The Sydney Festival is hiring an elite German orchestra to perform at the 2014 Sydney Festival, because believe it or not, it is more cost effective than employing an Australian ensemble. Substantial government subsidies are the reason behind this curious situation. Click here to read the feature in The Age.
Wagner specialist conductor Christian Thielemann’s reading of the complete Ring Cycle at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2011 was recognised as one of the greatest Wagnerian events of recent times. On August 2nd, Deutsche Grammophon releases a recording of this performance as a boxed set of 14 CDs of the four Ring operas and 2 DVDs featuring four…
Discovered in 2004, amongst a collection of drafts and rejected sketches, the prologue to Shostakovich’s incomplete and forgotten opera Orango received its world premiere in Los Angeles in December 2012. The work was intended to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Soviet revolution but became a satire on the bourgeois Russian press. The world premiere was directed…