mezzos
Sebastian Scotney
Helping to build the careers of superb young singers is what Wigmore Hall has done for decades: I still remember Olaf Bär’s debut in the hall in 1983, having won the Walther Gruner Lieder competition, and also Matthias Goerne’s in 1997.But whereas Bär was 25 and Goerne 27 when they first appeared in Wigmore Street, Austrian mezzo-soprano Anja Mittermüller was not yet 21 when she won the Wigmore Hall/Bollinger International Song Competition last year. She has recently turned 22, and still has another year left as a student in Hanover.Hearing her remarkable Wigmore debut recital at the Read more ...
David Nice
“Safe” is a word used far too often in ENO’s bizarre new version of a programme, full of uncredited articles, at least two of which look as if they’re AI generated. Everything intimacy director Haruko Karoda, Niamh O’Sullivan (Carmen) and John Findon (Don José) say makes sense, but the context is worrying. What’s a Carmen without real danger? Revival director Jamie Manton has toned down Calixto Bieito’s once-semi-controversal production, and it shows.O’Sullivan has emerged as a marvellous singer-actor, with a singular, beautiful and at times sensual mezzo instrument. She makes Carmen real: Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That friend you have who hates musicals – probably male, probably straight, probably not seen one since The Sound of Music on BBC 1 after the Queen’s Speech in 1978 – well, don’t send them to Charing Cross Theatre for this show. But that other friend you have – enjoyed Hamilton, likes a bit of Sondheim, seen a couple of operas – do send them. They’re not guaranteed to like Stiletto, but they’ll find it interesting at worst and, whisper it because it's a new musical, they might actually thank you! We’re in 18th century Venice, pleasingly evoked by Ceri Calf's atmospheric set design and Anna Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston just gets better and better, both as singer and as actor. Last night’s recital at Temple Church had an unusual and wide-ranging programme – consisting of a first half hopping through the centuries, followed by a complete performance of Schumann’s “Kerner-Lieder” cycle.Charlston and Sholto Kynoch had originally devised this programme for last autumn’s Oxford International Song Festival. It certainly looked very appealing on paper, with all kinds of music to discover. And so it proved.The first half worked brilliantly as a sequence, with all kinds of Read more ...
David Nice
Peerless among the constellation of Irish singers making waves around the world, mezzo Paula Murrihy first dazzled London as Ascanio in Terry Gilliam’s English National Opera production of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. Since then she’s become a major star on the continent, not least as a superb Octavian in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, less so in the UK, though that should have changed with her Proms appearance last year as Didon in Les Troyens.The Wigmore Hall hardcore don’t seem to have got the message – last night’s concert, far from being the sellout it should have been, was relatively Read more ...
David Nice
It’s what you dream of in opera but don’t often get: singers feeling free and liberated to give their best after weeks of preparation with a master conductor. Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati leads the way with a peerless London Philharmonic Orchestra in Bizet’s absolute masterpiece, and Tunisian-Canadian mezzo Rihab Chaieb’s Carmen stuns in a vocally magnificent cast.Better still if everything else aligns, as it did in Irish National Opera’s recent L’Olimpiade. Not quite so much here, given a production by Tony award winner Diane Paulus which tells the story for the most part – a Read more ...
Simon Thompson
While it is an incontrovertibly good thing that the classical music world has set about rediscovering the work of neglected female composers, not all rediscoveries are equally worthy of being found. Particularly on a day like International Women’s Day (IWD), concert programmers run the risk of unearthing work that tends towards the mediocre, and which can end up being tokenistic.Not on this IWD concert, however. I’d never heard of Mel Bonis (pictured below) until this Royal Scottish National Orchestra concert, but her Trois femmes de légende proved a delight. She studied with Franck in Paris Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Some lockdown-era recital programmes have doled out miserly short measures, as performers gallop through a brief, rushed hour (or less) of music as if afraid to tax the online patience of their disembodied audience. If this final concert in Leeds Lieder’s spring weekend of song had a fault, it lay on the opposite side: an abundant generosity that saw Dame Sarah Connolly and pianist, and festival director, Joseph Middleton pack a full-length bill (introduced by presenter Tom McKinney) with intensely flavoured major works almost to the limits of digestion – and then add some extras to the menu Read more ...
David Nice
Solitude, mortality and transcendence have never been more profoundly expressed in music than by Mahler, who composed Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) in the valley of the shadow of death (too superstitious to give it the name of Ninth Symphony, though that and a sketched-out Tenth did follow, he never lived to hear it performed). It seems like the perfect work to benefit from a silent background in an otherwise empty Royal Opera House - though there's no substitute for the intense silence of a full audience. Gluck, too struck his deepest note with the highest ones of the Read more ...
David Nice
What a jolting coincidence that one of the 20th century's angriest symphonic beasts should have a rare unleashing on a night of high national anxiety. Whether Vaughan Williams spewed forth his Fourth Symphony in response to darkening European clouds in 1934 or as a sublimation of sexual frustration, given his unhappy domestic life at the time, it hit us all hard last night. There was even some release of tension in the sheer energy of embattled themes and grinding dissonances, thanks to Antonio Pappano's stupendous control of a London Symphony Orchestra on fire.Most surprising, perhaps, was Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The conductor Thomas Søndergård turned 50 on Friday. He marked the occasion, which coincided with the opening concert of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s winter season, with a short homily on the contradictions of age – “the young seek experience, adventure and wisdom, the old seek only one thing: youth” – addressed to the audience before a programme of three works whose composers were all in their early twenties at the time of writing: Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Berg’s Seven Early Songs, and Mahler’s First Symphony.It was a bold start to a season that promises rich pickings from the Read more ...
David Nice
It seems an almost indecent luxury to have heard two top mezzos in just over a week with so much to express, backed up by the perfect technique and instrument with which to do so. Georgian Anita Rachvelishvili with Pappano and the Royal Opera Orchestra the Friday before last only had to hold the spell through a Rachmaninov sequence in the middle of an all-Russian concert. For her long sold-out Wigmore Hall recital, Latvian Elīna Garanča chose a daunting sequence of song series by Schumann, Wagner and Mahler, ending the official programme with other-worldly poise in what sounded exactly as it Read more ...