Handel
David Benedict
There’s a reason why many people think Handel and, particularly his Messiah, is dull. Relatively easy to play, his music is incredibly difficult to perform well. Take this Temple Winter Festival outing with choral expert David Hill conducting the immensely skilled BBC Singers who can, and largely do, sing everything; four soloists all banishing grandiose, wobbly vibrato from days of yore; and the accomplished St James’s Baroque. There was nothing wrong with the performance... Unless, that is, you wanted the intensity, passion and, yes, the drama that Handel wrote.Scale is the key factor in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Youth orchestras do well at the Proms. Built to the same sprawling scale as the Royal Albert Hall, their energy is also a natural fit for the relentlessly enthusiastic Proms audience. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, the Aldeburgh World Youth Orchestra, our own National Youth Orchestra – year after year we marvel at the skills of these young musicians and come away with new demands to make of our professional ensembles. But last night the newly formed National Youth Orchestra of America showed their inexperience. Rarely has a youth orchestra sounded so 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 ...
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 ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Barbican is London’s home for baroque opera in concert, regularly bringing Europe’s finest over with their latest Handel and Vivaldi. But although fresh from a performance in Paris, last night’s band were definitely home-grown. Harry Bicket and the English Concert were joined by a dream-team of soloists for a performance of Handel’s Radamisto that suggested their French rivals aren’t going to have it all their own way this season.Radamisto isn’t first-tier Handel; its uneasy combination of tragic extremity and quick-fix dramatic resolution render it inadvertently comic, whatever you do Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It may look like a sure-fire hit to let Kansas mezzo Joyce DiDonato rip through the drama-queen repertoire of the Baroque. But last night’s exploration of the dustiest, most overgrown byways of 17th and 18th century Italian opera needed every drop of DiDonato’s star musical talents – not to mention those of her backing band Il Complesso Barocco – to convince us of the worth of these rarities. The audience bought it. I remain on the fence.Prepared in conjunction with that great scholar of this period, Alan Curtis, the concert didn’t disappoint in certain key respects. In mood, narrative flow Read more ...
David Nice
Messiahs of all kinds multiply at this time of year: the meek and the threadbare as well as the proud and polished. On the Sunday before Christmas, it was hard to choose between two potential archangels who could hardly fail given their respective pedigrees. It may have initially come down to a choice between single star soloists, soprano of the year Sophie Bevan at the Wigmore or flawless countertenor Iestyn Davies (pictured below by Marco Borggreve) at St John’s. As it turned out the entire team at Smith Square, crowning a week of top-quality choral concerts which had included Bach's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If you’ve ever wondered what a bad day at the office looked like for Handel then look no further than Belshazzar – an oratorio that positively demands heavenly intervention and possibly a bit of smiting. With a first act that worried even the composer with its length, a confused magpie plot and a libretto whose worst excrescences outdo even those of Congreve’s Semele, it’s one of those neglected works that gain little by being dragged out into the light, even by such distinguished champions as William Christie and Les Arts Florissants.Which is a shame, because it’s a rare delight these days Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What if Handel, after his death, descended to an eminently civilised afterlife, where he spent his time making music and new friends with the likes of Beethoven and even Jimi Hendrix? That’s the premise of Louis de Bernières’ new play Mr Handel, a show that brings the author himself together with baroque chamber group The Brook Street Band and soprano Nicki Kennedy in a gentle meander through the life and works of baroque’s finest.It’s Christmas, and novelty shows are all around, if you can find them among the ubiquitous pantomimes and West End shows screaming ever louder for the attention of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Oliver Knussen: Violin Concerto etc Various artists/Oliver Knussen (NMC)Collecting music written between the early 1970s and 2010, this NMC disc is an enthralling tribute to one of the greatest of contemporary composers. Oliver Knussen has never been prolific. And, in Colin Matthews’s words: “One of the reasons that Knussen’s output is relatively small… is that he takes such pleasure in discovering new things when instead he should be composing… every bar that he writes is measured against all the music he knows and loves.” Unsurprisingly, as a conductor he's an inspirational Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reviewing the Buxton Festival production of Handel’s Jephtha on theartsdesk a couple of months ago, Philip Radcliffe complained that the director, Frederic Wake-Walker, had done too little to justify the staging of this, the composer’s last oratorio: had made it, that is, too static and unstagey. I wonder what Radcliffe would say about Katie Mitchell’s production for Welsh National Opera, revived this weekend by Robin Tebbutt, and a classic case of a director’s reluctance to allow an essentially statuesque, slow-moving work its natural space and pace.Unlike Wake-Walker, who virtually Read more ...