Image courtesy of Simon Maguire at Sotheby's.
Jens Laurson, chez ionarts, is giving thorough reports of that big Mahler Festival in Leipzig. You can watch and hear all the concerts at MDR or Arte. As Jens says, the Seventh, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony, gets off to a rather mellow start but becomes spectacularly exciting in the finale. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Dresden Staatskapelle deliver a serenely powerful Third, with songful trombone solos by Nicolas Naudot.... A first edition of the Third is up for auction next month at Sotheby's, with extensive corrections by the composer, not all of which seem to have been incorporated into later editions. (The image above shows a few of these changes. As the catalogue notes, the added music for clarinets does not appear in the standard Universal score, nor do the trumpets play in thirds.) The auction also includes intimate letters from Chopin to Auguste Franchomme, a Mendelssohn watercolor, an apparently unpublished "Happy Birthday" setting by Stravinsky, an early sketch for Strauss's Elektra, and a large batch of Copland materials from the collection of Philip Ramey, including — oh my — "unpublished photographs of the naked Britten and Peter Pears." ... The Village Voice has acted wisely in signing up Seth Colter Walls to write about new classical music. This week Seth covers the recent Wordless Music concert, with special attention to Jonny Greenwood's Doghouse, which strikes me as a formidable piece in an individual style.... Lara Pellegrinelli has been chronicling, via Twitter, a day in the life of Claire Chase, flutist and ICE director.... This Sunday you can hear the remarkable Angela Meade singing Mercadante's Virginia at Wexford, via NPR's World of Opera.... John Adams gave a funny and wise commencement speech at Juilliard.... Next week I will have a Critic's Notebook about New York City Opera, which has announced plans to leave Lincoln Center. In a recent column I had expressed a hope that the company would escape the complex, but I didn't envision it happening in this desperate-looking fashion. There are various stories in the Times.
