Coinciding with the Austrian release of Rémy Ballot’s live recordings from the Richard Strauss Tage in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (international release on 24.3), the Pizzicato Magazine is publishing a first excellent review:

‘If the symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben by Richard Strauss is the reminiscence of an old man, if such reminiscence displaces the negative and emphasizes the positive, if the lyrical passages are brought to the highest expressiveness through warmth, then a conductor is at work who can realize this tone poem coherently and intensively at the same time.

Thus Ballot, an acknowledged Bruckner conductor, also proves to be an excellent Strauss interpreter.‘

For the 75th anniversary of Richard Strauss’ death, the Richard-Strauss-Tage Garmisch-Partenkirchen launched a new Richard Strauss Days Edition in cooperation with Gramola to document the festival in live recordings of Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan. Conductor in Residence Rémy Ballot talks about the influence of Strauss on today’s orchestras, the location of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the tradition of conducting.

Vienna’s Great Radio Hall invited Remy Ballot and his Ballot Quintet for a performance of the Bruckner Quintet, in this instance also including the Intermezzo as inserted 4th movement. Austrian Radio broadcast the concert on 26th November, it’s available online for another 30 days:

A few weeks after conducting the local premiere performance of Bruckner’s 4th symphony at the renowned Brescia / Bergamo festival, Remy Ballot returned to Italy in August for a performance of Bruckner’s 5th in Bressanone:

Award winning Bruckner Conductor, and Conductor in Residence at the Richard Strauss Tage Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Rémy Ballot and his Ballot Quintet perform Bruckner’s string quintet, including the Intermezzo as added 5th movement, in a live broadcast from Vienna’s Great Radio Hall. Available online from the 26th of November onwards:

Remy Ballot’s cycle of Bruckner symphonies 0-9, recorded over a period of 10 years live at St Florian Abbey, has just been nominated for the 2025 International Classsical Music Awards!

Previous awards include among others the ‘Recording of the Year’ from the American Bruckner Society, and as a very special honour the box serves currently as reference recording at the Austrian National Libraries jubilee Bruckner Exhibition.

Remy Ballot was invited by the Music Faculty of Oxford University to work with the University Orchestra for the Michaelmas Term concert:

Remy Ballot talks about his teacher Sergiu Celibidache in this new episode of the ‘Great moments in music’ ARTE.TV series dedicated to Celibidache and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The shows focus is on the legendary performance of Bruckner’s 7th in 1992. A must for all Bruckner and/or Celibidache fans, not to mention the Berlin Philharmonic.

Remy Ballot has put the St Florian Bruckner Days firmly on the Festival Map with his live recordings of 10 Bruckner symphonies over the last 10 years. With the cycle being the reference recording at the Austrian National Library’s jubliee Bruckner Exhibition, Remy Ballot returned to the jubliee edition of the most authentic of all Bruckner festivals to conduct the 9th symphony. Felix Diergarten introduced the existing fragments of the last movement, prior to a performance of the existing complete 3 movements.

According to critics, ‘Ballot is primarily concerned with the broad structures of this great music. He implements the harmonic instability of this work in the border area between atonal and totally chromatic forms extremely successfully.’

Following up on the Strauss successes Remy Ballot had with the Pilsen Philharmonic Orchestra both in Pilsen and also Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the orchestra ventured under Remy Ballot’s direction into further new territory – namely Bruckner’s monunemental 5th symphony, in a perfomance in Brixen.

According to critics, the excellent performance is firmly placed next to Thielemann, in the same tradition where Celibidache already paved the way in his legendary 1985 performance with the Munich Phiharmonic Orchestra.

Remy Ballot was invited to conduct his Riga debut with Sinfonietta Riga and soloist Georgijs Osokins at the 2024 Riga Festival with a program of Vasks and Beethoven. You can hear the entire concert in a broadcast of Latvijas Radio 3 here:

Peteris Vasks: Musica Appassionata (5:46’)
L V Beethoven: Klavierkonzert Nr 4 (30:11’)
L v Beethoven: Symphonie Nr 4 (1:49:00’)

The Ballot Quintet was invited to open the 43rd edition of the renowned chamber music festival ‘Veceri na Gricu’ in Zagreb, to honor the Bruckner jubilee with a perfomance of his string quartet.

