Now, Opera Chic is going to Cortina d'Ampezzo to breath the clean air and eat the tasty Knoedel (spinach, no meat thx) and ski @ 130 mph more dangerously than some crazed Manga character.
But actual classical music lovers, instead, tend to choose more musical -- if a bit staid not to say b0ring -- destinations such as Lucerne, Berlin, Salzburg (been there already!) or Schwetzinger (where is that? It must be the South Dakota of Europe, quite difficult to pinpoint on a map).
A handy Bloomberg piece (thanks Mr. Mayor!) gives us the whole map.
To sum it up:
The Lucerne Easter Festival, starting March 24: has two resident orchestras this year, Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (chief conductor Gustavo Dudamel), and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mariss Jansons.
El Dudamel will conduct pretty kicka$$ works such as Mahler 5, Rueckert-Lieder (Kozena), Ravel's La Valse, Tchaikovsky 5, Rachmaninov 3rd piano concerto (Yefim Bronfman).
Jansons will lead his Germans in Mahler 7 (guys, why not the Third, Opera Chic's favorite Mahler symphony???), then works by Schubert, Haydn and Gounod the next day.
Sadly, Nikolaus "The Taxidermist" Harnoncourt will appear at the Festival as well, always eager to embalm astonishingly beautiful works with his trademark glacial tempi and gloomily desaturated colors.
Wagner-lovers (ie, not us) can enjoy the old neckbearded Nazi's feverish musical dreams of racial purity in Salzburg (more on Herr Richard's appalling neckbeard fetish here), where our Lord of nerdy-cool Sir Simon Rattle (Levine, Rattle, Dudamel -- why do we like conductors with Afros so much?) will condcut the BPO in Das Rheingold,' staged by Stephane Braunschweig, in the cast Willard White, Robert Gambill and Anna Larsson. The Berlin Philharmonic and Rattle will thankfully give three further concerts.
Those in search of a musical holiday with a de-nazification bonus, here's our unimpeachable hero Daniel Barenboim, who will conduct Staatskapelle in a Mahler Cycle in Berlin for the Festtage, with his BFF&E Pierre Boulez.
The beautiful sounds of poor old forgotten Giovanni Legrenzi will echo in Schwetzingen, for the annual Festival (April 24). So, if you wanna get down with Legrenzi's 1683 Il Giustino in a baroque moment of raprture, check it out, all info is here.
