 | |
| Type of business | Limited company |
|---|---|
Type of site | Online magazine, music website |
| Available in | English, French, German, Spanish |
| Founded | London, United Kingdom |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
| Key people | David Karlin, Alison Karlin |
| URL | bachtrack.com |
| Launched | January 2008 |
Bachtrack is a London-based international online music magazine which publishes listings of classical music, opera, ballet and dance, as well as reviews of these genres, interviews and general feature articles.
Bachtrack Ltd was registered on 3 December 2007 by David Karlin and Alison Karlin. [1] The website bachtrack.com was launched in January 2008, the following month.
Bachtrack's event finder initially covered the UK only. In 2009, coverage expanded to include the US and Europe. [2] The finder permitted users to "search for events by date, country, city, festival, venue, work, composer or musician". [3] By 2010, the site listed 7,000 events and was being described favourably by both local London and national UK press. [4] [3] Bachtrack's first mobile app was launched in late 2009. [5] [6]
In July 2010, Bachtrack was named as no. 5 in Classical Music magazine's top ten Web Winners. [7]
Later in 2010, Bachtrack started publishing reviews of classical music to accompany its listings database. In 2013, a redesigned site permitted operation in French and German, with some original content written in those languages. Spanish was added the following year; however, the main language of the site remains English.
Bachtrack's database of forthcoming performances covers events worldwide, although coverage varies by country, with the UK generally having the largest number of events listed. The content is crowdsourced, with many listings input by users, who are often the promoters of the event. [8]
Every January, Bachtrack publishes statistics about the performances listed in its database for the previous year. [9] These receive widespread media attention across the world, in many publications including The New York Times , [10] The Wall Street Journal , [11] The Guardian , [12] France Musique, [13] Clásica FM Radio, [14] and Izvestia . [15]
Bachtrack publishes reviews of concerts, opera, ballet and dance performances in a large number of countries, claiming to have published its 10,000th review in December 2016. [16] Bachtrack's reviews are referred to by other arts publications [17] and performers' websites. [18] [19]
In addition to reviews, Bachtrack publishes general articles including previews of festivals and concert/opera seasons, as well as interviews with performers and industry figures. A number of interviews have sparked interest in the general media, including soprano Lisette Oropesa's statement that she needed to lose weight in order to be cast in the roles she wanted, [20] and tenor Stuart Skelton's comments about English National Opera. [21] [22]
Riccardo Muti is an Italian conductor. He currently holds two music directorships, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and at the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini. Muti has previously held posts at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and the Salzburg Whitsun Festival.
Sir George William John Benjamin, CBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music. He is also a conductor, pianist and teacher. He is well known for operas Into the Little Hill (2006), Written on Skin (2009–2012) and Lessons in Love and Violence (2015–2017)—all with librettos by Martin Crimp. In 2019, critics at The Guardian ranked Written on Skin as the second best work of the 21st-century.
Mark Simpson is a British composer and clarinettist from Liverpool. In 2006, he became notable for winning both the BBC Young Musician of the Year and the BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer of the Year, making him the first and, to date, only person to win both competitions.
Adina is an operatic farsa in one act by Gioachino Rossini with a libretto by Marchese Gherardo Bevilacqua-Aldobrandini. The opera develops the popular theme of the "abduction from the seraglio". The première took place on 22 June 1826 at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon.
Thomas Larcher is an Austrian composer and pianist.
Raymond Yiu, born 1973; is a composer, conductor, jazz pianist and music writer.
Lisette Oropesa is an American operatic soprano of Cuban ancestry. Her repertoire includes works from Gluck, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Wagner, Verdi, Bizet, Massenet and Puccini. With her lyric coloratura soprano voice, she has performed roles in her native Spanish and English, as well as German, French and Italian. She is particularly noted in the roles of Susanna, Gilda, Konstanze, Lucia and Manon.
HGO Trust (HGO) was founded in 1990 by Roy Budden as an evening class at the Hampstead Garden Institute, London. Its objectives are to advance public education in the art and science of music with emphasis on operatic music.
Ryan Wigglesworth is a British composer, conductor and pianist.
Sardanapalo or Sardanapale, S.687, is an unfinished opera by Franz Liszt based on the 1821 verse play Sardanapalus by Lord Byron. Liszt was ambitious for his project, and planned to dovetail his retirement as a virtuoso with the premiere of his opera. He worked on it intermittently between 1845 and 1852, once declaring it 'well on the way toward completion,' but ceased work on it thereafter. The first act had been completed in a detailed, continuous particell, but there is no evidence of any music being notated for Acts 2–3. As an Italian opera, it would almost certainly have been called Sardanapalo, though Liszt referred to it as Sardanapale in his French correspondence. The music Liszt completed remained silent until 2016 when British musicologist David Trippett first established the legibility of Liszt's N4 manuscript, and produced both a critical edition and realized an orchestral performing edition. This received its world premiere in Weimar on 19 August 2018.
Barbara Hannigan is a Canadian soprano and conductor, known for her performances of contemporary opera.
Jörg Widmann is a German composer, conductor and clarinetist. In 2018, Widmann was the third most performed contemporary composer in the world. Formerly a clarinet and composition professor at the University of Music Freiburg, he is composition professor at the Barenboim–Said Akademie. His most important compositions are the two operas Babylon and Das Gesicht im Spiegel, an oratorio Arche, Kantate and the concert overture Con brio. Widmann has written musical tributes to Classical and Romantic composers. He was awarded the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art in 2018 and the Bach Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg in 2023.
Fulham Symphony Orchestra (FSO) is an amateur orchestra based in west London. It has given premieres of works by Wagner, Puccini and Tchaikovsky, performed with internationally renowned soloists, and featured many times in the national press.
Ana Sokolovic is a Canadian music composer based in Montreal, Quebec, whose contemporary pieces have won several awards in Canada.
Dimitri Platanias is a Greek baritone who has had an active international career since 2007, excelling particularly in the roles of Verdi and the Italian Verismo.
Na'ama Zisser is a London-based Israeli composer.
Nadia Yanowsky is a Spanish ballet dancer.
Josephine Stephenson is a French-British composer, arranger, singer and instrumentalist who works across a variety of musical genres.
Krisztián Cser is a Hungarian operatic and concert singer (bass) and physicist, the soloist of the Hungarian State Opera.
This article is for major events and other topics related to classical music in 2021.