{"id":2190,"date":"2012-03-10T09:40:52","date_gmt":"2012-03-10T14:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=2190"},"modified":"2012-03-10T09:40:52","modified_gmt":"2012-03-10T14:40:52","slug":"todays-best-free-listening-include-gerald-finley-at-the-met-and-a-sparkling-1939-piano-concerto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2012\/03\/10\/todays-best-free-listening-include-gerald-finley-at-the-met-and-a-sparkling-1939-piano-concerto\/","title":{"rendered":"Today’s best free listening includes Gerald Finley at the Met and a sparkling 1939 piano concerto"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Gerald Finley as Don Giovanni at the Met today<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Spectacular Canadian baritone Gerald Finley leaps backward from his steady diet of contemporary operatic fare to star as the Don himself in Mozart’s ever-loved Don Giovanni<\/em> in Michael Grandage’s nice, year-old production. It comes almost live from the Metropolitan Opera this afternoon — brought to us by CBC Radio 2’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Finley’s comic sidekick\/valet is sung by Bryn Terfel, which should make for a zesty combo. Sir Andrew Davis conducts.<\/p>\n

For more details, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The broadcast starts at 1 p.m. Eastern (an hour behind the live performance in New York).<\/p>\n

+++<\/p>\n

A MUST-HEAR ON THE WEB<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pianist Nathalia Romanenko<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Flamboyant young French-based Ukranian pianist Nathalia Romanenko<\/a> has taken a keen interest in the composers who lost their lives or careers to the horrors of Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n

Thursday, she sparkled in a live webcast by the Orchestre National de la Capitole de Toulouse of a Piano Concerto<\/em> by Austrian-Czech composer Viktor Ullmann, who was sent to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. He was 46.<\/p>\n

The Piano Concerto<\/em>, Op. 25, dedicated to pianist Juliette Aranyi (also killed at Auschwitz in 1944, aged 32), dates from 1939. Ullmann self-published it the following year. As a Jew he couldn’t get anyone in central Europe to publish it, nor perform it in public. (He was taken away to the Terez\u00edn concentration camp in 1942.)<\/p>\n

According to the concert’s programme notes (available in French here<\/a>), Ullmann studied with Schoenberg in Vienna. The concerto contains a lively mix of traditional tonal writing and some experimentation.<\/p>\n

Ullmann pleaded with the director of Terez\u00edn, where all sorts of artists had been rounded up to showcase the humaneness of Nazism to busloads of visitors, to grant a performance of the concerto, but was refused.<\/p>\n

The concerto didn’t get its premiere until until 1992, in Stuttgart. Schott published it in 1998, with corrections Ullmann had made at Terez\u00edn.<\/p>\n

Romanenko does an excellent job, as does American conductor Joseph Swensen. The four-movement concerto has nice structure as well as a fine balance of virtuosic show and satisfying interplay between soloist and orchestra.<\/p>\n

The concert programme also includes compelling readings of Felix Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/em> and the Symphony No. 2<\/em> by Robert Schumann.<\/p>\n

You can see and hear it all in high definition on medici.tv, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

John Terauds<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spectacular Canadian baritone Gerald Finley leaps backward from his steady diet of contemporary operatic fare to star as the Don himself in Mozart’s ever-loved Don Giovanni in Michael Grandage’s nice, year-old production. It comes almost live from the Metropolitan Opera this afternoon — brought to us by CBC Radio 2’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2192,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[76,19,27,36,43,47,56,60,66],"tags":[588,681,1067,1401,2207,2655,3032,3416,3490],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2012\/03\/romanenko.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-zk","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2190"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}