Vienna
BBC Proms: Vienna Philharmonic, HaitinkSaturday, 08 September 2012
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra can play Haydn’s last symphony - No 104 “London” - in its sleep but that is not, I hasten to add, the impression one wants to take away from any performance of it and especially not in the city that inspired it. The... Read more... |
Globe to Globe: Measure For Measure, Shakespeare's GlobeWednesday, 25 April 2012
What a joy this once-in-a-generation season is. From Moscow comes this free-wheeling production of Shakespeare's great morality play, and one that also makes remarkably free with the text too. Even those familiar with Measure For Measure will be... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Actor-Director Karl MarkovicsSunday, 22 April 2012
It’s not so very rare for actors to be given a shot at directing their own film. It happens slightly less often that they find financial backing to work on their own script. What makes Breathing, which opened this week in the UK, such a... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Falla, Rameau, Nikolaus HarnoncourtSaturday, 31 March 2012
De Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain, The Three-Cornered Hat, Homenajes Jean-Efflaum Bavouzet (piano), Raquel Lojendio (soprano), BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena has recently succeeded Gianandra Noseda... Read more... |
Der Rosenkavalier, English National OperaMonday, 30 January 2012
As in sex, so it is in music: there’s a lot riding on the climax. The celebrated third act trio of Der Rosenkavalier is arguably the most famous orgasm in music – dear reader, can you name a better one? – but time it wrongly and you’ll regret it.... Read more... |
Davies, London Symphony Orchestra, Zhang, Barbican HallThursday, 10 November 2011
Highly finished literary tales of doomed nixies, like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, seem to have prompted reams of bad art but plenty of mellifluous music. Not even all of that is on the same level. Viennese late-Romantic Zemlinsky's... Read more... |
Symphony, BBC FourFriday, 04 November 2011
Having blazed a trail through choral music, Simon Russell Beale now focuses his attentions on the symphony in this new four-part series. At last able to put aside the mind-games and chicanery of his role as Home Secretary William Towers in Spooks (... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Graham, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, DavisThursday, 25 August 2011
The spectacle of an orchestra named after Mahler playing Stravinsky irresistibly calls to mind Stravinsky’s report of a performance of the Eighth Symphony in Zurich in 1913. “Imagine”, he wrote to Maurice Delage, “that for two hours you are made to... Read more... |
Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival OperaMonday, 23 May 2011
Two 1950s Mozarts in one weekend might seem like pressing the contemporaneity of great art unnecessarily far. But Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, revived on Sunday, is a much less crude update than the WNO Così. True, the dramatis... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Górecki, Haydn, Shostakovich, Second Viennese SchoolFriday, 29 April 2011
It’s string-quartet Saturday – a young German group tackle Soviet classics and a rejuvenated Russian quartet smile with Haydn. There’s music from a contemporary Polish master and exquisitely uncomfortable fin-de-siècle music from Vienna.... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Script Supervisor Angela AllenSaturday, 05 March 2011
The credits unfold against a backdrop of a tall, exotic plant, down whose length the camera slowly pans. The African Queen, in glorious Technicolor, based on a novel by CS Forrester, directed by John Huston, shot by Jack Cardiff, starring two of... Read more... |
Die Fledermaus, Welsh National Opera, CardiffSunday, 13 February 2011
Those WNO regulars who remember the company’s last Fledermaus (directed nine years ago by Calixto Bieito) with a shiver of horror can rest assured that its replacement contradicts it at almost every point. John Copley, past-master of Texttreue (... Read more... |
