In Brief: Presidential Edition

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

• Gidon Kremer celebrates his 65th birthday with Martha Argerich and Kremerata Baltica, in the Salle Pleyel. [France Musique]


• Pianist Lise de la Salle plays her Liszt recital program in the Auditorium du Louvre. [France Musique]


• Watch pianist Bertrand Chamayou Bertrand with the Quatuor Zaïde in a program called Salons de Musiques, where the invited musicians play music and talk about it in an informal setting. [ARTE Live Web]


• If you watch the Don Pasquale embedded here, you can see if you agree with the review by Christian Merlin, who found the production "trop banal." Selon Merlin: "There are excellent performances, which one wants to praise. There are failed performance, which one wants to pan. In both cases the task of writing a review is easy. There are also those performances in between, which merit neither praise nor blame but fall into the category of 'merely good', just plain medium. These are the performances it is most difficult to review. The Don Pasquale at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées is one of them." [Le Figaro]


• Ton Koopman conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, in a program of music by Haydn, Mozart, and Cimarosa, from the Opéra Comique. [France Musique]


• John Malkovich, who was the most memorable Valmont, in the film version of Choderlos de Laclos's devastating epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Stephen Frears, is now directing Christopher Hampton's play version, at the Théâtre de l'Atelier in Paris. He has used a young cast, closer to the ages of the characters in the novel than how Frears cast the film. Igor Hansen-Løve asked Malkovich some questions about his vision of the work now: "For reasons beyond my control, the project kept falling by the wayside," he laments in impeccable French. "The fault of time management and actors' egos. When I was portraying Valmont, I focused mainly on the emotion of these characters tearing themselves apart. Youth, I suppose... Now I can treat all of it with a certain lightness. Still, their pain always makes me sad." [L'Express]


• From the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Matthias Pintscher conducts the Ensemble Intercontemporain in his own Songs from Solomon’s Garden (2009), plus music by Fausto Romitelli and Olga Neuwirth. [France Musique]


• The Vienna Philharmonic returns to Washington next week, after a long absence. Listen to Lorin Maazel conduct this esteemed orchestra in an all-Sibelius program. Sadly, they will play only the seventh symphony here at the Kennedy Center. [Österreichischer Rundfunk]


• Listen to a performance by the Quatuor Ebène, from the Wigmore Hall in London. [France Musique]


• Konrad Junghänel conducts Cantus Colln in music of Dietrich Buxtehude, from the church of St John's, Smith Square, in London. [France Musique]


• Cellist Alisa Weilerstein joins the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra for Prokofiev's Symphonie concertante, plus music by Stravinsky and Mozart. [ARTE Live Web]


• From the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the Talich Quartet and friends play music by Haydn, Schumann, and Mendelssohn. [France Musique]