Handel
Simon Thompson
This time last year, the moment I knew things were really bad was when the Dunedin Consort cancelled Messiah. All performances since the summer of 2020 had been online films, but Dunedin cancelled even their online Messiah because it would involve performers travelling from all corners of the UK to do it. Sure enough, a couple of days later, what we then called the “Kent variant” appeared, and the grim winter lockdown began.Fast forward to December 2021 and another Covid shadow is hanging over us, though now we’re enlightened enough to name it after a Greek letter. Jo Buckley, the Dunedin Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Music in London has faced down plagues, puritans, philistines and planners over the four centuries spanned by the Aurora Orchestra’s season-opener at Kings Place on Saturday. This concert in the venue’s “London Unwrapped” strand filled its main hall without distancing for the first time since the capital’s (and the world’s) latest pandemic struck. Accompanied for several works by the counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, on their own in others, a score of the Aurora’s players were led by their founder-conductor Nicholas Collon on a journey from the first Elizabeth’s city to our own, by way of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Choral singers have suffered more than most from erratic and irrational Covid prohibitions while riskier mass pursuits have gone ahead. So when one of the world’s great choirs returned to the Proms with the conductor who has guided them for over half a century, the sense of occasion was palpable. Last night the Monteverdi Choir numbered 30 – not huge by Royal Albert Hall standards – but the joyfully exultant music that they made filled the dome with a boundless grandeur. Sir John Eliot Gardiner led his singers and the English Baroque Soloists through a programme that nicely reflected the mood Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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 might freeze into a static amorous stand-off between pasteboard nobles contending with a harsh – then, suddenly, kindly – fate.Thank goodness that Irish soprano Anna Devin, as the lovelorn enchantress, graces Netia Jones's ingenious if somewhat hyper-active production of Handel’s 1715 heroic romance in Garsington Opera’s pavilion at Wormsley. In a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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 Poirot movies, staples of Bank Holiday line-ups roughly since the Pleistocene Era, had hogged fully four hours of the channel’s afternoon schedule. Miserly, timid, cheese-paring, grudging: the Proms partially excepted, BBC TV’s default attitude to classical music never fails to disappoint – even when the oratorio in question has been a beloved pillar Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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 phrase and line makes this music feel as natural and necessary as breathing, sang Handel’s nine German-language arias to pious texts by Bartold Heinrich Brockes (who also wrote the words to the “Brockes Passion”). In between clusters of songs, the Arcangelo players – violinist Matthew Truscott, lutenist Thomas Dunford and cellist Jonathan Manson, with 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 ...
Graham Rickson
Bach: St Matthew Passion The Choir of King’s College Cambridge, Academy of Ancient Music/Sir Stephen Cleobury (King’s College Cambridge)Bach Collegium Japan/Masaaki Suzuki (BIS)Both Masaaki Suzuki and the late lamented Sir Stephen Cleobury have recorded Bach's St Matthew Passion before. I struggled to choose between these two new versions, so thought it best to include both. Overall timings for both sets are, amazingly, just a few seconds apart, though BIS manage to squeeze Suzuki’s version onto just two discs. His account was taped under studio conditions in Japan last April, and Read more ...
David Nice
That virtue can be fascinating and prayers to a just God dramatic have been proved in riveting productions of two late Handel oratorios, Theodora and Jephtha. Whether Susanna can ever be reclaimed for the stage as powerfully seems unlikely, but this showcase for the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme may just have bungled it. Simple goodness surely needs a lighter touch than conductor Patrick Milne gave it through some numbing quarters of an hour early on, and director Isabel Kettle's heavy, often leaden, contemporary fishing community setting added nothing to the essence. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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 in an era that takes sexual violence seriously, while we scorn play-acting toffs who ape the lifestyle of some idealised peasantry, Marie Antoinette-style. That said, never forget that one particular self-conscious exercise in Baroque pastoral – the violin concerti of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – remains the world’s best-known piece of classical music Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“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 that you sometimes get plenty of impromptu vocalisation from the likes of Bernstein and Barbirolli. But what the august founder of the Baroque super-group (and super-chorus) meant on this occasion was the bravura performance of his co-conductor, and assistant director, Paul Agnew. In several of the pieces he led at the Barbican, Agnew would turn round Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Donnacha Dennehy: The Hunger Alarm Will Sound/Alan Pierson, with Katherine Manley and Iarla Ó Lionáird (Nonesuch)The Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852 resulted in the deaths of one million Irish citizens to starvation and prompted a further million to emigrate. In 1851, American social reformer Asenath Nicholson travelled across the Atlantic to document exactly what was happening, traversing the length of Ireland on foot. Nicholson’s text forms a substantial chunk of the libretto of Donnacha Dennehy’s The Hunger, extracts from her report interspersed with lyrics taken from the song Na Read more ...