Baroque
Orpheus, Opera North review - cross-cultural opera in actionSaturday, 15 October 2022
Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical... Read more... |
Album: Arcade Fire -WEThursday, 05 May 2022
When the pandemic closed in, Canadian experimental indie rock troupe Arcade Fire were on the cusp of heading into the studio to record their new album. COVID had other plans. But rather than pause, the husband and wife duo of Win and Regine... Read more... |
Amadigi, Garsington Opera review – geometries of enchantmentSunday, 27 June 2021
In Handel’s operas (as, indeed, elsewhere in art and life) the worst witch may turn out to have the best character. Without the sorceress Melissa, splendidly full of evil ruses yet endowed with a generous measure of tragic pathos, Amadigi di Gaula... Read more... |
Messiah highlights, English National Opera, BBC Two review – short-cut sorrow and redemptionSunday, 04 April 2021
Well, it wasn’t quite Messiah, but it was a source of joy. In ENO’s end-of-lockdown staging, BBC Two’s transmission of Handel’s resurrection song delivered a scant 54 minutes of music from the Coliseum on Easter Saturday. In contrast, two ancient... Read more... |
Iestyn Davies, Arcangelo, Wigmore Hall review - heavenly Handel as the lights dim againWednesday, 16 December 2020
Just before the doors closed again on live audiences at the Wigmore Hall, Iestyn Davies and members of the Arcangelo ensemble celebrated the private side of a very public composer. The peerless counter-tenor, whose powerfully polished command of... Read more... |
BBC Proms live online: Benedetti, OAE, Cohen review – double helpings of Baroque zestFriday, 04 September 2020
In a year of absences and separations, here was another one we had to bear. Built around a programme of Baroque double concertos, last night’s Prom should have brought Nicola Benedetti and Alina Ibragimova together in a violin super-duo that... Read more... |
Luis Sagasti: A Musical Offering review – the sounds of silenceSunday, 19 July 2020
Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like many authors before him, the Argentinian novelist and... Read more... |
Acis and Galatea, The Sixteen, Christophers, Cadogan Hall review – pocket-sized pastoral pleasuresWednesday, 12 February 2020
Nymphs and shepherds – go away? In music, as in art or literature, the pastoral fripperies of the Baroque age can feel utterly alien to modern tastes. Those dalliances, seductions and abductions in the Arcadian landscapes of myth may cease to entice... Read more... |
Caravaggio & Bernini, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna - high emotion in 17th century RomeSaturday, 14 December 2019
It doesn’t matter where you stand, whether you crouch, or teeter on tiptoe: looking into the eyes of Bernini’s Medusa, 1638-40, is impossible. The attempt is peculiarly exhilarating, a game of dare made simultaneously tantalising and absurd by the... Read more... |
Les Arts Florissants, Christie, Agnew, Barbican review – splendid Baroque knees-upTuesday, 10 December 2019
“How many times have you heard the conductor sing?” asked William Christie after the final number, but before the two encores, of Sunday night’s 40th birthday celebration for his ensemble Les Arts Florissants. Well, lovers of old recordings know... Read more... |
Podger, Brecon Baroque, Hollingworth, Brecon Cathedral review - Bohemian footnotes yield the extraordinarySaturday, 26 October 2019
One of the more harmless pastimes of us retired academics is rummaging around among the so-called minor contemporaries of great and famous composers. It often turns out that quite a few of them aren’t minor at all, or at least not minor enough to... Read more... |
Prom 71: Dunedin Consort, Butt review – Bach to the drawing-board pleaseThursday, 12 September 2019
Blame it on the box set. The four Bach Orchestral Suites fit neatly together as a recording project. They used to fill out the four sides of a double LP back in the early stages of the baroque revival. Completists and collectors could rejoice then,... Read more... |
