In Brief: Summer Festival Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Robert Lepage has turned in an eye-popping production of Stravinsky's Le Rossignol (matched with some other fairy tale pieces) at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. After soundly booing the awful Don Giovanni directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, the audience went berserk in ovations for this selection of Renard, stagings of some vocal pieces and the Trois pièces pour clarinette, and Le Rossignol staged with puppets, Chinese shadow play (made by hands at one point, and then by acrobats), and Japanese marionnettes. [Le Figaro]


• Want to see the Lepage production yourself? Try the online video. [ARTE Live Web]


• Speaking of rare Rossini, the Opera de Paris is performing La donna del lago, and in her review Francis Carlin calls the staging, by Lluis Pasqual, "laughable." [Financial Times]


• The Fondation Maeght has opened a new retrospective of the works of Alberto Giacometti. [Le Point]


• Artscape, the free-for-all summer festival up in Baltimore, does have a few classical offerings. Tim Smith has the skinny. [Baltimore Sun]


• More summer festival goodness, with videos of Martha Argerich and friends, Yuja Wang, and others -- from the Verbier Festival. [Medici.TV]


• Tyler Green notes that some paintings that Richard Diebenkorn made for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have surfaced quietly at the Hirshhorn Museum. [Modern Art Notes]


• Some audio of more summer performances: countertenor Lawrence Zazzo in some lute songs, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Munich Philharmonic in Vienna (with Christian Thielemann, including Eine Alpensinfonie), Leon Fleisher at the Aldeburgh Festival, Concerto Köln at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées (in Brahms, German Requiem), Les Talens Lyriques at the Abbaye aux Dames de Saintes (in Couperin's Les nations), Grétry's Andromaque from Montpellier, Nino Rota's opera Napoli Milionaria at the Festival della Valle d'Itria, a song recital by Sandrine Piau from Montpellier, and much more. [France Musique]


• Another perspective on that awful Don Giovanni in Aix-en-Provence. [Financial Times]


• This week saw the passing of one of the greats, conductor Charles Mackerras. [WETA FM 90.9 Blog]
  
  Mackerras previously at Ionarts: Mozart symphonies (February 27, 2010) | Così fan tutte (July 1, 2009) | More Mozart symphonies (December 12, 2008) | La Clemenza di Tito (January 1, 2007) | The Bartered Bride (January 13, 2006) | Charles Mackerras at 80 (August 20, 2005) | Dido and Aeneas (March 29, 2005)