Britten
Ismene Brown
It should be hard to make Britten’s Billy Budd a bloodless, passionless, contextless bore, shouldn’t it? This is after all a lacerating story about men behaving badly on a fighting ship in the 1797 wars between Britain and Revolutionary France, a story where a man of great viciousness meets a man of much havering and a decent, possibly extraordinary lad loses his life.And yet it’s what David Alden and English National Opera have achieved with this new production. Re-uniting the team who produced a hotly argued-about Peter Grimes in 2009, this has even more the sense of a disconnection between Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos, Sinfonias Orchestra of the Antipodes/Antony Walker, Anna MacDonald, Erin Helyard (ABC Classics)Exactly why this set, recorded in Sydney in 2003, has waited so long for a commercial release is a bit of a puzzle. These are fabulous performances in every sense. The playing is so vibrant, so alive that resistance is futile. Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos are as ubiquitous as Baroque music gets, but their familiarity shouldn’t hide their musical qualities. I loved Riccardo Chailly’s historically informed modern instrument versions, but these recordings Read more ...
Ismene Brown
As Mrs Thatcher used to say, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. Solutions have been flung with a will at the problem ballet of Kenneth MacMillan’s last years, his orientalist fairytale The Prince of the Pagodas - the Royal Ballet’s retiring director Monica Mason revived it last night as one of her last presentations, determined that a new generation should have the chance to love it.Cut, tightened up, re-edited 10 years after its choreographer’s death (a collaboration between MacMillan’s widow and the Royal Ballet, with the reluctant blessing of the Benjamin Britten Estate), The Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In this, the work’s 50th anniversary year, there will be a lot of War Requiems. Benjamin Britten’s howl of Pacifist conviction has lost little of its poignancy since its composition – a period marked by the almost continuous military presence of British forces abroad. With action in Afghanistan coming to a close and political stirrings animating the Falklands issue once again, this plaintive reminder of “truth untold”, of the “pity of war” still speaks loudly and directly. In the workmanlike hands of Maazel and the Philharmonia Chorus, heavenly trumpets blare and military glory is neatly Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Keyboard Concertos Nick van Bloss, English Chamber Orchestra/David Parry (Nimbus)Nick Van Bloss’s Goldberg Variations receive deserved acclaim when they appeared last year; the pianist’s fascinating backstory eclipsed by brilliant playing and interpretation. As with the Goldbergs, there’s a lot of competition in this repertoire. Van Bloss’s big-boned playing style is attractive and charismatic, and he delights in the opportunities offered by a modern concert grand. Bass lines are discreetly doubled, and the sustain pedal is used sparingly but effectively. He’s not as swift as Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was a lovely narrative to last night's CBSO concert. The muggy oppressiveness of Britten's Four Sea Interludes (and Passacaglia) appeared somehow explained by Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, then dissolved by the love letters that were the Strauss songs and then finally set free - psychologically and orchestrally - in Debussy's La Mer. Parallel to this, the great German tenor Jonas Kaufmann was being washed out to sea; his Mahler and Strauss songs were being lapped at from both directions by Debussy and Britten's portraits of the salty waters. Technically Kaufmann was anything but at Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies Vienna Philharmonic/Christian Thielemann (Sony)Another Beethoven symphony cycle, released hot on the heels of Chailly’s Leipzig set. That Decca box earned rapturous praise. I’m not sure that Christian Thielemann’s will be quite so warmly received; there’s a lot here which will infuriate fans of historically informed performance. Thielemann’s approach is defiantly old-school – tempi are expansive and disarmingly flexible, orchestral sonorities are huge, rich and fruity. Once your ears have adjusted, there’s an awful lot of music-making here which sounds Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Love it or hate it Christopher Alden’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at English National Opera last year made quite the impact, banishing any fey woodland glades and general waftiness from Benjamin Britten’s opera and embracing a rather more astringent visual aesthetic. It’s unfortunate then that Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama should follow so closely behind, begging comparisons that don’t best serve his World War II interpretation. A lack of directorial coherence mars what visually and vocally is a fine evening, and while Shakespeare may restore order Read more ...
David Nice
Two precisely imagined dream-visions bookend a cornucopia on the musical front. I’ll start with the deadly but save the apparently frivolous for the top slot. Christopher Alden’s pitiless exiling of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Elizabethan wood to 1960s school block was to opera what Lars von Trier’s Melancholia was to film: audience-sundering, often alienating, sometimes enticing, but very much its own consistent world. Its splendid cast and conductor Leo Hussain worked as one to enhance the paradoxes of its terrible beauty.ENO’s newcomer on the schoolboy front, Nico Muhly’s Two Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s typical: you wait ages for a Belshazzar’s Feast and then two come along at once. And judging by the performance delivered by Ed Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night, Andrew Nethsingha and his massed Cambridge choirs will have their work cut out to follow it next week at the Royal Festival Hall. Throbbing with dance, gaudy as an Eastern bazaar painted by a second-rate Victorian artist, Gardner’s Belshazzar was a wash of Technicolor extravagance among the twee reds and greens of Christmas classical programming.And speaking of gaudy – it was quite the curiosity that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Nearly 50 years have passed since Britten’s War Requiem premiered at the consecration of the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral in May 1962. The intervening years have seen British military campaigns in the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and while the process and practice of war has changed beyond recognition, the horror that the pacifist Britten perceived so acutely remains the same. With Remembrance Sunday approaching, it would be hard to imagine a more vivid act of commemoration and testimony than the performance the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus delivered at the Barbican Read more ...