But now the 83-year-old Peter Kraus is once again in the mood for a concert tour through 25 cities. A conversation about canoeing, singing as a skunk and the changes in the music industry.Interviewed by Michael ZirnsteinPeter Kraus spent his first fee on a concert ticket to Sammy Davis junior in Monte Carlo; Coincidentally, the world star and the rising star from Munich met at the hotel bar afterwards... Kraus may have developed into a teenage heartthrob, the German Elvis,...
Fully. The Isarphilharmonie in Munich is sold out, which doesn't mean that all seats are taken, because there are also seats behind the podium. But they are only sold in concerts, not when a person is alone on the stage. A person, a table, a piano stool and at least 1600 listeners. On the table two books that will never be opened in two and a half hours, that only serve as a support for the notebook he is reading...
The Munich Philharmonic offered a program of very different sound worlds in the Isarphilharmonie under the knowledgeable, confident and wide-awake direction of Susanna Mälkki. In their uniqueness, the pieces also appeared like the physiognomies of their creators. It began with Anton Webern's six orchestral pieces op. 6: darkness and the finest sense of sound, allusion and lament in the shortest possible form, orchestral richness in the smallest of spaces and the exploration of piano and pianissimo regions. Webern's music provides...
By Klaus P RichterIn the middle of the cozy Christmas carol season, András Schiff embarks on the extravagant territory of Bach's harpsichord concertos in the Isarphilharmonie. The six concertos BWV 1052 to 1056 and 1058 are arrangements of his own music, including the violin concertos in E major and A minor, but they are the nucleus of our piano concert culture.In doing so, Bach not only follows the musical ethos of his time with the recycling of good ideas, but...
She had a cheeky Goschen - and she was so much more than just Karl Valentin's sidekick. In her new concert show in the Isarphilharmonie, Cornelia Corba devotes herself entirely to the great Liesl Karlstadt, tells the turbulent life of the popular folk actress: about her beginnings in the variety theaters in Munich, about her relationship with the married Valentin, about her solo career at the Kammerspiele and up to the role of Mother Brandl on BR radio. In between,...
Igor Stravinsky's Violin Concerto from 1931 makes it impressively clear that dryness can be sensual, that distance can be attractive and that elegant coolness should not be confused with harsh cold. Provided that a violinist who is as familiar with all the violin literature as Frank Peter Zimmermann plays on this evening in the Isarphilharmonie with the Munich Philharmonic under the baton of conductor Dima Slobodeniuk, who stepped in for the ailing Mikko Frank. Then it flashes and tingles, then...
Never before in Munich has Melody Gardot been seen strutting across the stage so relaxed and without a cane as on this evening. While she used to have to use a cane at every concert after a terrible accident at the age of 18 when she was run over by a car, this time she floats and strides - cheers for physiotherapy - across the stage of the Isarphilharmonie. The only thing that has remained of her injury is her...
Apart from those who have already heard the album or attended a tour date from the past week - for example at the "Act-Jubilee" three days earlier in Berlin - hardly anyone in the Isarphilharmonie recognized the piece with which Michael Wollny and his trio with Tim Lefebvre on bass and Eric Schaefer on drums started the evening: George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" came across as almost unrecognizable, mysteriously floating and almost menacing despite its romance. A version that...
By Klaus P. Richter, MunichFor the first anniversary of the Isarphilharmonie, the Munich Philharmonic gave us an extravagant trip to the Rhine. She led us from the cheerful Rheingau ambience in Schumann's "Rhenish" symphony to the dark Rhine myth of Wagner's "Ring". Philippe Jordan, the evening's maestro, created something like a mental connection between the fourth movement of the Schumann symphony with its solemn trombone choirs in Cologne Cathedral Homage and the abysmal trombone pomp of Wagner's "Götterdämmerung".While the first...
By Klaus P. Richter, MunichIf that had been interesting, the opera maestro who had rushed to Berlin would have presented us with an "Elias" by Mendelssohn. But Kirill Petrenko was ill during rehearsals and Duncon Ward thankfully stepped in at the Isarphilharmonie. The passionately acting 33-year-old Englishman approached the latent operatic drama of the biblical oratorio with verve. Already the overture he charged with agitato, attunement to a dramaturgy between Old Testament archaism with god-forsaken prophets, the people of Zion...
