David Nice
david.nice
- Bio
- David was formerly a music critic for the Guardian and Sunday Correspondent. A regular BBC music broadcaster, he has written books on Elgar, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky and the history of opera, and is currently working on the second volume of his Prokofiev biography for Yale University Press
Articles by David Nice
The Cunning Little Vixen, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
Monday, 21 May 2012
Glyndebourne nature, it seems, runs along as smoothly as the much discussed new wind turbine on the hill. Within the theatre, though, all is flux: director Melly Still and Vladimir Jurowski,... Read more... |
Globe to Globe: Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's Globe
Sunday, 29 April 2012
The rain it raineth every day this week, sometimes with monsoon-like persistence. Yet there’s no dousing the ardour of groundlings and thespian visitors to the global Shakespeare village within the... Read more... |
Globe to Globe: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare's Globe
Friday, 27 April 2012
Of all Shakespeare’s plays, his reprise of Falstaffian humour to please Queen Bess is surely the most specific in its prosaic gallimaufry of earthy English vocabulary. Yet it’s also the most... Read more... |
2011: Schoolroom Fairies and a Cross-Dressing Mezzo
Friday, 30 December 2011
Two precisely imagined dream-visions bookend a cornucopia on the musical front. I’ll start with the deadly but save the apparently frivolous for the top slot. Christopher Alden’s pitiless exiling of... Read more... |
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Royal Opera
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
A young chap from Elsewhere woos an alderman's daughter: not Dick Whittington in panto London, but Wagner's Walther von Stolzing in an unseasonal Nuremberg. No one is going to mind the solstitial... Read more... |
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Saraste, Barbican Hall
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Is it ever a good idea to programme two symphonies by one composer in a single concert? Maverick Valery Gergiev is likely to stand alone in applying the rule to Mahler. Yet curiously his Prom... Read more... |
Dick Whittington, New Wimbledon Theatre
Friday, 16 December 2011
You know what to expect from an audience with Dame Edna Everage. The London-loving Merry Widow of Moonie Ponds can be trusted to hurl her gladdies, patronise the paups in the cheap seats, dish out... Read more... |
Anne Schwanewilms, Charles Spencer, Wigmore Hall
Friday, 09 December 2011
Now that Margaret Price is no more and Kiri's well past her heyday, whose is the most limpid soprano of them all? "The beautiful voice" was a label slapped by PR on Renée Fleming, but that fitfully... Read more... |
No go Glasgow's SNO Maiden
Thursday, 08 December 2011
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Glasgow concert tonight has had to be cancelled because of what my Scots godson, in far less extreme conditions down in the Borders, once described as "... Read more... |
Khatia Buniatishvili, Wigmore Hall/ Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Queen Elizabeth Hall
Thursday, 08 December 2011
Before his slightly over-extended majesty drops behind a cloud at the end of this bicentenary year, and following Louis Lortie’s light-and-shade monodrama on Sunday, Franz Liszt has moved back to... Read more... |
DVD: Medea
Tuesday, 06 December 2011
Among the many singularities of Pasolini’s films, the proportions of his narrative structure have to be the strangest. Here we, like the young Jason who grows before our eyes, get a six-minute... Read more... |
Louis Lortie, Wigmore Hall
Monday, 05 December 2011
It was Chopin time when I last heard Louis Lortie, and a typical London clash of scheduling allowed me to catch his effervescent Op 10 Études before pedalling like crazy north of the river for the... Read more... |
Hamlet, Schaubühne Berlin, Barbican Theatre
Friday, 02 December 2011
Ken Russell is, it seems, alive and well and directing Germans in Shakespeare. Actually, no, it's outgrown theatrical terrorist Thomas Ostermeier, but it might as well be our Ken to judge from the... Read more... |
Mutter, London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, Barbican Hall
Monday, 28 November 2011
Praise be, or slava if you prefer, to Valery Gergiev for honouring new Russian music alongside his hallmark interpretations - ever evolving or dangerously volatile according to taste – of Prokofiev,... Read more... |
Opera North: making London's flesh creep
Sunday, 27 November 2011
A disappointed man from Sheffield asked on a blog why Opera North was spoiling pampered London with two of its major productions and an offshoot this season when the rest of its vicinity was going... Read more... |
Tosca, English National Opera
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Who is more likely to be an operatic creature of flesh and blood: Puccini's young diva, unexpectedly caught up in the infernal machine of a lustful tyrant, or Tchaikovsky's teenager impetuously... Read more... |
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How to contact David Nice
- personal website
- http://www.davidnice.blogspot.com
