Czech
David Nice
It didn't help that the London Symphony Chorus sounded rough and hectoring rather than earthily ecstatic - and I'm not sure how well they had been coached in the Czech-language mass settings. Heroic tenor Simon O'Neill, Sir Colin's last-minute Otello in the LSO's 2009-10 season, slipped in a couple of bizarre "Svats", too, between the "Svets" of his colleagues, but his anguished trumpeting - strikingly complemented at one point by a shrill, muted equivalent in the orchestra - suited his role as urgent celebrant. There were angelic sounds from soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, and Catherine Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Amanda Roocroft was a star from the moment she graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music. At 25, Sir Georg Solti asked her to sing Pamina at the Salzburg Festival. She declined. It was too soon. Where would there be left to go? "Hurry slowly" would seem to have been her motto and now that she is playing - for the first time - a diva with 300 years of experience, the decisions she has made in her career are more than ever falling into perspective.The 300-year-old diva is, of course, the elusive and mysterious Emilia Marty in Janáček's extraordinary opera The Makropulos Case and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Opera spends so much of its time killing off female protagonists that it's refreshing to come back to The Makropulos Case. In it Janáček, in one of his many moments of generosity, imagines what might happen if you allowed a woman not just to live but to live forever. The answer? They become a bloody nightmare.It's a funny old opera, The Makropulos Case. Nihilistic to its core in the thrust of the libretto, but curiously life-enhancing musically. The first act should knock you out with boredom, so heavy is its tread (one initially thinks) through the obscurities of a probate case. That it didn Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of all the schools of film which were allowed to sprout behind the Iron Curtain, it was in Czechslovakia which contrived to export its work most successfully to the West.Poland had Andrzej Wajda. Hungary had István Szabó. But Czech cinema seemed to sprout out of a fertile collaboration with its national literature. Before he wrote The Joke, lest we forget, Milan Kundera was a lecturer in world literature at the Film Faculty of Charles University in Prague. There are certainly other ways to measure these things, but Jiří Menzel won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1967 with his magnificent Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It must have been with a leaden heart that the BBC Proms planning team realised that 2010's Last Night would fall plumb on 9/11. How to reconcile all the traditional Brit triumphalism and singing of Jerusalem with the rather more contemporary need to reconcile all, whether out of Jerusalem or not? They did, and full marks for a delicate balancing-act of culture politics and a moving occasion last night (admitted by one who had spent a lifetime avoiding the Last Night of the Proms).Booking Renée Fleming, for one, was a canny move. She is most people’s favourite American soprano, gorgeous to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Short of rolling around the podium like a delirious pig in a mudbath, Sir John Eliot Gardiner couldn't have hidden his enjoyment of the warm, plush sounds and well-upholstered vibrato of this wonderfully old-fashioned orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, less well at last night's Prom. As he embarked on one of the broadest, most unashamedly Romantic openings to Dvořák's Eighth Symphony I have ever heard, I wondered what the hell his years of all-out warfare on modern performance techniques had been about. Was Sir John doing a Kim Philby? Was the period movement's greatest propagandist Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Charles Mackerras has died at the age of 84. In tribute to one of the most highly respected and best-loved of conductors, theartsdesk republishes here an interview he gave on the eve of conducting Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera last October. Despite bouts of ill health, he found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s Read more ...
David Nice
It needs saying yet again, until the message gets through: Bohuslav Martinů is one of the great symphonic masters of the 20th century, and his fellow Czech, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra Jiři Bĕlohlávek, once more proves the right man to marshal a golden Martinů revival. It needs saying above all because, for all the beauties and oddities in every bar of the six symphonies, composed at the height of the exiled composer's mastery in America and France between 1942 and 1953, the Third Symphony is perhaps the one which cries out masterpiece from embattled start to shatteringly Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Filmed extracts of a fantastically vivid 1954 production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen have been unearthed by the great blogger Doundou Tchil of Classical Iconoclast. Václav Neumann is the conductor; Berlin's Komische Oper is the house. Whets the appetite for tonight's Bill Bryden revival production at Covent Garden. Hard to imagine the sets or the acting (watch that singing vixen scrambling about before the poacher) being bettered. My friend says I'm setting myself up for a fall. But Sir Charles Mackerras will no doubt give Neumann a run for his money.
Book for The Cunning Little Read more ...
sue.steward
A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the plant exploded in the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster and Chernobyl’s almost 40,000 inhabitants Read more ...
David Nice
Asrael, angel of death, rarely glides up to the concert platform; I've only heard Josef Suk's painful and protracted symphony of the same name once before in the Festival Hall, championed by Rattle. In the past, all Suk's great Czech compatriots, including Ančerl, Kubelik and Neumann, paid their respects. Now Vladimir Jurowski joins the distinguished line for a work he clearly loves. It was no fault of his rainbow-hued interpretation if, in a week where I've sat dry-eyed through the film of A Single Man, another artistic take on bereavement left me intrigued but detached at the end of a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You can't ever expect immediate liftoff from a rusty old Lada. Spluttering, shaking and rattling make up as much of the first few minutes of the experience as that of actually moving. But then, before you know it, you're halfway to Plovdiv, and you wonder what you were complaining about. It's what happened last night with Libor Pešek's Czech National Symphony Orchestra. Juddering through the first two pieces (the Polonaise from Dvořák's Rusalka and Smetana's winning Polka from The Bartered Bride) at leaden tempi, the stringed body barely hanging on, the brass and percussion engine Read more ...