Features
David Nice
Everything is political in the world's current turbulent freefall. The aim of Riccardo Muti's "Roads of Friendship" series, taking the young players of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra to cities from Sarajevo in 1997 to Moscow in 2000 and Tehran last year, has simply been "to perform with musicians from different cultures and religions" in a community of peace. Inevitably, though, the resonances are going to be bigger when you join, as happened this year in Kiev, with performers not only from the Ukrainian Opera but also from Mariupol in the strife-torn east, part of an ongoing war the Read more ...
James Gilchrist
Debussy is having a good year. It is wonderful to see such wide and varied celebrations of his life and work, and to let the century since his death bear witness to the huge influence he has had on writers in every field of music.Of course, no one can claim to know every field of music. All of us know what we know, and tend to become more proficient and knowledgeable in an area of music that narrows over time. We find where our skill-set fits, what we’re good at. This is certainly true of me: over my working life I’ve found niches in the musical world where I seem to feel comfortable, and ( Read more ...
Charlotte Jones
I think it’s always a dangerous sport to try and consciously unravel where your ideas come from. Lest you break the spell and inadvertently silence yourself…There’s always the superficial reasons, of course: the geography and the history of a play. My new play The Meeting, which opens at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester this month, came from my experience of attending a Friends’ Meeting House in Lewes. I didn’t go to a Quaker Meeting in order to research and write a play. I went because I was seeking something for myself, for my life. Silence, possibly. Meaning, certainly. My children were Read more ...
David Nice
There is a tide in the best-planned festivals that comes in and out almost imperceptibly, bringing with it changes as the days move on. Put it down to the kind of perfect planning that discards any one rigid theme, and to forging long-term links with performers who don't just pop in for one concert. That in this case has been the work of East Neuk Festival mastermind Svend-Einar McEwan-Brown, who not only ensures artists of a uniquely high quality over the years, but also introduces themes and mini-residencies with impressive subtlety.In the two and a half days I was there this year, Bach, Read more ...
David Kettle
With – unusually – no visiting orchestra at this year’s St Magnus International Festival in far-flung Orkney (the fall-out from delayed funding confirmations, we’re assured), there was a danger that the annual midsummer event might have felt a little – well, quiet.Not a bit of it. In fact, if anything, this year’s festival felt more densely packed than ever – perhaps with events that were smaller in scale, admittedly, but they were no less ambitious and captivating for that. Famously founded by Orkney’s most famous musical resident – Peter Maxwell Davies, who died two years ago – all of 42 Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Trumpeter Keyon Harrold grew up in Ferguson, Missouri and studied alongside Robert Glasper at the School of Jazz at The New School, in Greenwich Village, NYC. He has been a sideman with many of the biggest performers in music including Eminem, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Dr Dre, Maxwell and Common, and recorded two albums in his own name.His second album, The Mugician, was released last year to great acclaim. With collaboration from artists including Robert Glasper, Bilal, Big KRIT and Pharoahe Monch, Harrold incorporates elements of soul, reggae and hip hop into a transcendent musical statement of hope Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a truism that history is written by the victors, but nowhere in classical music is the argument made more persuasively than in the legacy and reputation of Charles Gounod. In a year in which you can hardly move for Bernstein and Debussy-related events, a year in which even Couperin and Parry are getting a good showing, as well as the too-often-neglected Lili Boulanger, the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth is passing all but uncelebrated in the UK.It’s a sign of just how far out of fashion Gounod has fallen that none of the major British houses is taking the opportunity to stage Read more ...
David Nice
Have you ever wondered why the Steinway grand piano is invariably the instrument of choice in every hall you visit, great or small? Why do the halls in question not offer a choice between two or three pianos of different manufacture, as so many did before the Second World War? How is it that the hand-crafted pianos pioneered by Julius Blüthner in Leipzig from 1853 onwards, and still being made to the highest specifications on a different site just outside the city, don't usually get a look-in?Famous for their layered, mellow richness, cited by more than one great pianist as enablers for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Many of us recognise that rather striking modernist building in Cromwell Gardens near South Kensington tube, having seen it on the way to the V&A or perhaps a Prom at the Albert Hall but not been sure what it is exactly. I hadn't actually been inside until last week when I was given a guided tour. The space was discussed at one point as a potential site for the National Theatre. It’s actually the Ismaili Centre, the first of six throughout the world (pictured below, the latest in Toronto) and was built by the Casson Cander Partnership and opened (by Margaret Thatcher and the spiritual Read more ...
Roger Neill
The well-known portrait of New Zealand’s greatest writer, Katherine Mansfield, is exactly 100 years old on 17 June 2018 (main picture). It was painted by the American artist Anne Estelle Rice. At that time, Mansfield and Rice were both staying in Cornwall, the writer at the Headland Hotel at Looe on the south-east coast of the county, and the artist, together with her husband, theatre and art critic Raymond Drey, nearby.In December Mansfield had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, at that time incurable, and from which she died five years later, but in May, her very brief marriage to George Read more ...
David Nice
"Get those creatures off the stage, or I won't answer for what I'll do". The exclamation of the Prima Donna in the backstage prologue of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, about to share her grand opera with lower forms of theatrical life, seems to have been shared by a head teacher at the first Setúbal Music Festival in Portugal eight years ago, faced with the arrival of special-needs children to join his pupils. It was a sink-or-swim moment, but artistic director Ian Ritchie stood firm, and the festival has gone swimmingly ever since. All levels now work together without anything other Read more ...
Michael Chance
Out of the blue comes a phone call. A freelance career is based on those to a certain extent. Certainly mine has been. But this one was a bit different. “Would you come and talk to us about the way forward?”. I soon learnt that what this actually meant was, “would you launch and run a new opera festival for us?”Singers as a bunch are inveterate gossips and effortless complainers. The hierarchy of targets usually starts with the incompetence of their agents, then quickly the unpleasantness of a recent conductor or director, before inevitably slagging off successful colleagues. Oh, don’t we Read more ...