18th century
Gavin Dixon
Masaaki Suzuki’s reputation precedes him. His recordings of Bach’s choral works with Bach Collegium Japan, the group he founded in 1990, have been arguably the finest of recent decades. But visits to the West, and especially to London, are rare, so this evening’s concert offered a valuable opportunity to find out what the dynamics are within the ensemble, and how they achieve such impressive results on disc.Unlike many Bach interpreters, Suzuki is a real conductor. He doesn’t play violin or harpsichord when he leads, he actually conducts. He takes an interest in every detail of the music, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most radical of the directors who forged a “cinema of resistance” at the BBC in the 1960s, Peter Watkins completed two groundbreaking docudramas there – Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) – before the suppression of the second prompted his eventual exile to countries more receptive to his internationalist films and his anti-capitalistic approach to financing and making them.Half a century hasn’t dimmed the seismic power of this pacifist diptych, now handsomely restored and packed with supplements by the British Film Institute for its release in a dual format edition. The antithesis Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The B Minor Mass comes in many shapes and sizes. Martin Feinstein opts for a bright and bijou approach, with period instruments, one to a part, and a choir of ten. The small ensemble sometimes lacks finesse, but makes up for it in dynamism, passion, and sheer joy. There was nothing chamber-scaled about this reading: it was all big gestures and direct emotions.Feinstein leads his eponymous ensemble from the flute. That can lead to curious ensemble dynamics, with many of the movements being led from the (essentially decorative) obbligato flute line. Generally, though, the ensemble is small Read more ...
Marshall Marcus
2016 began with the passing of Pierre Boulez, arguably the doyen of modernism in the field of classical music. Now, only a couple of months later, it is the turn of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a musician occupying a similar level of singular elevation but this time in what is often described (certainly inadequately in this case) as the "period instrument" movement.Harnoncourt was clearly an inspiration to generations of period instrument musicians, including generations like mine that came to the "movement" in the 1970s and '80s; he taught us not only about grammar and its expression, not simply Read more ...
David Nice
Gluck's two operas about the daughter of Agamemnon saved from sacrifice only to serve as priestess-butcher herself have found their level on the contemporary operatic stage. Not that the handful of UK productions or their casts in recent years have quite matched the pared-away beauty of his peculiar classicism: neither Iphigénie en Aulide at Glyndebourne nor the Royal Opera's Iphigénie en Tauride have stuck in the memory, and I doubt if ETO's brave shot at the second opera will either.Iphigenia's tortuous path to reunion with brother Orestes finally calms the chain of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
From the more or less inconsequential wit and bravura of The Barber of Seville to the profound comic psychology, social nuances and unparalleled musical genius of The Marriage of Figaro, and from the silly antics of Sam Brown’s Rossini to the style and brilliant stage management of Tobias Richter’s Mozart, is a good lesson in music theatrical history played backwards. At the same time it's a reminder of the versatility of this great Welsh company, the adaptability of its orchestra and chorus, and the musical loss it’s about to suffer with the impending departure of its chief conductor, Lothar Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“We are at a time of present crisis.” When Sarastro addressed his boardroom of business-suited acolytes last night, there can’t have been many in the Coliseum whose thoughts didn’t turn to English National Opera. Even by the standards of a company that has spent most of its history fighting for survival, 2015 was a year of unprecedented difficulty. Whether crisis becomes catastrophe remains to be seen, but there couldn’t be a more emphatic portent of success, a better-timed metaphor, than this Magic Flute. Frankly a bit of a dud on its first outing back in 2013, it has been transformed by ENO Read more ...
David Nice
Unlike Schubert, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, Mozart composed nothing astoundingly individual before the age of 20. That leaves any odyssey through his oeuvre, year by year – this one will finish in 2041, by which time I’ll be nearly 80 if I live that long – with a problem effectively solved by Ian Page and his Classical Opera in placing works by contemporaries of various ages alongside young Amadeus’s efforts. For the music of the nevertheless precocious nine/ten-year-old of the year 1766, directness of communication was everything, not a problem given Page’s players and two bright Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
“Finding the Light”, the second episode of this four-part series, took us to the period when Scottish intellectuals led the world in innovative and revolutionary thinking, Edinburgh’s neo-classical architecture in the leafy streets of the New Town made for new standards of civic architecture, and Scottish education could be of the highest quality.The exceptionally enthusiastic narrator is the Scottish representational artist Lachlan Goudie, who rather disarmingly sketches as he goes, particularly in the city and galleries of Rome where Scots of the Enlightenment went for even further Read more ...
David Nice
Relatively recent tweaks to the abundant London concert scene have resulted in top-end events right up to Christmas. We have in part to thank the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square, postponing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s holidays, putting them together with superb soloists and choirs, and serving up major Handel and Bach. One snag: their Christmas Oratorio when I last went to hear it turned out to be only four cantatas out of the sequence of six.You’d have to pay two period-instrument horn players if you included Part Four – the OAE didn’t – and yet as Richard Read more ...
David Nice
In 1981 a 20-year-old Swedish trumpeter on national service turned up in the town – city, by Swedish reckoning – of Örebro as soloist in Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. The ensemble, then a mix of amateurs and professionals, some of them from the local military academy, is now the much-recorded and award-winning Swedish Chamber Orchestra; the trumpeter, Håkan Hardenberger, is probably the most famous in the world, and certainly the most adventurous – he still fights for contemporary composers to take first place in musical creation. Earlier this month the SCO and Hardenberger Read more ...
David Nice
The last time I saw Janet McTeer, she was doing her best with the slightly underwritten role of sister to Glenn Close’s lethal Patty Hewes in Damages, the ultimate TV series about the discrepancy between seeming and being. Which is the theme, too, of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, adapted from Choderlos de Laclos’ peerless epistolary novel. Close was unforgettable as the manipulative Marquise de Merteuil in the film version, so it’s good to report that McTeer, back in the West End after too long an absence, equals her achievement and has a Valmont as charismatic in his way as Read more ...