Levente Molnár as Bánk bán in New York.
843 words
Last week was a very bad week for the globalists. First, Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidency in a landslide; then, Angela Merkel was forced to resign the chairmanship of the Christian Democratic Union after her party received another drubbing in regional elections. (more…)
Parsifal and Gurnemanz travelling through German history and entering the Grail Hall in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s film of Parsifal – a truly outstanding presentation of the drama.
6,800 words / 39:17
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For a Wagnerian, seeing a performance at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus (Festival House) – the theater that was built and established by Richard Wagner himself, with the financial support of Wagner Societies across Germany as well as King Ludwig II and the Bavarian state coffers in the 1870s – is the Holy Grail of Wagnerism, the pinnacle of the Wagner experience. (more…)
5,540 words / 32:41
To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” To subscribe to the CC podcast RSS feed, click here.
Seeing an opera production these days, if you’re anything even approximating a small-t traditionalist, is always a risky business. When the guardians of Western culture – who actually hate Western culture, or at least what it was until recently – want to change literature, painting, television, or film to suit whatever agenda they’re pursuing at the time, it’s a relatively simple matter: they simply create new works in new styles. (more…)
Christopher Ventris as Palestrina in the 2009 Bavarian State Opera production of the opera.
1,693 words
Hans Pfitzner
Palestrina
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, conducted by Rafael Kubelík
Deutsche Grammophon, 1989
Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina is one of the unsung masterpieces of twentieth-century opera. (more…)