Lorin Maazel conducts “ La Boheme” at Castleton in June, 2011. This summer, Castleton will feature another big Puccini opera, “La fanciulla del West.” (Photo by Tracy A Woodward/The Washington Post) (TRACY A WOODWARD - WASHINGTON POST) I give up on predicting the Castleton Festival, or even on trying to describe it. It’s actually refreshing, at a time when many organizations seem locked into place, to see a festival careen so wildly in different directions. When Lorin Maazel founded Castleton, a quasi-training festival featuring apprentices and young artists, it was a home for Benjamin Britten operas, and expanded to include other chamber works. It gradually developed a sideline in large-scale Puccini; detoured, last summer, into old chestnuts; and now, on Tuesday, announced a 2013 season of staggering ambition. Get ready for it: Castleton’s fifth season, in July, will feature Poulenc’s “La voix humaine,” Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West,” and Verdi’s “Otello.” In other words, a one-woman monodrama and two of the biggest operas in the repertory.

Castleton isn’t announcing casting until December or January, so I can’t yet say who Maazel and Co. have engaged to sing roles that are usually viewed as the apogee of a career. The “Otello” production has a noble pedigree: it’s by Sir Peter Hall and comes from Glyndebourne, where it opened in 2001 as both the company’s and the director’s first-ever attempt at this particular opera. The tenor Neil Shicoff is mentioned as one of this summer’s teaching artists, leading me briefly to speculate that he might be coming in as a ringer for the leading role – but surely not, especially since this punishing, glorious part isn’t quite a fit for him. As for Minnie in “Fanciulla” (aka The Girl of the Golden West) – house favorite Joyce El-Khoury did make a huge splash in “Suor Angelica,” but please tell me she’s not trying this. This is all rank speculation, but that’s all I can offer given Castleton’s extremely sketchy press release.

To amplify the message that Castleton is going very, very big this year (at least in musical scale), the concert programs include Mahler’s 4th and 5th symphonies. And just in case you worried that the festival is abandoning the Broadway focus it started last year with “A Little Night Music,” the concerts also include Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem. (I lack a font to communicate the inner cringe with which I read that piece of information.)

The festival is also seeking submissions from composers under the age of 25 for a work to be performed alongside the Mahler 5th and conducted by Maazel.

It’s not clear that Castleton is finding a formula calculated to attract the funders it needs to continue. In fact, it’s not clear that it has any formula at all. But it’s certainly never dull. Subscription packages go on sale on November 26th on the festival’s website; single tickets will be available in April.

The last few days saw me concluding my public reappraisal of my
This week, I decided that maybe Lang Lang wasn’t quite as showy as I thought. This picture is a reminder that I wasn’t coming out of left field in my earlier appraisals, either. ( MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP/Getty Images) (MICHAEL KAPPELER) views on Lang Lang as the pianist finished up his residency with the National Symphony Orchestra with a duo recital with Christoph Eschenbach and a series of Beethoven concerti with the full orchestra. Questioning my own views so extremely — “Here’s my perception; here’s how I react; what if I’m completely wrong?” — was such an intriguing thought exercise that I vowed to try it again with other artists I think I know well. There’s no question that Lang Lang has a distinctive approach, and that it’s not what we’re used to hearing in certain repertory, and that it can seem overdone. But I also noted, this week, how quickly my instinct was to jump to finger-wagging, and how much I did get out of the performances when I folded that wagging finger into a fist and suspended judgment.

There are added factors at play, of course: this was no one-off concert (like the “Evening with Lang Lang” the NSO offered in 2009), but a week-long residency with Eschenbach, whom Lang Lang has called a musical father. It makes sense that Washington saw his best side. In any case, the week had a lot of rewards for me, and evidently for many of the people who filled the halls for his performances. And the passion of the debates I’ve seen in the wake of the performances, between those pro and con, is something I wish we had more of in this field; I love it that so many people are listening and talking and thinking, from those who call him “Bang Bang” to those who love him (and I’ve been on both sides of that equation). It amuses me to realize, looking back over my past reviews of him, how much I’ve struggled with myself almost every time I’ve heard him.

