Music festivals The sounds of summer

摘要

There are worse ways to go than at the peak of your powers, lost in a task you love. But the heart attack that carried off Giuseppe Sinopoli last month as he conducted "Aida" in Berlin came cruelly soon. He was only 54, an age when many conductors have decades of music ahead of them, and his datebook was full. Mr Sino-poli's death left a particular hole at the Bayreuth festival in Germany, where he was due to conduct this summer's cycles of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen".