Baroque
Boyd Tonkin
St Mark’s shadow fell gloriously over the Wigmore Hall last night with a programme of Christmas music performed in, or inspired by, the great basilica of Venice. The Dunedin Consort braided festive works from pioneers who wrote for its grandly sonorous spaces – Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Grandi – with pieces by their German visitor and student Heinrich Schütz, culminating with his Christmas Story (1660).No one knows better than the Dunedins’ director John Butt how risky it is to posit historical “authenticity” for any interpretation of music composed four centuries or more ago (he wrote a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s been a quiet storm of critical approval building around Weyes Blood. American singer Natalie Mering has been releasing music for over a decade but, during the last two or three years a tailwind of positive verbiage has blown her faster forward. Her last album, