classical music’s pre-eminent annual event had more revivals than usual, but also a breathless new staging of Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova.”

The soprano Corinne Winters as an isolated woman in “Kat’a Kabanova” at the Salzburg Festival’s Felsenreitschule theater.

SALZBURG, Austria — The premiere of a new production of Janacek’s opera “Kat’a Kabanova” had just ended at the Salzburg Festival here last week. When the lights went up, Kristina Hammer, the festival’s new president, was wiping tears off her cheeks. It was hard to blame her for crying. “Kat’a” is a breathless tragedy about a small-town woman trapped in a loveless marriage and driven to suicide after having a brief affair. Janacek’s music stamps out her ethereal fantasies with the brutal fist of reality.

May 2, 2022

Associated Press by Ronald Blum

Zurich Ring Cycle focuses on dysfunctional family of gods

ZURICH (AP) — Wotan beckoned the other gods to join him in walking to Valhalla, their new home acquired at a high and painful price. Instead of following, they shot him looks of contempt and allowed him to enter on his own.

Andreas Homoki’s production of Richard Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” that opened at the Zurich Opera on Saturday night is a family affair, stripping Wagner’s mythology of usual trappings, instead laser-focused on a dysfunctional, brooding bunch consumed by greed. No rainbow bridge, no hint of a river, mountaintop or underground mine, not even an eye patch.

“You don’t need to see Valhalla built up by the giants,” conductor Gianandrea Noseda said.

Only a 25-minute walk from the Escher Houses flats at 11-13 Zeltweg where Wagner composed “Rheingold,” “Die Walküre” and the first two acts of “Siegfried” from 1853-57, the Zurich Opera is staging its first “Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)” since Robert Wilson’s typically austere rendition of 2000-01. Homoki and set designer Christian Schmidt will debut the four operas over two years, culminating in a pair of Ring Cycles in the spring of 2024.

February 20, 2022

The Spectator World by James Panero

Carnegie Plus One

After 130 years, Carnegie Hall decided it could use a virtual stage

“A cable channel... but for classical music! It could be called ‘The Carnegie Hall Channel.’”

I was on a beam reach to Eatons Neck about a quarter-century ago when a young man named Lawrence Perelman made this blustery pronouncement. We were Bill Buckley’s guests for an overnight sail across Long Island Sound. My first thought was: good luck with that. My second thought was no one wants to watch classical music on television. PBS’s Great Performances? More like lesser performances.

With pixels the size of Cheez-Its and tin-can soundtracks, the experience was nothing like the real thing.

But Perelman, an impresario who became an advisor to classical artists and institutions, as well as a friend, kept waving his baton long after we returned to Stamford. Cable became apps and Apple TV. After 130 years, Carnegie Hall, Andrew Carnegie’s pitch-perfect concert house on Fifty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, decided it could use a virtual stage.

Carnegie Hall+, announced in early January, is touted as the “first premium subscription on-demand channel of its kind established by an American performing arts institution.” Co-founded by Carnegie Hall’s Clive Gillinson, it’s a subscription service from Apple TV.

“This is my life’s work,” Perelman called me up to say. “I came to Clive in 2007 and found a kindred spirit. We never stopped talking about it. And for this to happen now is amazing.” “Would I be getting a free subscription?” I inquired. I would not. But there’s a free one-week trial for the $7.99-a-month service. I signed up.

“The reality of the pandemic led to something like this,” Perelman explained. “We are spending more time with screens than ever before. So we need better virtual experiences. Sports have been doing it forever. For

the arts it’s even more important. Now they have finally caught up. This is the world’s stage at home.”

December 10, 2021

The New York Times by Zachary Woolfe

AMID VIRUS SURGE, SALZBURG FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES NEXT SUMMER

Classical music’s most storied annual event will return to prepandemic scale, with more than 200 events over six weeks.

Austria went into lockdown recently to counter a record number of coronavirus cases. But in Salzburg, where the surge has been sharp, there are plans for a brighter future.

On Friday the Salzburg Festival, classical music and opera’s most storied annual event, announced its 2022 summer season — back to prepandemic scale, with more than 200 events over six weeks beginning July 18.

