Nikolaus Harnoncourt

An Austrian Bach specialist fulfills a 40-year dream: a recording of Gershwin’s ‘folk opera’

This may not be actually be the strangest choice of repertoire that a famous conductor has made, but it’s up there. A few days ago, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, one of the fathers of the early-music movement who also built a successful parallel career conducting 19th century European music (his recordings of Beethoven, Schumann and Dvořák are mostly very fine) decided to conduct his first work of 20th-century American music… Porgy and Bess. At the Styriarte Festival in Graz, he led concert performances of Gershwin’s jazz opera; Canada’s Measha Brueggergosman was originally supposed to be Bess, but unfortunately had to pull out due to illness.

I wrote about Beethoven earlier today — Thursdays are slow around here, and I’m trying to get the election out of my head, and music is always good — and one of the commenters mentioned the boxed set of Karajan conducting the Beethoven symphonies that always comes out around Christmas for $25. And I jumped in to say, Hey, don’t buy the Karajan cheapo Beethoven symphony box, because it’s a snoozer. Which led a couple more commenters to ask me what they should get instead. Here is the answer. Well, two answers: