18th century
Bernard Hughes
The baroque music ensemble Arcangelo have been around since 2010 but I hadn’t heard them before this pair of concerts streamed from Wigmore Hall in the last week. But what I heard has certainly encouraged me to seek out more – and they have quickly built up a large discography ready to be tucked into. This includes the Bach violin concertos with Alina Ibragimova, who joined them for a journey through Vivaldi, Bach and Corelli last Friday, while frequent collaborator Iestyn Davies duetted with Carolyn Sampson in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater on Tuesday.The Wigmore Hall has been a particular oasis Read more ...
Robert Beale
For the newest performance of their part-postponed “Winter Season” on film, the Hallé return to their rehearsal and performance centre in Ancoats, and with the help of piano soloist-director Paul Lewis and guest leader-director Eva Thórarinsdóttir offer a display of the capability of their orchestra members as chamber musicians.So first we see again the little sequence of musicians heading through Manchester city centre to Hallé St Peter’s, and before the music starts Paul Lewis introduces Mozart’s Piano Quintet in E flat K452, and Sergio Castelló-López, clarinet, and Elena Comelli, bassoon, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Aside from the happy accident of longevity, something that set Bach and Handel and Telemann apart from their contemporaries was fluency. I’m speaking here of musical rather than verbal tongues: the least polyglot of them was Bach, with his command of four languages, German, Latin, French and Italian, in decreasing degrees of facility. While Handel criss-crossed Europe, Bach and Telemann anchored themselves in small areas of central and northern Germany respectively.Yet the world came to them. Bach especially composed in French and Italian with mother-tongue fluency, albeit a strong German Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Catalan director Albert Serra’s interest in late 18th century France is well established – his previous film was The Death of Louis XIV – but the title of his new one has precious little to do with the triadic revolutionary slogan that swept away the French monarchy at the end of it. If Liberté celebrates freedom in any sense, it’s that of libertinage, libertinism, the rejection of moral and especially sexual restraints that was being celebrated at the time by the Marquis de Sade, whose philosophical presence is a commanding one here (alongside, cinematically, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose final Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Amid madness, fear and death, there is still an oasis in the music of Bach - and Bach played by András Schiff in the Wigmore Hall is a special type of haven. Normally one can’t get in to those concerts because they are instantly sold out, even though he usually does each one twice. Instead, this performance was beamed live into our own computers wherever we may be, and after the past few days, my goodness, we needed it. Playing into the empty cavern of the Wigmore’s auditorium - the hall that is usually his home from home - Schiff spoke to his invisible audience through the cameras, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
History ain’t what it used to be, not on television at any rate. Recently we’ve witnessed the ongoing furore about the factual accuracy or otherwise of The Crown, while Bridgerton has cheekily galloped bareback over the conventional cliches of telly costume dramas. Now here’s The Great (Channel 4), which sort-of purports to tell the story of Catherine the Great, although writer Tony McNamara has given himself plenty of room for whimsy and invention.Each episode is prefaced with the caption “An occasionally true story” (a precaution some other programme-makers might like to consider), and Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For its latest production, unveiled on Sunday evening but recorded in November, Scottish Opera toys playfully with the absurdities of Covid-compliant performance practice. But maybe sensing our weariness with the whole business, it is not overdone. In fact this is a relatively straightforward concert staging of Mozart’s dark and unsettling comedy.The orchestra is on a darkened stage, behind the proscenium arch, ghostly masked figures barely visible behind a multitude of flexible perspex screens. The stage is extended over the orchestra pit and lightly furnished with a table, two chairs and a Read more ...
David Nice
“After black and gloomy night, the sun shines all the brighter,” sings hero Ariodante after a life-threatening bout of jealousy nearly scuppers a royal wedding. There’s a snag in Handel’s dramaturgy: all that sunshine in preparation for the nuptials in Act One isn’t really earned. It probably needs a live audience to beam love and support to the Royal Opera's engaging soloists, but you get the impression they’re trying really hard to an empty house, while orchestra and conductor behind them on the wooden box of a stage, though audibly supportive, show no visible joy in the proceedings.It Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly two weeks into the latest lockdown, and already I feel nostalgic about the last day of freedom. You should too, just watching the film released last night of the CLS’s most recent happening in Southwark Cathedral. It’s of the evening performance; I was there in the golden afternoon, sunlight flooding the nave, we spectators free to wander albeit in one direction and masked and head for one of the points of the Charles Ives-like soundscape that suffused the place to hear what a musician had to say, and play, about his or her part in Haydn’s Symphony No. 104.Haydn had more forces at his Read more ...
David Nice
It must have felt very strange to Mark Wigglesworth that he returned to the London Coliseum under such unanticipated circumstances. ENO’s shortest-lived but also (many of us think) best Music Director campaigned from the start for direct communication with the audience, in that magic triangle between composer, performers and spectators, and lived it to the full in all the productions he conducted (“we underestimate the public as performers at our peril,” he told me in 2015 before taking up the post). Now, replacing a self-quarantining Martyn Brabbins, his successor, he had his back to an Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Back to Georgian brothels, now – at least, for those of us who don’t have a Hulu subscription. The BBC’s airing of the second series of Harlots over the summer felt strangely timely. Barely an episode in and an angry crowd was hammering at the local judge’s door, demanding justice after the needless death of one of the city’s poorest residents. The third series, showing weekly on Wednesdays on BBC Two and available in its entirety on iPlayer, is less easily related to 2020, but it’s still a rollicking ride. Harlots, created by Moira Buffini and Alison Newman, is billed as a bodice- Read more ...
David Nice
How does Mozart do it? His music can provoke deep emotions even in the unlikeliest operatic situations, if well done, and present circumstances stirred them up all the more on Sunday afternoon. Those flirtatious ladies flouncing around the prone prince in the first musical number of The Magic Flute – no overture here – only had to sing “although it breaks my heart in two/I have to bid farewell to you/until we meet again" for another tearful turn of the screw. There was more dramatically justified cause for the floodgates to open as heroine Pamina arrives to lead her Tamino through the Read more ...