Stravinsky
David Nice
One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration with W H Auden and Chester Kallman is as a numbers opera in nine pictures, four of them indebted to Hogarth's series of paintings/prints. So it's not surprising that visual flair has marked out three significant productions: John Cox’s for Glyndebourne, “starring” David Hockney’s cross-hatched homage to Hogarth in 1975 and still going strong; Robert Lepage’s 1940s Hollywood tale in 2007; and, a decade later, this, Simon McBurney’s contemporary version first seen in Aix-en-Provence (but not so far in the UK, hence our gratitude to Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Concert programmes that set out to tell us a story can prove a mixed blessing. Yes, it’s valuable and stimulating to find ideas, and narratives, embodied in the musical flow. But great pieces, well-performed, have a habit of cutting loose from the frame of concepts someone has devised for them. At the Royal Festival Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia gathered three singular, idiosyncratic works under the rubric of “Voices of 1945”. No ordinary year, of course: immediately, the title primed us to listen for after-echoes – direct or oblique – of the conflict that had lately shattered Read more ...
David Nice
The megastars are here at the Barbican, for an intensive three days in the case of the LA Phil and Gustavo Dudamel, throughout the season as the hall shines an "Artist Spotlight" on pianist Yuja Wang. Despite a shallow opener showcasing the individual talents of the Los Angeles principals and daft, rollicking Sousa at the end, there was a seriousness of intent and depth of focus that belied the touring glitz. The biggest miracle, perhaps, came in a three-minute encore from Wang - her third - but you couldn't fail to be deeply impressed by the execution of the rest.Just when you think you're Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
July in Tuscany and the heat is intense. Oak-forested hills offer tempting shade; pale dust flies from the roads; in the houses curtains are drawn against the ferocious sun and around irrigated gardens the mosquitos are growing plump. If you love Italian sunshine, food, wine and chamber music, this is your ideal festival, as long as you pack some citronella. Its name: Incontri in Terra di Siena. The background to the event is both unusual and inspiring. In the 1920s the writer Iris Origo and her husband Antonio set up home in a sprawling villa, La Foce, overlooking the Val d’Orcia ( Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
You can’t accuse the Royal Ballet of lightweight programming: the three juicy pieces in the triple bill that opened at the Royal Opera House on Tuesday add up to a three-hour running time. That’s a lot of ballet for your buck. Whether they actually go together is another question. Russian-ness is a rather tenuous thread to link the mythic extravaganza of The Firebird, the torrid claustrophobia of Ashton's Month in the Country and the faceted neo-classicism of Balanchine's Symphony in C.A Month in the Country, Frederick Ashton’s throbbing little ode to forbidden passions running high in a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
She does indeed persist, that remarkable Tamara Rojo. Dismayed by the fact that, in 20 years as a dancer, she had never performed a ballet made by a woman, she mounted a triple bill called She Said, featuring only work by and about women. That 2016 conversation is resumed in English National Ballet’s current spring showing at Sadler’s Wells which revives the best of those commissions – Broken Wings, a phantasmagorical tour through the life of the artist Frida Kahlo – along with a sell-out hit from two years ago, the Pina Bausch version of The Rite of Spring. There’s a new work too, a dance Read more ...
graham.rickson
Stravinsky acknowledged that his orchestra for The Rite of Spring was a large one because Diaghilev had promised him extra musicians (“I am not sure that my orchestra would have been as huge otherwise.”) It isn’t huge in Opera North’s production (★★★★★), and for practical reasons they're using the edition arranged by Jonathan McPhee in 1988 for a standard pit band. I expected to be underwhelmed, but, as conducted by Garry Walker, it sounded terrific, most of the sonic thrills emerging unscathed.This staging, a collaboration between Opera North and Leeds’s Phoenix Dance Theatre, marks the UK Read more ...
David Nice
There's now something of a gala atmosphere when the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House takes to the Covent Garden stage with its music director Antonio Pappano. Admittedly some of the players are not the same as when he took up his tenure, but the core relationship of 17 years - with the contract now extended to at least the end of the 2022/23 season - results in collegial music-making at an intense level which most orchestras can only dream about. As in 2016, he chose an all-Russian programme - none of it core repertoire, all of it spellbinding in one way or another.Blink and you miss the Read more ...
Robert Beale
In contrast to a classic film soundtrack played live with the film, the idea in "symphonic cinema" is that the music, and its interpretation, come first. So the conductor is literally setting the pace, and to some extent the atmosphere, while the film is controlled in real time by an "image soloist", and the visuals follow the music’s lead rather than the other way round.It’s the brainchild of Lucas van Woerkum, who is that soloist, appearing on stage next to the rostrum like a concerto virtuoso, with a touchscreen as his instrument, and taking his bows alongside the maestro – in this case Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The London Philharmonic’s year-long Stravinsky festival, Changing Faces, concluded here in spectacular style, with a tribute to “The Swingling Sixties”. Vladimir Jurowski, the soon to be leaving – and soon to be much-missed, Principal Conductor of the LPO, devised an adventurous and innovative programme, pairing Stravinsky’s late masterpiece Threni with the contemporaneous Sinfonia of Berio. Aesthetically, these pieces were from different worlds, yet each in its way is suffused with the Sixties zeitgeist. Add to this superlative performances, and the result was a satisfying conclusion to one Read more ...
Robert Beale
At first sight, performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – premiered in 1913 and sometimes seen as presaging the whole world of modernism – in the centenary year of the 1918 Armistice might seem to be lagging behind in timing (if centenaries float your boat).But Sir Mark Elder’s choice of the piece for the Hallé’s last concert of the year in the "flagship" Thursday series had more to it than that. (Opera North, incidentally, are soon to perform it on stage, with Phoenix Dance Theatre, so there’s a couple of northern trendsetters with similar inspirations).At this distance, we can see it Read more ...
David Nice
Lightness and gravity in perfect equilibrium have always graced Vladimir Jurowski's Stravinsky. From his first London Rake's Progress at English National Opera, proving that he could do the delicate and translucent after his Royal Opera debut conducting Verdi's Nabucco, via the Glyndebourne revival to this, much the most strongly cast, a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert staging – direction uncredited – executed with more ingenuity than several recent productions, Jurowski's sleight of hand has been paramount. Though the finesse is remarkable, there's no need to put words like "emotion" Read more ...