In 1990 Peter Maag (1919–2001) returned to the Gran Teatro del Liceo in Lisbon for a run of Così fan tutte, an opera he had been directing for over 40 years. He raised a few eyebrows when he asked for an orchestra of only 26 players. ‘If there is more,’ he explained, ‘Mozart vanishes.’ Mozart, […]

Waltzing all the way from Vienna to London. Peter Quantrill discusses a reissue of Josef Krips conducting music by the Strauss Family. A little over a quarter of a century after first raising a baton, Josef Krips made his London debut with a British orchestra in March 1948. He conducted the Philharmonia and Pierre Fournier […]

Founded in 1842, the Vienna Philharmonic gave a notoriously dusty reception to Bruckner’s Third when they played through it in rehearsal in 1874 and refused to perform it in concert. Three years later the composer conducted them in the premiere of the symphony’s revised version; though the occasion was a fiasco, it earned Bruckner the lifelong admiration of Gustav Mahler, who was present as a student.

‘An extraordinary contralto’, in the words of her modern counterpart, Nathalie Stutzmann.