A double bill of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Orff’s rarely performed “De Temporum Fine Comoedia” will be staged by Romeo Castellucci and conducted by Teodor Currentzis. The soprano Asmik Grigorian will star in all three one-acts of Puccini’s “Il Trittico.” The director Barrie Kosky and the conductor Jakub Hrusa will collaborate on Janacek’s “Kat’a Kabanova.”

Cecilia Bartoli will take the main role in Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” and Shirin Neshat’s 2017 production of Verdi’s “Aida” and Lydia Steier’s 2018 staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” will get return engagements. There is a rich lineup of spoken drama, orchestra concerts — many featuring the festival’s house band, the Vienna Philharmonic — and recitals, including the usual enviable array of pianists.The season will be the first under Kristina Hammer, the festival’s ne-w president, whose appointment was announced on Nov. 24. A marketing and communications specialist, Hammer follows Helga Rabl-Stadler’s quarter-century tenure, and she joins Markus Hinterhäuser, the artistic director, and Lukas Crepaz, the finance director, in a triumvirate that will continue to negotiate the pandemic, as well as oversee a major renovation of the festival’s theaters.

December 10, 2021

Associated Press by Ronald Blum

SALZBURG FESTIVAL PROJECTS RETURN TO NORMAL NEXT SUMMER

The Salzburg Festival is projecting for a return to normal next summer, announcing a schedule of 228 performances over 45 days that include a new production of Béla Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” paired with Carl Orff’s “A Play on the End of Time.”

Salzburg, Europe’s premier festival, cut to 110 performances in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic and was back up to 163 last summer. Revenue dropped from 31.2 million Euros ($34.9 million) in 2019 to 8.7 million Euros ($10.4 million) before rebounding to 27.7 million Euros ($31.5 million) in 2021, when 227,000 attended.

“We are doing a full program. We cannot predict how it will be in the summer,” festival artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser said during a telephone interview. “We had two summers when we had the pandemic situation and we had to react.”

Hinterhäuser hopes the festival’s regular audience, usually drawn to Austria from more than 80 nations, will return for the first time since 2019 after skipping last summer due to travel restrictions.

December 8, 2021

Associated Press by Ronald Blum

NEW YORK’S CARNEGIE HALL LAUNCHES VIDEO ON-DEMAND NETWORK

Carnegie Hall is launching an on-demand video network that features recorded performances of classical artists known for performing at the famed venue.

Carnegie Hall+, created in a partnership Unitel, was to launch Wednesday night. It costs $7.99 monthly and is available through the Apple TV app and smart televisions, Roku, Amazon Fire and other devices.

Content includes operas from the Salzburg Festival and the Bayreuth Festival’s 1979-80 staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle directed by Patrice Chéreau. Concerts and ballets are available, and featured performers include Luciano Pavarotti, Renée Fleming, Leontyne Price, Anna Netrebko and Jonas Kaufmann, and conductors Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti, Carlos Kleiber, Riccardo Muti and Claudio Abbado.

Carnegie executive and artistic director Clive Gillinson said the Hall began exploring a network about 15 years ago, initially as an audio-only project.

“It became very clear that the audio scene was saturated with very, very big players, so the focus went to the audiovisual,” he said.

Gillinson was introduced to Unitel by Lawrence Perelman, a consultant who became a co-founder of the network. Gillinson said a pair of Carnegie trustees contributed funds enabling the startup, and he projects the network will run on a break-even basis within 18-to-24 months.

December 8, 2021

The Washington Post by Michael Andor Brodeur

Best classical music of 2021: Noseda reunites with the NSO, ‘Fire’ lights up the Met

The return of live performances in 2021 after 18 months of shuttered halls and scattered orchestras was enough to disabuse any critic of their crankier faculties.

After such a long and fraught silence, I’m not gonna lie: Everything sounded amazing. It may take a few months for my critical nails to grow back to full talon status, but that’s not to say that the weird blur of 2021 didn’t have some clearly discernible musical highs.

