Baroque
alexandra.coghlan
The advertising for La Nuova Musica’s Orlando billed it as “Handel’s most psychologically complex opera”. Whether or not you agree (and there are plenty of heavyweight rivals – Alcina, Giulio Cesare and Agrippina just for starters) there’s also the issue that it’s only half the story. Orlando may be a complicated portrait of mental instability and madness, but it’s also a magical pastoral comedy peopled with lovelorn shepherdesses and wizards, featuring quite the silliest ending of all Handel (although this too, admittedly, is a much-contested category). This performance did little to Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Cheers and huzzahs greeted the arrival of Sir Simon Rattle on the Barbican stage last night before the London Symphony Orchestra had even played a note. The 10-day festivities to open his tenure as principal conductor evidently worked a treat. The hall was full for a lengthy and – on the surface of it – unlikely splicing of Austrian Romantic angst with Baroque arias and dance.Joy and woe were woven fine throughout, but especially so in a tenderly moulded account of Schubert’s "Unfinished" Symphony. Rattle views the “Unfinished” in the context of a prose vision of paternal rejection and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 1725 a collection of some 50 songs was published by one William Thomson. You might not know his name, or even the names of the songs, but given the first bar of most I’m betting you could hum them from beginning to end. The work? Orpheus Caledonius – the first published collection of Scottish folk melodies and lyrics.This year’s Brighton Early Music Festival takes “Roots” as its theme, and this opening night concert looked back beyond baroque to the traditional tunes that lurk, just out of sight, behind so many of its great works, from Corelli to Purcell. This performance by period band L’ Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Amazingly, last night Sir András Schiff scored a Proms first with his performance of Book One of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Never before has even half of the sublime and seminal “48” taken the Royal Albert Hall stage in unmutilated form. The WTC could have found no better advocate. Schiff’s awesome ability as a pianist to deliver clarity without austerity, fidelity without pedantry, made us see how this first set of 24 preludes and fugues (completed in 1722; the second book dates from two decades later) encodes so much of the fundamental DNA of Western music.Not only across the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
William Christie chose a suitably light and breezy programme for this warm summer evening’s concert at St. John’s Smith Square. The concert was titled “Bach goes to Paris”, with works chosen to highlight the connections between the German master and his French contemporaries. But, more significantly, they showcased Christie’s deep affinity with French Baroque music, and the vibrancy and passion he brings to this repertoire.For Christie, Baroque music is always about dance, so it was fitting that much of this music derived from ballet. Christie gestures broadly from the podium, but rarely to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
''…after various Accidents, it comes to pass that he recovers both Her and his Kingdom”. Handel's Radamisto may be a tale of warring kingdoms, noble self-sacrifice and mature, wedded love, but it’s also a fairly daft piece of dramatic belief-suspension, whose various knotty conflicts get miraculously untangled in a brisk few bars of recitative, just in time for a rousing final chorus and whatever the ancient Armenian version is of a nice cup of tea.Director John Ramster is well aware of this, embracing the opera’s idiocies along with its musical glories in his witty new production for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A Saudi princess in her white wedding dress digs her own grave as men pile up stones to hurl at her head — next, an Isis fighter is stabbing a knife at her neck to decapitate her. Ah, the fate of the heroine of the average baroque opera about the appalling ways of men and gods. Add in the bearded lady in a burqa, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry on the opening day of the new Glyndebourne season. Graham Vick’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s 359-year-old opera Hipermestra is certainly extremist opera.Yet what an extreme opera this is. Here is a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To hear The English Concert playing Handel is to arrive in technicolour Oz after a lifetime of black and white baroque in Kansas. We’re not short on period bands in the UK, but few bring this music into anything like the kind of focus that Harry Bicket and his crack team of musicians achieve, nor demonstrate such love and joy in the process. The solo line-up may have been starry, but the hero of this Ariodante was the orchestra.Even by Handel’s standards, the plot of Ariodante is a curious one. A happy beginning and ending frame a central conflict of disturbing darkness (a Much Ado-style Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever musicologists may tell us about the patchy authenticity of Monteverdi’s last two operas, they unquestionably make a pair. Il ritorno di Ulisse is all about fidelity and ends with a love duet between the reunited husband and wife. L’Incoronazione di Poppea is almost entirely dedicated to infidelity and ends with a disturbingly beautiful love duet between the adulterous couple, Nero and Poppea, after he has exiled his wife, Ottavia, and ordered his moralising tutor, Seneca, to kill himself, among other equally vicious, if slightly less murderous, diktats.Happily Monteverdi’s only other Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Never give one concert if you can give a hundred” might stand as a motto for the conductor who once hauled his choir and orchestra round the world performing all 200 or so of Bach’s cantatas. And mathematically Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s latest project is a nearly exact honouring of that idea. Three operas by Monteverdi survive (out of 10 or a dozen), and Gardiner claims to be taking his semi-staged productions to 33 cities – just one short of the hundred performances.To complete the arithmetic, the tour is honouring Monteverdi’s 450th birthday this year; and to complete the geography, the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The annual London Handel Festival is dutifully working its way through every one of Handel’s operas in a cycle that will eventually take us from Alcina to Xerxes before, presumably, starting all over again. But each year, alongside these headliners, we also get a pasticcio – an opera stitched together by Handel from the shiniest and most decorative musical scraps by his European colleagues. It’s these unknown works that often throw up the biggest surprises, giving us a wide-shot of a broader musical landscape now all but obliterated by Handel’s popularity.The term "pasticcio" originally meant Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Marian devotions have given us some of sacred music’s most striking works, from graceful Ave Marias to anguished settings of the Stabat Mater. Andreas Scholl and musicologist Bernardo Ticci have recently gone in search of some less familiar ones – companion pieces for Vivaldi’s theatrical Stabat Mater, which has long been part of Scholl’s concert repertoire. They have emerged with a rich handful of works from 18th century Naples. Music by Porpora, Vinci and Anfossi makes for a varied, if rather fragmented, evening.While the speaker of the Stabat Mater (set here both by Vivaldi) watches the Read more ...