18th century
David Nice
Light and grace must flood the concert hall in Haydn’s The Creation, after a striking-for-its time evocation of Chaos, and periwigged creatures skip around the Genesis picture. With Edward Gardner keeping the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus on their dancing toes, as ever, and three fine soloists carrying the creatures’ share of the beauties, it was a good time for happy creativity.Happily, too, Haydn inclines more in this often intimate oratorio to the instrumental originality of his symphonies than to the strangely vacuous world of his operas. You still sometimes feel that the arias Read more ...
Robert Beale
Placing the UK premiere of Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto (for cello and orchestra) after Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 was probably an inspired idea from the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Joshua Weilerstein.In its day, the so-called “Military” Symphony was not only striking on account of its use of novel instrumental effects – the “Turkish music” sound of triangle, cymbals and big drum for one, and clarinets (heard, military-band style, alongside oboes and flute) for another – but the clever and comical way they were brought into a context that was otherwise seemingly orthodox and almost Read more ...
Robert Beale
Reviving Tim Albery’s production of Così fan tutte, now almost 20 years old, again at Leeds Grand Theatre, Opera North have a bet that’s as safe as Don Alfonso’s in the story – that “Women are all the same”. It’s a sure-fire winner, and the best part this time round lies in the balance and contrast of both voices and personalities in the casting of the central pairs of lovers.Albery sees the piece as a kind of Enlightenment-era scientific demonstration, in which truth is to be revealed by an unblinking camera lens. Almost all the action takes place inside a giant “camera obscura”, as we Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
What Zoe Cooper has concocted in her loving rewiring of Jane Austen’s first completed novel looks at first sight like a knockabout satire of a satire. But her aim is more sober than that: a queer rereading of this text as she first experienced it as a student.The Orange Tree’s in-the-round space is ideal for what Cooper does here. The venue has no “fourth wall” to break, more like a fifth wall, an invisible membrane separating stage area from seats. This Cooper cheerfully breaks too, from the outset. The three period-costumed cast members arrive, survey the audience and wave, preparing us for Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s a game called Whamageddon, where people see how deep into December they can go without hearing “Last Christmas”. I’m like that, but with the Bach Christmas Oratorio, and this year I made it four days. And who would want to wait any longer? Last night I was at the Voces8 Centre in London as part of a live audience for a concert also streamed in the ongoing Live from London series, started during the Covid summer of 2020 and continuing to flourish.The programme was titled “Christmas with JS Bach” but could equally have been called “Blackadder Goes Forth” for the determination to get Read more ...
David Nice
If ever a marriage was made in heaven, it would have to be the one between Lucy Crowe’s beleaguered Queen Rodelinda and Iestyn Davies’ King Bertarido, the husband she believes dead and almost loses a second time. The duet at the end of Handel’s gem-packed Act Two where they’re reunited and then separated again was peerlessly moving as they performed it last night in Saffron Hall with the vibrant English Concert under Harry Bicket (more about the circumstances later).Concert performance never hampers the Handel operas of Bicket's team, and the countertenor may well have suggested what happened Read more ...
David Nice
Fascinating for the history of opera, less so for opera. The most interesting thing about Gazzaniga’s take on the libertine and the stone guest, apart from a couple of sprightly numbers, is the libretto by Bertati, repurposed with better dramatic shape by Da Ponte for Mozart, whose masterpiece opened in Prague eight months after the lesser work’s Venice premiere of February 1787. We have a right, though, to witness Gazzaniga’s unadulterated original. This wasn’t it.For most people in the audience, the first surprise – apart from discovering that the opening scene is Mozart/Da Ponte’s in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sir Ridley Scott has taken umbrage at the French critics who weren’t too impressed with his new movie. Not only do they not like his film, but the French “don’t even like themselves”, according to the dyspeptic auteur.But I feel our French cousins may have a point, especially the one who described Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the fabled emperor as “a sullen boor and a cad with his wife, Joséphine.” Like Steely Dan sang, “I have never met Napoleon”, but one might reasonably expect that a man who masterminded a European empire which stretched from Spain to Poland and temporarily as far as Read more ...
David Nice
“Tell me,” The West Wing’s President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) asks of a right-wing TV host who uses the Bible to call homosexuality an abomination, “I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21.7… What would a good price for her be?” He might also have cited Judges 11 and asked about sacrificing his daughter as thanks for victory over his enemies, the position of Israelite Jephtha having massacred the Ammonites.Handel and his librettist Thomas Morell in their oratorio about Jephtha’s rash promise are equivocal about the filicide, to say the least, and Read more ...
David Nice
There was a good reason why Milton never added a Moderato, a “middle way”, to his masterly poems on mirth in bright day (L’Allegro) and more reflective pleasures by night (Il Penseroso), and a bad one why Handel allowed Charles Jennens to tack on his own ode to reason; neither poetry nor music should have much to do with pure intellect.Yet the joys and solitudes of the first two parts are so mesmerisingly handled, and here well-nigh perfect in performance, that we can forgive a trimmed appendix with a sable final chorus.Following his takeover from the self-dishonoured Gardiner in a Read more ...
Robert Beale
The showman was back – and, bless him, he can still sell every seat in a big hall even if the programme offers close on an hour and a half of unalloyed Bach.Lang Lang’s gifts are phenomenal: he doesn’t just play music brilliantly, every now and then he plays with it, putting his own twist of fun or pathos or bravura where few would venture to try. It can be utterly mesmerising; it can be quirky, if not exasperating. And so he did with the aria and 30 variations for keyboard known to us as the Goldbergs.He preceded it with Schumann’s Arabeske, Op. 18, as if needing to warm the atmosphere a Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Basel Chamber Orchestra’s 21 string players on tour are an extraordinary set of musicians. Not only did they begin their programme in Manchester with Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, requiring at times one-to-a-part playing to accomplish its multi-voice textures, but eight of them put down their instruments and transformed into a choir for the piece that followed.That was for Heinz Holliger’s Eisblumen, written for seven strings plus four vocal parts: Bach’s chorale “Komm, O Tod” is heard beneath the very un-Bachian string writing. It was realised with delicacy and Read more ...