According to critics a highlight of the festival, where the members of the quintet ‘were obsessed with listening to each other and constantly creating sculpted collective sound figures, keeping pace with the grateful and sensitive church acoustics.’. You can read the full review here, for all non-Croatian speakers also with the help of Chrome:

Following up on the success of his Garmisch-Partenkirchen debut last year, Remy Ballot returns to the Strauss Tage 2024 as freshly appointed Conductor in Residence, again with the Pilsen Philharmonic Orchestra. The two concerts included Heldenleben, Don Juan, several songs and arias with Günther Groissböck, and the re-discovery of Heinrich Gottlieb Noren’s monumental ‘Kaleidoskop’, which established Noren internationally after a premiere performance in Dresden in 1907.

Following a short notice debut on 6th April, and an Italian tour opening the Brescia-Bergamo piano festival, the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra called Remy Ballot back again, to conduct Bruckner’s 4th together with Mozart’s K488 with Eva Gevorgyan as soloist at the Stuttgart Liederhalle on 16th of May.

Critics wrote about the concert: ‘one of the best Bruckner conductors of our times’ conducting ‘one of the best concerts in recent seasons’… ‘This is how Bruckner works, and Ballot is probably not the only one who understands and can realise this today, but he is one of the very few.’

You can watch an excerpt of the 4th movement here:

Following his short notice debut with Bruckner’s 5th on 6th of April, the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra invited Remy Ballot to conduct an Italian tour with Bruckner’s 4th and Mozart’s K488 in Bergamo and Brescia on 26th and 27th of April. These concerts are supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum in Milan, together with an upcoming performance of Bruckner 5 in Bressanone on 16th August).

Remy Ballot will step in for Dan Ettinger to conduct a performance of Bruckner’s 5th with the Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra on Saturday, 6th of April:

The Austrian National Library, host of the greatest Bruckner collection worldwide and gravitational centre of the international Bruckner research, has chosen Remy Ballot‘s live recordings of the Bruckner Quintet and the symphonies from the St Florianer Brucknertage as sound samples for their jubilee exhibition, titled: ‘Anton Bruckner. The Pious Revolutionary. The exhibition was opened on 20th March 2024, and is open to the public from 21st of March 2024 until 26th January 2025:

Leading French Classical Magazine Resmusica published a glowing review of Rémy Ballot‘s Bruckner cycle recorded live at St Florian Abbey. Jean-Claude Houlot writes: ‘

‘While Christian Thielemann’s complete works with the Vienna Philharmonic stand out for their orchestral splendour, the one offered by the Viennese publisher, conducted by the French conductor, is characterised by its approach to Bruckner. Rémy Ballot takes a more in-depth look at the work, choosing from a variety of versions, and has certainly produced the most personal and interesting of the many recordings of this bicentenary.’

You can read the entire review in French here:

Martin Blaumeiser’s detailed and insightful review of the World Premiere of Hans Winterberg’s 4th piano concerto by leading Winterberg expert Jonathan Powell and the Beethoven Philharmonie Baden, conducted by Thomas Rösner (in German):

‘The British pianist Jonathan Powell – who completed his doctorate as a musicologist on the succession of Scriabin and is currently publishing all of Winterberg’s piano concertos as well as his complete solo piano works – is one of the most fascinating piano virtuosos in the world, is not only in the eyes of this reviewer, but also a late-comer, admittedly with an unusual wealth of experience and almost superhuman pianistic abilities.

‘The most fascinating thing here is Hans Winterberg’s completely independent orchestration and the extremely skilful, constant regression from dramatic events back into calm waters, with almost tonal echoes at the end.

‘ Thomas Rösner and his empathetic Beethoven Philharmonic Orchestra bring out the details of this demanding piece in a very vivid and tonally differentiated way – an excellent performance! The audience receives the “new” piece very attentively and positively, apparently only surprised by its brevity.

In time for the World Premiere of Hans Winterberg‘s 4th piano concerto in Baden with Jonathan Powell and the Beethoven Philharmonie Baden conducted by Thomas Rösner, Austrian Radio OE1 broadcast an interview with Thomas Rösner and Peter Puskás about Hans Winterberg’s oeuvre and it’s relevance (in German):