Classical music
Adam Sweeting
The famously tempestuous Romanian soprano is, we learn, living a separate life from her husband Roberto Alagna. If Opera's Most Romantic Couple is no more, will Brand Angela be terminally damaged? Surely a showcase performance in the South Bank's International Voices season would be just the thing to rally the faithful and reaffirm Ms Gheorghiu's spectacular star quality, but I must admit that by the time we reached the interval, I was beset with gnawing doubt.The performance had begun with a bright canter through Leonard Bernstein's Candide overture, with the Philharmonia Orchestra Read more ...
tom.higgins
Elgar’s flag-waving nautical song-cycle The Fringes of the Fleet was performed to packed houses up and down the country in 1917, then sank virtually without trace for the next 90 years. As the work receives its first professional orchestral recording since Elgar's own, Tom Higgins, the conductor of the recording, explains how the work came into being, and why Rudyard Kipling had it banned.
IF events in the First World War had meshed a little differently, Elgar’s The Fringes of the Fleet would have become one of his best-known works. When first heard at the London Coliseum on 11 June 1917 as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Michael Tilson Thomas’s association with the London Symphony Orchestra runs deep - he was its principal conductor for eight years, and for his latest return to his old band last night the American programmed works that, while they had a Viennese theme, also seemed vividly designed to show off the jewels of this great orchestra, its wonderful wind players. How the clarinettists, oboists, flautists, horn-players and trumpeters must have delighted to see what they were to play: Schubert’s Donizetti-like Rosamunde, with its haunting woodwind songs, Mahler’s richly picturesque song cycle Des Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
So many 19th-century opera plots park themselves on fertile historical ground, amid all the colour, character and juice you could ever want, and then spend three hours picking at some anaemic daisies at the edges. It was a worry last night as I watched Donizetti’s Maria di Rohan in concert at the Royal Festival Hall. By sidestepping the heavyweight power players of Louis XIII’s reign, the eminently operatic figures of Cardinal Richelieu (endlessly alluded to) and Marie de Medici, weren’t we also sidestepping the juice? Thankfully, not. But we did have to wait until the second half for Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's round-up of the latest classical CDs takes in a major new Schubert recording by Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis, a pair of Shostakovich symphonies brought to fresh life in Liverpool under a young Russian conductor from the composer's home-town, a Mahler symphony recorded by the German orchestra that premiered it, a Kipling-inspired satire on artistic epigones by the half-forgotten Charles Koechlin, rare Rossini arias from Joyce DiDonato, a 60th-anniversary box-set from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and more.CD of the Month
Schubert: Winterreise, Mark Padmore/Paul Lewis ( Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Shostakovich’s Festive Overture marked the 30th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution with earnest fanfares and jolly tunes. 62 years on it smacks more of “Looney Tunes” and a cheesy kind of newsreel patriotism and you can’t help wondering if, behind all the laughter and frenetic flag-waving, the disillusionment had already set in. Mikhail Pletnev’s face suggested it had.He’s a decidedly cool customer is Pletnev, whether at the keyboard or, where we’re more likely to find him these days, on the podium. He has the air of containment and you don’t always see what you hear – not in terms of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
With its powerfully emotive stagings of Bach's St John Passion and Verdi's Requiem English National Opera has built something of a reputation for bringing sacred masterworks to the secular stage. Award-winning director Deborah Warner, conductor and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings, and ENO's indefatigable chorus master Martin Merry tell Edward Seckerson about the challenges of making a credible stage spectacle of Handel's Messiah, which opens on Friday 27 November. "It's about us all," says Warner, when asked how inclusive this most popular of all sacred oratorios can be. And she promises Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The irony won’t have been lost on many in the audience that the South Bank’s International Voices series began with Ballet. A whole first half of it, actually. Just as well the diva-in-waiting – the almost indecently glamorous Renée Fleming – knows the value of expectation and anticipation. Her very first album was entitled The Beautiful Voice and if that isn’t pressure for a burgeoning career I don’t know what is.But Fleming has certainly fulfilled that side of the promise and she is now in a place where voice, temperament, and technique are one and the singing radiates a combination of ease Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
It is probably fair to say that the concert hall at the Barbican Centre isn’t one of London’s most intimate spaces. It’s not the sort of place that would put one immediately in mind of, say, a drawing room – in fact, to do so requires a particular willingness to suspend one’s disbelief. Tonight, Thomas Quasthoff and friends endeavoured to make us do just that, and got within a hair’s breadth of pulling it off.This is the last in a series of five concerts that Quasthoff has programmed at the Barbican. Entitled Die Stimme (also the title of his autobiography), the series has included music by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We Brucknerians aren't easy to please. Few musical partnerships get the official seal of approval. Horenstein and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Wand and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic, Knappertsbusch and the Vienna Philharmonic. These are among the handful of collaborations that have gained a place in my Brucknerian pantheon. Last night’s performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, however, saw the London Philharmonic Orchestra and their French-Canadian guest conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin catapult themselves into these exalted ranks.Nézet-Séguin is Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At 84 years of age, Sir Charles Mackerras is one of the best-respected and best-loved operatic conductors working in the world today. He conducts Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera tonight and, despite bouts of ill health, found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s and his run-ins with Richard Jones and Christopher Alden Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
Much like Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G, Op 79, with which he started the programme, I’ll get straight to the point. Till Fellner is a very good pianist. To demonstrate this, I’d like to jump to the last sonata of five we heard in this all-Beethoven programme last night: the Piano Sonata in E flat, Op 7. When you look at this music on the page, you could easily see this piece becoming a bumptious triplet-fest of mind-numbing proportions. When it is in the capable and stylish hands of someone like Fellner, it turns into an artful musical argument, with unexpected turns at every corner Read more ...