The pandemic shook every end of cultural life and, in doing so, gave composers, musicians and institutions alike fresh impetus to examine the very foundations of the art form. This year was the first step in putting the house back together, and addressing some urgent repairs in the process.

The return of Noseda and the NSO

The pandemic offered scant opportunities for Gianandrea Noseda and the National Symphony Orchestra to spend quality socially distanced time together. When they did, it was usually in reduced form, and for an audience of video cameras and faraway streamers. And maybe it’s because I started this Washington Post gig just two days before covid crumpled up every calendar on Earth, but the reunion of the NSO and its maestro has sounded especially sweet. To close the year, Noseda will lead the orchestra in pieces from Handel’s “Messiah” as well as Bach’s “Magnificat.” kennedy-center.org/nso.

August 17, 2021

The New York Times by Zachary Woolfe

After a Quarter-Century, the Queen of Salzburg Calls It Quits

Since 1995, Helga Rabl-Stadler has ruled the Salzburg Festival, classical music’s premier annual event, as its president and public face.

SALZBURG, Austria — It was intermission at the Salzburg Festival’s surreal and melancholy new production of “Don Giovanni,” and a small crowd of donors filled the office of Helga Rabl-Stadler, the festival’s president since 1995.

Dropping the medical-grade FFP2 masks that have been required indoors at the 101-year-old festival, classical music’s premier annual event, the group sipped champagne and nibbled canapés. After some small talk, Rabl-Stadler gave a short speech about this summer’s program, a continuation of last year’s centennial — which was truncated by the pandemic but, through elaborate planning and force of will, not canceled entirely.

“We couldn’t celebrate a hundred years,” she said, “by not doing everything.”

As the applause died down, Reinold Geiger, the billionaire who runs the French beauty company L’Occitane en Provence, and whom Rabl-Stadler some time ago recruited to help underwrite the festival’s youth programs, spoke up to suggest a reason Salzburg had been one of the few major performing arts events that went forward during 2020.

July 17, 2020

Gramophone Magazine

RECORDING OF THE MONTH

Dallapiccola Il prigioniero

Sols; Danish National Symphony Choir & Orchestra / Gianandrea Noseda

Chandos

Gianandrea Noseda returns to the music of Dallapiccola with a powerful performance of his protest opera. Brilliantly performed, it’s a significant addition to the composer’s discography.

March 5, 2020

The Chicago Tribune, by Howard Reich

Does Chicago have room for another baroque group? Apollo’s Fire believes so.

Is there room in Chicago for another early music group?

Jeannette Sorrell, founder and artistic director of Cleveland-based Apollo’s Fire, believes so.

Having performed thrice in the Chicago area — twice at Ravinia Festival and once at the University of Chicago — Apollo’s Fire is launching what Sorrell calls a “semiannual residency” with a concert March 12 at Northwestern University’s Galvin Recital Hall in Evanston (a second program will be announced later). Apollo’s Fire — which bills itself as the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra — will also do outreach activities with Chicago schools.

In effect, Sorrell’s ensemble will be opening a beachhead in a city that’s home to Newberry Consort and Haymarket Opera (both specializing in historic performance practices), and Music of the Baroque (which performs on modern instruments).

“We have essentially a different repertoire than they do, and a somewhat different performance style,” says Sorrell. “My hope is that we will build new audiences for classical music, but especially early music, in Chicago, and that this will benefit the local groups that are here.”

Surely it stands to benefit audiences who value historic repertory played on period instruments with keen sensitivity and scholarship. That much is evident from “Sephardic Journey: Wanderings of the Spanish Jews,” an Apollo Fire album that poetically revives centuries-old songs and chants.

