The Met’s first Ring Cycle is completed

The first of three complete ‘Ring’ cycles, directed by Robert Lepage and staged by The Met this spring, is over. The NY Times has its say:

The first of three complete ‘Ring’ cycles, directed by Robert Lepage and staged by The Met this spring, is over. The NY Times has its say:
The music will play day and night, It will do its work whether someone is there or not. Lentz illustrates “This old rusty water tank in the middle of nowhere, in darkness will glow from the inside with music and sound pouring out of all day and night. I believe it is doing its work just by being.”
Sadly Claudio Abbado is no more. Thanks to the digital age, his work lives on through his numerous recordings and videos. Gramophone magazine’s website has a selection of his 10 best recordings and the Berlin Philharmoniker concerts on video.
Grammy Award winning New Zealand born bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu (he’s sung Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni for OA in Sydney) has had to meet a new challenge – that of learning a libretto in Chinese. He talks about it in this blog. (The Grammy Award was in 2010 for Best Opera Recording Billy Budd) http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/mar/26/learning-to-sing-chinese-songs
Twenty-four-year-old Victorian pianist Konrad Olsezewski has taken out the prestigious $10,000 Allison/Henderson Sydney Eisteddfod Piano Scholarship with a winning performance, Konrad played the Piano Sonata No 2 in B-flat minor, Opus 36, (1st version) by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Konrad recently completed a Bachelor of Music with Honours at the University of Melbourne and is now studying for a…
Your heart pounds like a timpani, your pulse races faster than the ‘Minute Waltz’; your throat is drier than rosin, whilst the (Blue) Danube could gush from your sweaty palms any moment; you’re so shaky, the hours of vibrato practice were quite redundant. Yet you have to get control yourself and perform – whether it…
Some weeks ago we posted the link to a feature in the New York Times bout the destruction of pianos that no-one wanted to keep or maintain. Now the Sydney Morning Herald reports on a rapidly diminishing skill base of piano tuners. http://www.smh.com.au/national/scaled-back-dying-skill-a-note-of-concern-for-pianists-20120824-24rxj.html