Mendelssohn
East Neuk Festival 2016Friday, 08 July 2016
All the best festivals develop organically, with a guiding hand from the best directors. When I first came to the East Neuk Festival two years ago, on its 10th anniversary, it was already a special case, thriving on the spirit of place and including... Read more... |
Haïm: In the Light of a Violin, The Print RoomWednesday, 15 June 2016
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focused little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1930s Poland is dismally familiar. The story of life-... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Middle Temple HallTuesday, 03 May 2016
You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to adorn the text with Mendelssohn's bewitching incidental music, plus the... Read more... |
Shakespeare 400 Gala, LPO, Jurowski, RFHSunday, 24 April 2016
Every year is Shakespeare year in theatre, opera house and concert hall. An anniversary's best, though, for those select few galas where the mind's made flexible by constant comparison between different Shakespearean worlds. I don't know how it was... Read more... |
Hadland / Moser Brothers, Wigmore HallMonday, 04 January 2016
Prokofiev milestones stood proudly at the ends of the New Year’s first three major UK concert programmes. The Second Piano Sonata raged as the zenith of the composer’s generous enfant terrible period in Christian Ihle Hadland’s journey through two... Read more... |
Best of 2015: Classical ConcertsSaturday, 26 December 2015
The musical future looks bright indeed, at least from my perspective. There are more classical concerts than ever going on across the UK on most days of the year, so who can know with any authority what might have been missed? Yet each of... Read more... |
Leonskaja 70th Birthday Concert, Wigmore HallMonday, 23 November 2015
It was a massive but never overbearing three-parter, a three-and-a-half hour celebration, a mini-festival of youth and experience. Wouldn’t we all want to mark a major birthday in the company of friends of all ages? Elisabeth Leonskaja, much-loved... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Garsington OperaFriday, 17 July 2015
We’re so used these days to theatre music as aural torture – blasts of pop music on the tannoy, assorted electronics or, if you’re (moderately) lucky, a snatch of too-loud Chopin or Grieg before the lights come up on the Ibsen drawing-room – that it... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the East Neuk Festival: Church strings, garden hornsMonday, 13 July 2015
A peninsular spirit of place and the greatest of instrumentalists drew me a second time to the eastern nook (hence the “Neuk”) of Fife. But could a second report for theartsdesk be justified – wasn’t the premise the same for the 11th East Neuk... Read more... |
Jansen, LSO, Harding, BarbicanWednesday, 03 June 2015
How to respond to Mahler? That was the challenge set by the London Symphony Orchestra to Edward Rushton when they commissioned him to write an opener for this programme. Rushton’s response was to take a story from a biography of Alma and spin it... Read more... |
Fitzwilliam Quartet, Hay Chamber Music FestivalSaturday, 25 April 2015
If the thought of the annual trek to Hay-on-Wye for the literary festival in May fills you with as much gloom as it does me (and I don’t have to go as far as most of our readers), you might do worse than sample the town’s chamber music festival this... Read more... |
Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört, Tanztheater Wuppertal, Sadler's WellsThursday, 16 April 2015
Retrospectives are difficult in dance, and for Pina Bausch's brand of Tanztheater, even more difficult. A great deal of her oeuvre's impact derives from the special atmosphere of her Wuppertal company, whose dancers were devoted to her and to each... Read more... |
