Handel
David Nice
As the hand-held credits popped up on screen to pianist and musical director Manoj Kamps's superb quartet arrangement of Mozart's Magic Flute Overture, the European Union's Culture Programme logo brought a spontaneous burst of applause. Not the norm for Suffolk this week, I'm told, but this audience knew how international opera is, how we're all connected in Europe's musical world.A year and a half after its inception as a collaboration between the Aix-en-Provence Festival and the European Network of Opera Academies – I was there at the very first meeting but had not seen the show until last Read more ...
David Nice
What Auden called "the sexy airs of summer" arrived early in Göttingen this year. Frog action in the Botanical Gardens of the town's pioneering University may have been less clamorous than when I first came here in late rather than early May (the annual International Handel Festival usually begins whenever the Ascension Day holiday happens to be, so it's a moveable celebration). Otherwise everything in this green-girt and on this occasion sun-drenched dream town chimed well with the sensuous pastoral elements of two out of the three big Handel dramas of the first long weekend.The oratorio Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
La Follia was, as every programme note inevitably reminds us, a pop song of its day. A strutting Spanish dance, it featured in the work of over 150 composers, so catchy was its signature chord progression. Still a classic of Baroque concert programmes, it’s a great way to take the temperature of any given performance. At its best, it can have even a sedate audience stamping and swaying, thrilled by those grinding syncopations and that heartbeat pulse. Last night at the Wigmore Hall, Christophe Rousset and a trio of musicians from Les Talens Lyriques got a polite round of applause.Perhaps it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Copland: Orchestral Works 1 BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson (Chandos)There are sensational things in the first volume of John Wilson’s projected Copland series, but his disc suffers from being released too soon after Andrew Litton’s thrilling Colorado Symphony anthology. Litton scores by allowing us to hear Billy the Kid and Rodeo in their uncut original versions, and his orchestra play with a muscular grace that’s matched by BIS’s widescreen sound. Wilson’s hard-working BBC Philharmonic are more than capable, but many of Copland’s brasher moments are too restrained. El Salón México is a case in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The London Handel Festival is back, and instead of ploughing their usual furrow of rarely-seen works, this year’s opera is a classic. If the rest of Ariodante doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its two often-excerpted arias (“Dopo Notte” and “Scherza Infida”), then it’s still a deeply satisfying evening of music, with a large cast perfect for showing off the talents of the Royal College of Music’s student performers.James Bonas’s production is a moody affair, distilling Handel’s Scottish setting down to its emotional essentials. There are hints of snow and of the original sea-coast in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Anyone who says Handel can’t do psychology should spend an evening with Orlando. Form, orchestration, even exit conventions are all reinvented or cast aside for a work of startlingly contemporary fluidity, where music is completely the servant of drama. Stripped back to little more than the score last night, in one of the Barbican’s very-semi-stagings, Handel’s emotional architecture was completely exposed, allowing us to see just how jaggedly inventive its lines really are.Which makes it all the more frustrating that, while stylish and efficient, The English Concert’s performance wasn’t just Read more ...
graham.rickson
Handel: Duetti e Terzetti italiani Roberto Invernizzi (soprano), La Risonanza/Fabio Bonizzoni (Glossa)Handel's brief Italian period was crucial to his musical development, lasting from 1706 to 1710, just before his arrival in London. Stefano Russomanno's booklet essay to this superb anthology suggests that the combined influences of Italian music, landscape and culture “operated inside him like a kind of baker's yeast”, and it's not too fanciful to think that these duets and trios represent a neat melding of Northern European compositional rigour with sunny Mediterranean sensuality. You can't Read more ...
David Kettle
In the end, it’s all about the oranges. They adorn the programme that accompanies Harry Fehr’s intelligent new production of Handel’s Ariodante for Scottish Opera. More importantly, they’re prominent in designer Yannis Thavoris’s clinical steel-and-glass set, growing on carefully groomed bushes in six neat tubs, placed meticulously below warming light bulbs, protected from the gales and snow drifts outside by a wall of glass.They're a simple but highly effective metaphor in Fehr’s deeply unsettling production, which relocates Handel’s opera – originally set in an unrecognisible, age-old Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The curse of Tamerlano strikes again. The last time London saw Handel’s darkest and most sober opera was in 2010. Graham Vick’s production for the Royal Opera House lost its unlikely star Placido Domingo before it even opened in London, ran interminably long and lost any emotional impetus somewhere in the course of its three-and-a-half hours. To say, then, that last night’s concert performance from Maxim Emelyanychev and Il Pomo d’Oro made an even poorer job of the piece is not to dismiss it lightly.The Barbican have fine form where baroque opera is concerned. We’ve become used to concert Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It was rather like a trip home to see long-lost relatives. Ton Koopman took to the stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic with a broad smile. That smile both greeted the audience and, from what the audience could see, told the orchestra that they were on form. Or, on the other hand, it might have been encouraging them to try harder.The latter was hardly necessary. There have been times when the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra reduced its ranks to become a Baroque ensemble and, in so doing, failed to realise that it needed to leave behind the 19th century bluster and become that bit more Read more ...
David Nice
No doubt this sophisticated bagatelle starring Mark Rylance worked like a charm in the intimate space and woody resonance of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The Duke of York's Theatre is one of the West End’s smaller mainstream venues, its proscenium arch is appropriate to the early 18th century operatic world in which castrato Farinelli made a fortune enchanting his audiences, and the recreation of the Southwark gem onstage with its ranks of candles in chandeliers as well as footlights and its pretty boxes has been perfectly achieved by Jonathan Fensom for the transfer of John Dove’s production Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s almost impossible to imagine what a Handel opera performance can have been like in London in the 1730s, when Orlando first appeared. The audience came primarily to hear their favourite singers: and these must have been sensational, if not unduly dedicated to the dramatic verities they were supposed to be representing: castrati like Senesino and Farinelli, sopranos like Cuzzoni and Faustina (who once came to blows onstage, presumably trying to upstage one another). Nobody cared much about plot or character, but they loved the magical effects: Zoroastro whisking Orlando away in a flying Read more ...