Criticultura em Portugal

 I just returned from a musical journey in Germany and Austria, starting in Berlin and ending in Vienna, seeing three symphonic concerts and two operas over one week. I'll review the operas next week, but will start with the symphonies. My satisfaction with these concerts did not align with my a priori expectations. This is a good thing, and one reason why it is fun to see live music. Otherwise, you could just sit at home with your perfect digital performances.  First up was the Berlin Philharmonic playing in their home Philharmonie under guest conductor Andris Nelsons, the Latvian maestro who heads both the Boston Symphony and Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestras. The orchestra sounded as great as expected, with particularly delicious woodwind solos in the Beethoven Fourth Symphony. This is not a titanic piece, but Nelsons and the orchestra performed it with a nice mix of virtuosity and classical restraint. Less interesting were the Richard Strauss tone poem Don Juan  and the contemporar

Portugal's classical scene feature many typical holiday concerts, including those with too-familiar repertory (eg Sleighride, Nutcracker). Compared to the USA there are fewer Messiah s, but more Bach Christmas Oratorio s, as in most of Europe. Last weekend I saw two very non-typical holiday concerts that should have made a nice pair. The Austrian organist-composer Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) started neurotically laboring over his 10 published massive symphonies late in life (mostly after age 50) and was heavily influenced by his contemporaries Brahms and Wagner. In many ways his symphonies synthesize the music of both. So I looked forward to hearing two concerts the same day featuring these three composers.  First, the good. The Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa (OML) performed a free concert of the Bruckner Symphony No. 7 in E major in the gorgeous Basílica da Estrela (see below). It was exciting to see a Bruckner concert with people lined up outside in the rain one hour in advance

On a recent trip to New York City, I sampled some current theater, both on- and off-Broadway. Off-Broadway theater has been very slow to recover post-COVID, as attendance has dropped, key personnel left the city, and some companies lost their lease at small theaters. Historically, the New Group has been among the healthiest of these smaller companies, often featuring established stars performing in unusual, or self-written plays. On this visit I saw Sabbath’s Theater , a theatrical reworking of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name, starring (and co-written by) John Turturro, film and stage star of Quiz Show, Severance, and Barton Fink . It’s centered on a horny 64-year-old ex-puppeteer who beds numerous women and has an existential crisis. I like Roth better when he does not obsess on the theme of oversexed middle aged men. While this is not one of my favorite Roth novels, I looked forward to seeing what a theatrical rewrite could do with it. Not much, it turns out. This play was unfa