Britten
Prom 10, Van der Heijden, BBCSSO, Ryan Wigglesworth review - an engaging and esoteric delightSaturday, 27 July 2024
What is Englishness? Over the last century the answer has changed substantially. Yet last night’s Prom, which – according to the programme – set itself the task of celebrating “all things English” had a very particular answer.This was an England of... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the 2024 Aldeburgh Festival - romantic journeys, cosmic hallucinations and wild stompsWednesday, 12 June 2024
It may be unusual to begin festival coverage with praise of the overseer rather than the artists. Yet Roger Wright, who quietly leaves his post at Britten Pears Arts this July after a momentous decade, is no ordinary Chief Executive. I’ve never... Read more... |
Classical CDs: Cowhorns, gloves and marching drumsSaturday, 25 May 2024
Britten: Spring Symphony, Sinfonia da Requiem, Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)Here’s as good a Britten sampler as you’ll find, opening with a truly terrifying account of the early... Read more... |
Goldscheider, Spence, Britten Sinfonia, Milton Court review - heroic evening songs and a jolly horn rambleWednesday, 10 April 2024
Milton Court, like its parent Barbican Hall, disconcertingly inflates the sound of larger ensembles and voices. Had there been a conductor for all four pieces in the Britten Sinfonia’s programme - Michael Papadopoulos was there for the two most... Read more... |
Elmore String Quartet, Kings Place review - impressive playing from an emerging groupTuesday, 09 April 2024
The young Elmore String Quartet, recent graduates of the Royal Northern College, made an impressive Kings Place debut last night with a programme that put music written by composers at a similarly early stage in their careers alongside another’s... Read more... |
Death In Venice, Welsh National Opera review - breathtaking BrittenSaturday, 23 March 2024
Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice (1973), adapted from Thomas Mann’s novella of the same name (1912) and the subject of one of Visconti’s later, most celebrated films, explores homoerotic attraction, the nature of beauty and the... Read more... |
Gillam, Hallé, Poska, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - an experience of colour and funThursday, 21 March 2024
There was a common factor in the superficially disparate elements of this Hallé concert, and it wasn’t just the fact that both soloist and conductor were female. It was an experience of the colours of the music and a sense of enjoyment of what... Read more... |
Turning the Screw, King’s Head Theatre review - Britten and the not-so-innocentSaturday, 17 February 2024
David Hemmings was, by his own later admission, a knowing and bumptious boy when Britten cast him as the ill-fated Miles in his operatic adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The upheaval Hemmings wrought in Aldeburgh’s Crag House when... Read more... |
Albert Herring, Opera North review - immersive and intimate funSaturday, 13 January 2024
Reviving Giles Havergal’s 2013 production from its “Festival of Britten” of that year, Opera North have an Albert Herring that’s both immersive and intimate, to quote their own publicity.Immersive because it was designed specifically for the... Read more... |
Perfection of a Kind: Britten vs Auden, City of London Sinfonia, QEH review - the odd coupleTuesday, 07 November 2023
“Underneath the abject willow/ Lover, sulk no more;/ Act from thought should quickly follow:/ What is thinking for?” In 1936, early in their tempestuous friendship, WH Auden wrote a poem for Benjamin Britten that urged the younger artist to pursue... Read more... |
Paris Chapters, Barbier Serrano, Finegan, Ling, Bloomsbury Festival review - beguiling journey around Irishmen abroadTuesday, 24 October 2023
Young French soprano Clara Barbier Serrano has everything it takes to shine in an overcrowded singers’ world, including vivacious communicative skills – I witnessed those for the first time last Tuesday, when she performed at the Oxford... Read more... |
Peter Grimes, English National Opera review - not quite the pity or the truthFriday, 22 September 2023
Britten’s biggest cornucopia of invention seems unsinkable, and no-one seeing his breakthrough 1945 opera for the first time in this revival will fail to register its forceful genius. David Alden’s expressionist nightmare of a production, though,... Read more... |
