the set of the noteworthy arts documents
Mozart was a great joker. Once he’s got a fun during a run of his Magic Flute at Vienna’s Freihaus Theatre. In a letter to his wife Constanze, Mozart admitted sneaking backstage and sabotaging the great Emanuel Schikaneder as the latter sang ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’. When Schikaneder, as Papageno, went up on his magic…
On January 15, 1941, in the chilled hall of a prisoner of war camp in German-controlled Silesia, a huge crowd of prisoners and Nazi guards gathered to listen to the musicians performing. Stalag was buried under the snow. There were 30,000 of prisoners (mostly French, but there were also Polish and Belgians). Four musicians played…
If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.
Simon Rattle meets Simon Rattle: “Conductors aren’t separate people! We don’t exist without our orchestras.” Attitude to Competition Victories (After the 1974 the John Player International Conducting Competition Victory) People do plan their lives, you know, and I had my life well planned, I had the money to do a fourth year at the Academy. I just…
Dinner of Arthur Rubinstein, Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya in French Deauville. The action begins before the dessert with whipped cream. You’ll see how Rubinstein teaches Vishnevskaya to make smoke out of cigars – they talk in Russian. The verses of Mephistopheles, which sing a glorious trinity, where each – primus inter pares, first among…
The communion with a confidential soul, the discovery of indescribable colours, the admiration of a remarkable message whose ideas never cease to evolve and inspire… This is part of a distinctive journey that will leave an everlasting mark upon us.
The Modigliani Quartet
The Modigliani Quartet has been recording the complete quartets of Schubert all year long. This great project will be released for the Folle Journée 2022. Recorded in the most beautiful halls in Europe such as La Chaux de Fonds in Switzerland, the Reistadel in Munich, or the TAP in Poitiers by their sound engineer Hugues Deschaux, this complete work is a great first for a French quartet… 5 discs box set
This is Lucile Boulanger’s first solo recital. The French gambist, universally praised for her natural and moving playing – BBC Music Magazine even described her as ‘the Jacqueline du Pré of the viola da gamba’ – juxtaposes Bach with Carl Friedrich Abel, a great master of the bass viol and a close friend of the Bach family. Although Johann Sebastian never wrote for solo viola da gamba, we know that he transcribed many of his works for other instruments. So Lucile Boulanger has chosen, for example, to transcribe three dances from the Sixth Suite, “because it sounds particularly good on the viol, being written for five-stringed cello (a step towards the six or seven strings of the viol?). It is in D, the viol key par excellence, and its style, already somewhat galant, is reminiscent of Abel. . . . This album gives me the opportunity to showcase the viol as both a melodic instrument – with the grain of the bow, the fragility of tone – and a polyphonic one.”