Stephen Walsh
stephen.walsh
- Bio
- Stephen is a former Observer music critic and a regular contributor to The Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Independent and the BBC. He is the author of a major biography of Stravinsky and other books on Stravinsky, Bartók and Schumann. He holds a chair in music at Cardiff University.
Articles by Stephen Walsh
Uchida, CBSO, Nelsons, Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Friday, 03 May 2013
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Blake asked the tiger. One might have asked the same question of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, with Mozart’s G major Piano Concerto, K.453, as the lamb, in this... Read more... |
George Benjamin, CBSO Centre, Birmingham
Monday, 08 April 2013
“A book,” says the Boy-Illuminator in George Benjamin’s latest opera Written on Skin, “needs long days of light.” He speaks for Benjamin himself, a composer who, for all his fabulous musical mind and... Read more... |
The Cunning Little Vixen, Welsh National Opera
Monday, 25 February 2013
Janáček’s opera subjects – the 300-year-old opera singer, the composer with a mad mother-in-law, the Siberian prison camp – are by any standards a fairly rum collection. But The Cunning Little Vixen... Read more... |
Madam Butterfly, Welsh National Opera
Saturday, 16 February 2013
Last week Lulu, this week Cio-Cio San, next week the Vixen Bystrouška. These are the three exemplars of David Pountney’s “Free Spirits” – as he labels his first themed season with WNO. But it’s hard... Read more... |
Orpheus in the Underworld, Opera'r Ddraig
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
Since I last reviewed Opera’r Ddraig (no longer offered as Dragon Opera in their publicity) two years ago, this company of students and postgraduates has moved house, and this year is staging its... Read more... |
Lulu, Welsh National Opera
Saturday, 09 February 2013
What-ifs and might-have-beens are usually as pointless in music as in any other walk of life. Still one can’t help wondering how Alban Berg would have completed – and, no less interesting, revised –... Read more... |
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Atherton, St David's Hall, Cardiff
Saturday, 26 January 2013
The Britten centenary will, among much else, inspire performances of his comparatively under-regarded instrumental works - pieces like the cello suites and the string quartets, already sampled in... Read more... |
WNO Chorus and Orchestra, Poppen, St David's Hall, Cardiff
Saturday, 17 November 2012
Speaking about the Requiem he composed in 1990 in memory of the London Sinfonietta’s long-time artistic director Michael Vyner, Hans Werner Henze always talked as a believing atheist. “Paradise is... Read more... |
Elliott Carter Remembered
Monday, 12 November 2012
It’s hard to imagine that a composer’s death at the age of 103 could be a loss to music, in the sense of possible future work, as well as a personal loss, which of course death will always be. But... Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Welsh National Opera
Thursday, 04 October 2012
For some reason, the Welsh have revived their Così fan tutte, from last year, with positively unseemly haste – if not quite so unseemly as the haste with which their La Bohème, from this spring, was... Read more... |
Prince Igor, Hamburg State Opera
Friday, 28 September 2012
Samuel Johnson’s description of opera as an exotic and irrational entertainment might well have been written after a performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor, give or take a hundred years or so. Of all... Read more... |
Jephtha, Welsh National Opera
Sunday, 23 September 2012
Reviewing the Buxton Festival production of Handel’s Jephtha on theartsdesk a couple of months ago, Philip Radcliffe complained that the director, Frederic Wake-Walker, had done too little to justify... Read more... |
Ravel Double Bill, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
Sunday, 05 August 2012
Ravel composed only two operas, both one-acters, widely separated in time, superficially very different, but both in a way about the same thing: naughtiness. In L’Heure espagnole (1911), the... Read more... |
Susanna, Iford Manor
Sunday, 29 July 2012
Not all geese are swans, and not all Handel oratorios are like Messiah – storyless, spiritual, monumental sequences of reflective arias and choruses. By definition, though, they aren’t operas either... Read more... |
Götterdämmerung, Longborough Festival
Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Every production of Wagner’s Ring is a challenge. But to stage it in a smallish converted barn seating 500 with little or no stage machinery, which is what the Longborough Festival plans to do in a... Read more... |
Katya Kabanova, Longborough Festival
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Janáček’s obsession with Russia has always intrigued me: something to do with a shared Slav ancestry traceable to peasant roots being crunched to pieces by the modern world. Gone are the rolling... Read more... |
- 1 of 5
- ››
