Schedule

With Rolando Villazón directing and playing the title role, the world rushed for tickets to the Baden-Baden 2012 Pentecost-holiday opera. Following his directorial debut in 2011 (Werther, Lyon) the Mexican tenor went a step further, staging Gaetano Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore and directing himself in the role of Nemorino. The film tells the story of this “story within a story” and reveals the creative process of staging the comic opera in two acts at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden in April and May 2012. We follow Rolando Villazón in rehearsals with singers and actors, and in his exchanges with young conductor Pablo Heras-Casado on the way to a highly personal performance.

Stefano Demicheli conducts the Ensemble Talenti Vulcanici and soloists Nicola Cianncio (bass) and Catherine Jones (cello) in a varied baroque music program, recorded at Chiesa di Santa Caterina da Seina in Naples, Italy. On the program are Alessandro Scarlatti's Quante i boschi han piane (from his serenade Erminia); Nicola Fago's Contro colpi di fortuna (from the opera Il faraone sommerso); Nicola Porpora's Idre, arpie, draghi e leoni (from his serenade La Iole); Angelo Ragazzi's Sonata a quattro, no. 1 in G major; Alessandro Scarlatti's cantata Nel mar che bagna al bel Sebeto; Giovanni Bononcini's Quanto abbraccia il mar (from Euleo festeggiante); Georg Frideric Handel's Precipitoso il mar che freme (from his cantata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo); Nicola Porpora's Concerto for Cello and Strings in G major; Nicola Fago's Miei fidi armatevi (from his cantata Il faraone sommerso); and Giovanni Bononcini's Per molti lustri (from Euleo festeggiante).

On New Year’s Eve the Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle invite us to join them together with Cecilia Bartoli, who graced their annual concert at the Philharmonie, Berlin with arias selected from her extraordinary repertoire. Also featured: exhilarating dances by Brahms and Dvořák that happily combine characteristics of their own idioms with Slavonic and Hungarian folk music. The program features following works: Rameau’s Dances Suite, Gavotte and Entr’acte from Les Boréades; Handel’s “Scherza in mar la navicella" from Lotario, “Ah che sol...M'adoro l'idol mio” from Teseo and “Lascia la spina” from Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. This is followed by orchestral performances such as Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances Op. 46/1, No. 4, Op.72/4 and Op. 46/3, Suite No. 2 from Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 1.

Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks performs Frederic Chopin's Polonaise-Fantaisie Op. 61. Recorded at the Nicols Concert Hall, Evanston, IL, USA. Faliks has established herself as one of the most communicative, and poetic artists of her generation. The Polonaise-Fantaise was dedicated to Mme A. Veyret, composed and published in 1846

Renowned French string quartet Quatuor Ébène marked the 250th birth anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) with a remarkable project: recording all of the great composer’s sixteen string quartets. For five years, violinists Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure, violist Marie Chilemme, and cellist Raphaël Merlin immersed themselves in Beethoven’s 650 pages of sheet music. Their efforts culminated in the performance of the composer’s complete repertoire for string quartet, which covers three decades of Beethoven's musical creativity, during six impressive concerts at Philharmonie de Paris in the autumn of 2020. Quatuor Ébène explored every facet of Beethoven's string quartet repertoire: from the youthful Opus 18 string quartets to the Razumovsky, Harp, and Serioso quartets (Opus 59, 74, and 95) from his middle period, and finally, the depth of his late quartets (Opus 127 to 135). This program features Quatuor Ébène performing Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 5 in A major, Op. 18, No. 5; String Quartet No. 4 in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4; and String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat major, Op. 127. This concert was recorded at Philharmonie de Paris on December 17, 2020.

In this concert recorded in November 2016 at the magnificent Baroque basilica of Saint Florian, Austria – once the home of Anton Bruckner – the Wiener Singverein, the Cleveland Orchestra and its principal conductor Franz Welser-Möst pare down all traces of bombast wherever emotions could easily run out of control. Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45, reaches out to comfort the living through religious texts not traditionally associated with the Requiem Mass. The result is a work of great intensity that speaks to people of all faiths, believers and non-believers alike. The program’s two soloists – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller and Simon Keenlyside – are already at home on the world’s stages. While the former has carved a career for herself not only as an opera singer but also as a concert artist, the London-born Keenlyside has been building his impressive career around the prestigious guest appearances he has made during the past ten years.

New Year’s Eve 2009 was celebrated with an extraordinary concert in Havana, welcoming the New Year with Caribbean salsa rhythms and Cuban classics. This occasion coincided with the 70th anniversary of the Tropicana Club, the “cabaret of dreams”, making it a special event for all the club’s artists. Highlights of the evening include performances by Omara Portuondo (*1930), who gained international stardom as the singer of Buena Vista Social Club. She started her career at the Tropicana in 1945, making this occasion an extra-special celebration with friends and fellow artists.

Pianist JJ Jun Li Bui (Canada, 2004) performs the first movement of Carl Vine’s Piano Sonata No. 1; Piece No. 2 in E-flat major from Franz Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. Post. D. 946; and Maurice Ravel’s La Valse, during the first round of the Piano Edition of the Concours musical international de Montréal 2024 (CMIM). This performance was recorded at the Bourgie Hall of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Les Dissonances is a collective of artists founded by violinist David Grimal in 2004. The conductorless ensemble consists of musicians from the most prestigious European orchestras, international soloists, and young talents. In this performance, Les Dissonances play Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major, K. 216. Leading violinist Grimal features as the soloist. With the exception of the first violin concerto, Mozart composed his other four violin concertos in 1775 at a time when he was concertmaster at the Salzburg court. Violin Concerto No. 3 opens with a theme the composer borrowed from the aria ‘Aer tranquillo’ of his then recent opera Il re pastore. In the beautiful Adagio, the strings are muted and the oboes make way for the flutes, which only sound in the second movement. The finale movement has a dance-like character. This performance was recorded at Cité de la Musique, France, in 2014.

Baritone Arvid Fagerfjäll (Sweden, 1991) and pianist Hikaru Kanki (Japan, 1993) perform Franz Schubert’s An mein Herz, D. 860; ‘Die Aufgeregten’ from Arnold Schönberg’s Sechs Lieder, Op. 3; ‘A poison tree’ from Benjamin Britten’s The red cockatoo and other songs; Bart Visman’s Vermeer’s Gold; ‘La mer est plus belle’ from Claude Debussy’s Trois mélodies de Paul Verlaine, L. 81; Gabriel Fauré’s Prison, Op. 83, No. 1; and ‘Die Geister am Mummelsee’ from Hugo Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder, during the semi-finals of the International Vocal Competition 2021 – Lied Duo. This performance was recorded at Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.

Mezzo soprano Magdalena Kožená does not only make the heavenly joys resound in the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, earlier in the concert, she devotes herself to the seraphic beauty and intimate simplicity of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder. Practically all songs that Mahler composed prior to 1900 were based on texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of folk poems published by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim. Since then, Mahler turned exclusively towards one single poet, the Franconian orientalist and translator Friedrich Rückert. Mahler acknowledged that the poems moved him so deeply that he sometimes felt he had written them himself. In the transcendent final Lied, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, he also quoted a phrase from the Adagio of his fourth symphony. Asked what it meant, he replied that it personifies himself.