18th century
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi left it till last to be most itself, to dance a ballet that is truly of its blood, its seed - its closing on Alexei Ratmansky's The Flames of Paris will leave much happiness in the memory to override the problematic productions of classics, the unidiomatic Balanchine and the awful backstage events. Here at last, in a work by the most gifted of recent Bolshoi directors, you met on stage young people who dance, who act, who love the theatre, fresh in their performing, skilled in their means, open-hearted in reaching the audience, and loved right back.The previous night the visiting Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 at the age of 50. It was his first opera and his greatest. In its five acts, its visits to the woods of Diana, the groves of Venus, the fires of Pluto and the domestic meltdown in the house of Phaedra, is some of the most assured, inventive and stylish music ever written for the stage. As operatic debuts go, it is a miracle. That William Christie, the pre-eminent French Baroque specialist of our age, would be capable of summoning up some of the premiere’s dazzle was not surprising. But that Jonathan Kent would be able Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may have taken Sarah Connolly a decade or two, a detour to choral singing and a serious flirtation with jazz, but the British mezzo-soprano has most definitely arrived at full-blown National Treasure status. Perhaps it was her career-changing Xerxes in Nicholas Hytner’s 1998 Xerxes for English National Opera that marked the start of her reign, perhaps her 2005 Giulio Cesare for Glyndebourne. But either way a starring appearance at the Last Night of the Proms in 2009, a CBE the following year and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award just last month, all proclaim her the undisputed queen of Read more ...
David Nice
There are Handel operas where you wait impatiently for the handful of truly original set-pieces to light up the action, hoping the singers are equal to their challenges. One such is surely Siroe, Re di Persia, bravely staged at the Göttingen Handel Festival the other week. Others like Imeneo sparkle with genius and personality in virtually every number, musically if not dramatically the equal of a Shakespeare late romance.It’s a pleasure to sit through a reasonably animated concert performance like this, cast regardless, when the strings of an unshowy orchestra dart like little cupids around Read more ...
David Nice
Let me confess: I had to return to lovely Göttingen as much for the frogs as for the Handel. Puffing out their throats like bubblegum, the amphibians' brekekekek chorus in the ponds of the great university’s botanic gardens actually made a more spectacular showing, in my books, than the main opera of this year’s Handel Festival, the 93rd, with its canny theme linking the German honorary Englishman with the Orient. Not even the effervescent Laurence Cummings in his second wonderful year as festival director could kiss the mostly humdrum Siroe, Re di Persia into a prince. But Cummings’ contacts Read more ...
Tim Cumming
There have been memorable nights at the Foundling Museum recently, with Alasdair Roberts delivering a superb solo show in April, while on Friday the Nest Collective hosted a double bill of Zimbabwean-born singer Eska and Bristol’s masters of English folk minimalism, Spiro.I’d seen Eska at Essaouira’s Gnawa Festival last year, performing with Soweto Kinch and Hamid El Kasri – she was so good they invited her back with her own band this year – and on the strength of her opening set in the Picture Gallery, the folks in Essaouira have chosen well. She has a powerful, emotive, and mellifluous Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The return of the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music to London each year always heralds the beginning of summer. Granted this beginning is usually damp and decidedly chilly, but there’s a hopefulness in the air that things might be about to change. And this sense of hopefulness doesn’t end with the weather. Under Lindsay Kemp the festival’s programming is reliably wide-ranging and joyful, a proper celebration of the landmarks and the paths-less-trodden of the baroque repertoire.Last night’s concert had the appeal of being both a major work and one decidedly neglected in contemporary Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a self-taught chemist, innovative industrialist, a businessman who exploited and developed new means of distribution and marketing, an anti-slavery campaigner and a man dealing with his own disability, the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood was an important 18th-century figure, a pioneer whose achievements still resonate. But a genius?The historian, biographer and author AN Wilson has no doubt about this. Presenting this perambulation through Wedgwood’s life and vessels, Wilson began in Burslem – “a muddy village in the middle of nowhere” – and climaxed in the royal palaces of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If ever there was such a thing as a safe pair of pianistic hands then they would belong to Norway’s Leif Ove Andsnes. There’s a cool, patrician control to everything he does that speaks to thorough preparation, careful interpretative choices and immaculate technique. Thrill-seekers and risk-takers may want to look elsewhere, but for everyone else Andsnes offers the chance to hear cleanly through to the skeleton of a work. No histrionics or affectations muddy the silhouettes on show, and if occasionally one longs for a moment of abandon then it’s a desire easily satisfied by 10 minutes in the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Bach for breakfast, lunch and supper. That in essence was what yesterday's Bach Marathon was about. You can do that with Bach - have him flowing from the taps. Nothing new in this for those of us who experienced the Bach Christmas a few years back on Radio Three, when every note was piped over the airwaves for breakfast, lunch and supper for 10 days solid. Nothing very marathon-like about any of it, though, either. The day’s performances couldn’t have been further from a challenge to sit through or listen to. At the centre of this day of praise was the all-seeing, all-controling, all- Read more ...
David Nice
A Leipzig church is surely the place we’d most like to be for Bach on Good Friday. Never mind: the Barbican Hall is kinder to the best period instrument ensembles than it is to big symphony orchestras. Better still, having sat stunned and weepy for a good few minutes at the end of this performance, I’m happy to evangelise and proclaim that no better team could be assembled anywhere for the original 1724 version of this world-changing musical Passion.Richard Egarr (pictured below by Marco Borggreve), directing from the harpsichord, no doubt deserves the credit for the line that passed, without Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“My honest instinct,” says Jim, the hero of Bruce Norris’s The Low Road, “is one of resentment.” And while this contemporary fable of industrious bees, aka capitalist speculators, is set in the past, and is full of good jokes, it is also laced with emotions that are a tougher sell. Here a humorous tale of a life of entrepreneurship comes hand-in-hand with some satire that is bitter as well as being funny.Beginning, like so many 18th-century English novels, with the finding of a foundling child, the play starts with a snapshot of Massachusetts in 1759. The parentless baby (sired by one G Read more ...