Busoni, great composer that he was, revered Mozart as greatly as any composer – well, any composer other than Bach, of course. Although Busoni came to Mozart through the nineteenth-century, broadly speaking ‘Romantic’ tradition(s), and although he lauded, in the preface to his own edition, Liszt’s Réminiscences de don Juan for possessing ‘an almost symbolic significance as the highes...
This was the first opera performance by Semperoper Dresden after several months of lockdown and Josef E. Köpplinger’s new Die Zauberflöte was also the last one before their doors shut last November. Mozart’s Singspiele is presented as a coming-of-age story and we see a young Tamino in denim jacket and trainers on a darken stage at the start during the overture: when the curtains clos...