Thielemann goes for Broadway

Thielemann goes for Broadway

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norman lebrecht

December 17, 2013

Dresden has announced its New Year’s Eve TV offering, designed to put Berlin in the shade. In the past few years, Thielemann has trounced Rattle in the ratings. This time round, instead of the usual Strauss confections, he is putting on the Broadway lights – and with a pair of great singers. Beat that, Berlin.

ZDF will show the concert live on 31 Dezember from 17.30 Uhr, while Unitel will beam it to 27 other countries.

thielemann broadway

Comments

  • Klaus’s wife, Silvia Krüger, sang Christine in the Hamburg production of The Phantom of the Opera. She should get up on stage with hubby and Renée.

  • Malcolm James says:

    I know the BPO has Lang Lang, but programming Prokofiev and Hindemith seems to indicate that they don’t really care about the rating s game.

    • John says:

      The 50th anniversary of Hindemith’s death is this coming 28 Dec.and for my money he is never played enough, his music is truly food for thought. How right he was about so much!

  • andrichter says:

    you know, Berlin is having LangLang with Sir Simon, but what is more interesting is the Deutsche Symphonny-orchestra doing a show with Anne Sofie von Otter together with the Circus Roncalli

  • sdReader says:

    Bad cover! The word “Dresden” appears 4 times — and you miss all of them!

    • m2n2k says:

      But the mysterious word “DRESEN” just below the dates is hard to miss.

      • sdReader says:

        Right! What idiots. That makes 3 Dresdens and a Dresen.

        And the city name that’s clearest is BERLIN! If the City of Dresden is subsidizing, it got a bad deal.

        Horrible feature typeface, with bad letter-spacing. “Deutsche Grammophon” has gone to the dogs.

  • Petros Linardos says:

    Most disappointing. If only the Dresden Staatskapelle and Thieleman stuck to what they do best, as they seem to, during the rest of the year… We don’t need them to do Broadway any more than we need Broadway artists do German romantics.

    • David H. says:

      If everybody only does what he does best, one starves in monoculture, and eventually all culture suffers. It can only be beneficial from time to time “cross over” into neighboring territories. We don’t want boring specialists. That’s a consumer mentality.

  • Macro85205 says:

    A very different country than mine, where the idea of orchestras engaging in a New Years Eve ratings war is pretty inconceivable. We’ll probably just the NY Philharmonic in a fairly uninteresting program and the Vienna Phil.

    Really, isn’t Germany big enough to accommodate two such concerts? Do they really have to run head to head? Thank goodness for DVRs.

  • Rosalind says:

    Norman, this may be extremely wishful thinking, but does the UK feature amongst the 27 countries taking the Unitel broadcast?

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