Stravinsky's Nightingale from Aix

I didn't see last 20 minutes of Don Giovanni :(
Will comment on the Tcherniakov's production --which I tenderly loved-- once I see these last 20 minutes and I'm a liiiittle less busy.

Tonight, you can all try and see the Robert Lepage's production of The Nightingale



Thanks to the coolest TV in the Universe, it's free and it will start at 8 pm (Paris time - c.e.t). Bless Arte Live Web ;)

Information about the show can be found here. Our fave Kazushi Ono will conduct. With such a fantastic singers, I have no doubt that musicwise this will be 100 minutes of pure pleasure. As for the production itself, you already know that Robert Lepage's terabytes of computer images in an otherwise Zeffirelli's concept of theater are not what I like the most. So here is a hoping tonight we'll see a show in which the images do not hide the emptiness of content [like it was the case in the past, c.f. this].

FYI, French press is full of praise for this production,  which is certainly pleasant but says very little about the real quality of the show [French critique is 'atrocious' for the most part]. A short video about the show can be found here.

Ed: Olga Peretyatko and Elena Semenova are AMAZING singers. Nabil Suliman is very good too. In the show that we're about to see tonight they will combine live with the performance recorded last night. Olga complained on her blog about a sore throat she inadvertently woke up with yesterday, and the whole production team was freaking out all day... How it will all finish we'll see tonight. Good luck Olga [Удачи Оля!] :) 

Sensational Budapest Festival Orchestra at Pleyel

I listened to various orchestra conducted by Iván Fischer, but this was my first time listening to him conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Yes, it is a completely different experience and the memories from that Saturday, January 9 2010, will stay with me for quite some time.

You could feel a symbiosis of the conductor and his orchestra, a global technical prowess mixed with joy of all the musicians - the joy to play and share that moment in which the most sublime music is being produced. We shared that unique moment with them too, for which I am grateful to this  orchestra, its astounding conductor, and -of course- to Pleyel for making this all possible.

On the program: Richard Wagner - Siegfried Idyll, Wesendonck Lieder (with our fave Petra Lang), Igor Stravinsky - Petrushka.