KPAC Blog

Wagner's incredible and improbable success is one of the fairytale's of high art. The late Jacques Barzun referred to his position in later life as: "That of a Lord of all the arts."

Randy Anderson has rightly commented on his association with the highest circles of the intellect and art: De Gobineau, Nietzsche, Semper, Meyerbeer, Berlioz and later Liszt, as Wagner would wed Cosima, the pianist's daughter.

So how did all this happen?

"Beyond the Horizon" is the season finale for the San Antonio Choral Society. The concert this Sunday afternoon at 3pm will be led by Jennifer Seighman.

Seighman will lead Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein, as well as music by living composers like John Corigliano. "I've based the program on poetry," Jennifer states. "What lies behind us, what lies before us, what lies beyond us - are tiny matters compared to what is within us. It comes from a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote."

Two works share the San Antonio Symphony program this weekend with conductor Sebastian Lang Lessing: Shostakovich's Symphony No.8 and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 with soloist Michel Dalberto.

Audiences won't expect the romantic sounds of Ferruccio Busoni when they hear  the Mozart - but the Italian master wrote cadenzas (solo passages within the concerto) that Dalberto will play. 

The 2012-13 opera season has come and almost gone. For whatever wonders summer may hold, the Met Opera season of broadcasts closes this weekend with the living end, Richard Wagner's "Götterdämmerung."

In a staggering marathon of recapitulations, developments, plot changes and reversals, and a grand procession of leitmotivs that ignite a conflagration that ends the opera, the gods and the world are reborn in the cleansing fires of the overflowing Rhine.

But how does it all happen?