Lots of jaunting around today with my friends from Germany. One of the interesting attractions is Hanger 7 near the airport. It is a large enclosure with the Red Bull collection of aircraft, ranging from a B-25 WWII vintage heavy bomber to an early Douglas passenger plane, to a Sikoi design and a couple of French jets--a few helicopters as well. There is also a collection of Formula One race cars. The backdrop is a magnificent view of the Alps. Hanger 7 with the Alps in the background Me with the Alps An early Douglas passenger plane, seating 32 One of ..read more

This week's miscellanea comes to you from the Hotel Via Roma in Salzburg, Austria where I am recovering surprisingly quickly from jet lag! Let's open with a somber piece from the New York Times: Maestro Accused of Striking Singer Won’t Return to His Ensembles. After sixty years conducting devoted mostly to pre-Classical era music by Bach, Monteverdi and many others, John Eliot Gardiner is being let go by three ensembles he founded: Gardiner, 81, who is one of the world’s most celebrated conductors, will no longer lead the three groups: the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists a ..read more

Hohensalzburg Fortress My hotel has been cleverly laid out so there is no view whatsoever, but if you stand in front, you get a great look at the Hohensalzburg Fortress, begun around 1100 AD and added to for centuries after. It was never captured and Salzburg was an independent state under a series of "Prince Archbishops" for a thousand years (until Napoleon came along). There are two mountains in town that I know of, this one, the Mönchsberg on the Western side of the Salzach river and the Kapuzinerberg on the Eastern side. There are apparently three more mountains in town ..read more

 “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina Yesterday I attended a concert of violin and piano. In conversation with a violinist friend who also attended I mentioned that they simply don't program violin/piano recitals at the Salzburg Festival. She seemed surprised. They do have a lot of piano recitals though. The concert last night, while seemingly enjoyed by many, was bad, but following the Tolstoy quote, it was bad in its own way. The soloist, according to the biography, had won prizes in fifty (50!) international comp ..read more

 As I have done a few times recently, I will be flying to Salzburg next week to take in the music festival. After a couple of recovery days, the first concert will be on July 26th with Jordi Savall conducting vocal soloists, choir and orchestra in music by MICHEL-RICHARD DELALANDE, MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER, and ARVO PÄRT. This is the first of two concerts of largely early music I will be hearing, the second being Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble in works by Dowland and Purcell. I've never hear Pärt in concert before, nor Charpentier and Delalande for that matter ..read more

We don't have much actual music criticism these days, but we have a great deal of what the English would call "over-egging the pudding." YouTube has become almost unwatchable because of it, but I have commented on that before. Alas, we find it even in such rarified heights as writings by Richard Taruskin. In his scholarly works it doesn't appear, but when he writes for newspapers or magazines, it creeps out. Journalism these days is all about shouting out extremes. Here is an example from The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. Referring to the performance of the Symphony No. 9 by B ..read more

"the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being" --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn That's a pretty good quote. Mostly though, after reading it we go "cool idea" and then go back to life as usual. It might be more useful to think of how it applies to one's personal behavior. * * * There has been a lot of criticism of director-driven European opera productions, but personally, the ones I have seen have been entrancing and stimulating. Alex Ross talks about a new production of Wagner: The Waves. Leave it to the director Peter Sellars to make “Tristan” mind-bending once agai ..read more

 Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung in the original German) is a tone poem by Richard Strauss that expresses the dying thoughts of an artist who at the end achieves transcendence. That piece was completed in 1889. Many years later, in the closing months of the war, April 1945, he completed a somewhat similar work, unlike the previous one, with no overt program. This is his Metamorphosen for 23 strings which he started composing the day after the destruction of the Vienna Opera House. Here is a clip of an interview with a neurophysiologist and psychiatrist who also studie ..read more

 You can't do any better than listen to a little Bach on a Sunday morning. This is a particularly ecstatic cantata ..read more

Despite over fifty years in the music biz, I discover new things nearly every day. Often they are in the world of opera as I developed an interest in opera relatively late in life and opera is a universe of its own. We are all aware that there are different types of voice--it was in high school choir that I realized I was a bass (or more likely baritone) when they stuck me in that section. As a classical guitarist I accompanied many singers and noticed that they came in different varieties as well, though in choir, they are only divided into sopranos and altos, tenors and basses. But when you ..read more