Vienna
Schiff, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Queen Elizabeth HallTuesday, 26 February 2013
You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the... Read more... |
Yuletide Scenes 5: Hunters in the SnowSunday, 23 December 2012
The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder was instrumental in developing landscape painting as a genre in its own right. Hunters in the Snow, 1565, is one of five surviving paintings (Bruegel painted six) in his cycle depicting The Labours... Read more... |
A Voyage Round my Father at the Freud MuseumSunday, 09 December 2012
What would Sigmund Freud say to newcomers infiltrating his priceless collection of Greek, Chinese and Egyptian antiquities? His study on the ground floor of 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, where Freud and his family lived after fleeing the Nazis... Read more... |
The Merry Widow, Philharmonia Orchestra, Wilson, Royal Festival HallMonday, 03 December 2012
Lehár’s Merry Widow has been been spreading enchantment across the globe for well over a century. She’s the vintage champagne of operettas, and the prospect of John Wilson popping her cork was more than a little enticing. Wilson, one feels,... Read more... |
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal Festival HallThursday, 27 September 2012
Dissatisfied housewives who eventually stand by their men joined jewelled hands in a divine evening of operatic decadence. Suppressed Bianca all but steps over the body of her strangled lover to get at the muscles of her killer husband in Zemlinsky’... Read more... |
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... |
- 1 of 3
- ››