January 9, 2020

The New York Times, by Michael Cooper

52 Place to go in 2020: salzburg, Austria

The hills are still alive with you-know-what. Salzburg, Austria, draws hordes each year to the bright yellow townhouse where Mozart was born and to the Mirabell Gardens, where Julie Andrews taught a troupe of ersatz von Trapp children their do-re-mi's in “The Sound of Music.” But it’s worth the pilgrimage this year for another reason: The Salzburg Festival, theDavos or Disneyland of classical music, willcelebrate its centennial this summer. There will be diva turns by Anna Netrebko and Cecilia Bartoli and performances by some of the finest maestros and soloists in the world; the house band, as ever, will be the incomparable Vienna Philharmonic. The charming Salzburg Marionette Theater offers smaller scale (and prices). And the tone-deaf can enjoy the Baroque splendor of the Old Town; the sublime Wiener schnitzel at Herzl; and the addictive local street food, bosna sausages. A nearby alpine peak, Untersberg, is reachable by city bus and cable car. A different kind of summit can be enjoyed in its grand cafes: the Salzburger nockerl, a sweet soufflé whose sugar-dusted peaks suggest nearby snow-capped hills.

January 2, 2020

The Economist

In the world of conducting, fortune favors the old

MOST OF CARLOS MIGUEL PRIETO’S classmates from Princeton and Harvard Business School have built typical business careers. After applying or being headhunted for a job, they undergo a recruitment process lasting weeks or perhaps months. If successful, they do the role for a few years before moving on elsewhere and starting again: a recent study by Korn Ferry, a consultancy, found that even top executives have brief tenures, with CEOs remaining in place for an average of eight years. Mr Prieto, by contrast, has stuck with a number of his jobs for more than a decade each; he is currently considering what position he might like in three or four years’ time. Mr Prieto is an orchestral conductor, a profession so rarefied that most major appointments require a lengthy and careful courting process. Moves are planned many years in advance.

“In most careers, people’s prime occurs in the first 20 to 30 years,” Mr Prieto says. “In orchestral conducting it’s not like that, because you learn by doing and by building a repertoire. That takes time. It’s also a matter of maturity.”

December 12, 2019

The New York Times, by David Allen

The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2019

Another year, another appearance on this list for Mr. Honeck and the orchestra he has brought to scarcely believable heights in the standard repertoire. This may well be their finest recording so far: breathtakingly intense, magnificently played and unrelentingly fresh.

December 4, 2019

November 16, 2019

South Florida Classical Review, by Lawrence Budmen

Prieto makes outstanding New World debut in user-friendly program

An outstanding conducting debut and a performance of an American classic by a rising young soprano highlighted the New World Symphony’s concert on Friday night at the New World Center. The dance-infused beat of Latin rhythms bookended the program, showcasing the entire ensemble at fever pitch.

Carlos Miguel Prieto is conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and the Louisiana Philharmonic in New Orleans. He also directs youth ensembles, including NYO II and the Youth Orchestra of the Americas. 

November 15, 2019

The Associated Press, by Ron Blum

Noseda, in his prime, lifting National Symphony Orchestra

After a piano rehearsal, two orchestra sessions and one concert performance together, soprano Christine Goerke gushed with praise for Gianandrea Noseda.

“He doesn’t just use his hands and his arms. He conducts with his entire body,” she said. “And it is amazing, because when you see that kind of energetic physicality, there is no mistaking what he is asking for.”

Entering his prime, the 55-year-old Italian is in his third season as music director of Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra…

November 14, 2019

The New York Times, by Anthony Tommasini

Review: A Conductor and Soprano Test Wagnerian Waters

WASHINGTON — A lot was at stake for the soprano Christine Goerke and the conductor Gianandrea Noseda on Wednesday, when they performed Act II of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in concert here with the National Symphony Orchestra.

Ms. Goerke’s performances as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring” last season at the Metropolitan Opera reaffirmed her status as one of the world’s outstanding dramatic sopranos. But is she up for Isolde, the final summit for a Wagnerian singer?

And while Mr. Noseda has an extensive operatic repertory, his experience with Wagner is limited. With a “Ring” on the horizon in his new position at the Zurich Opera, is he adept at leading this challenging composer’s music?

November 13, 2019

The New York Times, by Michael Cooper

The Salzburg Festival Prepares to Turn 100

What a difference a century makes.

When the Salzburg Festival in Austria was first held, in the summer of 1920, it consisted of just half a dozen performances of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s morality play “Jedermann” (“Everyman”).