Tag Archives: abbado

Lucerne Festival Shake-Up: Mahler Out, Mozart and Beethoven In

I’m hugely disappointed:

Change of program:
LUCERNE FESTIVAL hereby announces that on 8 August as well as on 10 and 11 August, Claudio Abbado will conduct Beethoven’s Incidental music to “Egmont” and Mozart’s Requiem. For artistic reasons, this program replaces the originally scheduled Eighth Symphony by Gustav Mahler.

I had been planning to attend what was to be the culmination of Abbado’s Lucerne Mahler symphony cycle. Interesting that as of the hour of this post lucernefestival.ch seems to be having technical problems (style sheets and javascript are offline). I will post more information as soon as I know more.

Cheap Thrills: Outstanding Recent Budget CDs

I know, I know — the market for music recordings is in flux if not chaos, and there are growing indications that downloads are finally starting to hit the head of a “tipping point” among the non-teen-and-college-age demographic. And yes, a growing share of my own acquisitions are file downloads. But for the most part I remain an unreconstructed consumer knuckledragger who orders finished product online, bids on scarce audio gratification in disc formaat on eBay, and frequents the handful of well-stocked “record stores” left in Manhattan.

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