Word: salzburger
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Welcome to Salzburg, in August the classical-music world's equivalent of Cannes. To be sure, there are no topless starlets, cigar-smoking producers or interminable socialist-realist films from Rumania. Still, the music business has a hype and rhythm all its own. Posters of such performers as Conductor Herbert von Karajan (a native son), Soprano Kathleen Battle, Conductor Riccardo Muti and Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter are plastered in shop windows. Managers from the U.S. and Europe gather to plot the careers of performers and ensembles. Diners at the swank Goldener Hirsch restaurant near the Festspielhaus burst into applause whenever...
Indeed, the hills are alive with the sound of music -- and money. The five- week festival is one of the priciest in Europe, with tickets running upwards of $200 for the major opera productions. For those who can afford it, though, Salzburg affords in return an unparalleled opportunity to display wealth and finery. On the street in front of the Festspielhaus, Mercedes-Benz and BMW luxury sedans steadily disgorge one of the most elegantly dressed summer crowds in Europe, the men in tuxedoes or formal Austrian loden coats, the bejeweled women in couturier fantasies and silk dress dirndls. One favorite...
...terrace overlooking Lake Fuschl near Salzburg, Seiji Ozawa and Yo-Yo Ma are deep in conversation. "Remember that discussion about whether an Oriental can do Western music?" asks the Japanese conductor in heavily accented English. Ma does. "Music can be learned, really, by anybody who cares to know it well enough and deeply enough," says the cellist, who is of Chinese parentage but as American as a baseball...
MOZART: Don Giovanni. Samuel Ramey, Don Giovanni; Ferruccio Furlanetto, Leporello; Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Donna Anna; Agnes Baltsa, Donna Elvira; Kathleen Battle, Zerlina; Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon). Salzburg Recital. Soprano Kathleen Battle, Pianist James Levine...
Karajan and Mozart were both born in Salzburg, but that seems to be about all they have in common. Karajan's readings of his countryman's ineffable music have always been heavy and rhythmically sluggish, bereft of joy or bounce. His new recording, a warm-up for his production of the opera in Salzburg this spring and summer, never comes to fiery, diabolical life. It wastes the . talents of Ramey and Battle, and features an excruciating performance by Tomowa-Sintow as the hectoring, humorless Donna Anna. Far more harmonious is Battle's recording from her 1984 recital at Karajan...