In other news, Stephen Brookes reviewed the Momenta Quartet playing an intriguing program of Buddist-inspired music, and got to see the performance of Morton Subtonick’s opera “Lucy: Song and Dance” that was rescheduled in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Grace Jean heard Yefim Bronfman show his considerable stuff with the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra. And Joan Reinthaler heard a wide-ranging Prokofiev program from the National Philharmonic.

Washington, DC - The soprano Angela Meade during her WNO-sponsored recital on Saturday night. (credit: Scott Suchman for WNO) (Scott Suchman for WNO) There were two vocal recitals at the Kennedy Center within a few days of each other this past week. I reviewed the one by Angela Meade, who really isn’t a recitalist: powerhouse soprano, yes; Lieder singer, not yet. Two days earlier, Vocal Arts DC presented Russell Braun in what according to Cecelia Porter was a masterful performance of Schubert’s “Winterreise.”

The art of the song recital has been so honed over the last few decades, with help from organizations like the Marilyn Horne Foundation and the New York Festival of Song, that seeing an opera-singer performance of the kind Meade gave, including arias with piano accompaniment, seemed like a kind of throwback. Which doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, especially since it played to Meade’s strengths: the arias were the best part of the night.

Above: Angela Meade in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Ernani” earlier this year. I should note that I had some of the same reservations about that performance as about her recital on Saturday: I didn’t feel she’d entirely internalized the music yet. She seems to me like a woman with some personal spark, but very little of that spark comes through in her performance.

This weekend, I took a look at the record label Naxos, which has flourished at a time when the recording industry has seen a complete readjustment. When Naxos began, it was a low-budget label that was thought to exploit artists. Turns out it was actually prescient. Sure, everyone would still love to have the cushy recording contract with the major recording label, but there are no longer the sales to support this kind of thing on its former scale.

My article is here. And while we’re on the subject of the recording industry, those interested should take a look at this piece on New Music Box by Andrew Doe, a veteran of both iTunes and Naxos, about the realities of this much-misunderstood area.

Lang Lang started his week-long residency with the National Symphony Orchestra with a solo recital on Sunday afternoon. In the weekend’s Washington Post, Katherine Boyle wrote about the Lang Lang phenomenon; while in my review of the concert, I wrote of my sudden doubt about my own reactions to his playing. Plenty of people I know, aficionados and non-classical-listeners alike, find him mannered, overblown, and think that his playing can often distort the music, which was my initial reaction to the three Mozart sonatas he played on Sunday. Yet a lot of people are deeply moved, and not for superficial reasons (here’s a blog post someone linked in the comments to my review; well worth reading). I’m glad to have my opinions challenged right at the start of his residency; it’s an extra stimulus to keep me listening vigilantly all week and trying to avoid facile judgments.
Violinist Andrey Baranov, the winner of this year’s Queen Elisabeth Competition, performed at the Phillips Collection on Nov. 4. (Credit: Neda Navaee) (Neda Navaee)

Last week, I heard and reviewed another worthwhile performance that not everyone will embrace: Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra. It was a treat just to hear it done live, and I was glad to hear that the house was fuller on Saturday night than it had been on Thursday. On the intervening night, Christoph Eschenbach played chamber music with his musicians; Charles T. Downey reviewed.

It was a big week for big names in DC; both Midori and Josh Bell gave recitals on the same night. Stephen Brookes reviewed Midori; Robert Battey reviewed Bell.

Battey also checked out the American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein, using the term “under” rather loosely, given Botstein’s weaknesses as a conductor. He had nothing but praise, however, for the Escher Quartet — “a quartet to watch.”

Brookes covered the finale of the Post-Classical Ensemble’s Shostakovich festival, including orchestral transcriptions of the 8th and 10th quartets. He also liked the young pianist Michael Brown, a last-minute replacement for Leon McCawley.

Joan Reinthaler found the violinist Andrey Baranov adroit but cool in his Phillips Collection recital. She also enjoyed the Amernet Quartet at the Kennedy Center, though she wished they’d brought some contemporary work along with them.

Cecelia Porter was impressed by the pianist Alessio Bax, but also a little exhausted. But she greatly enjoyed the soprano Emmanuelle de Negri, presented by Opera Lafayette.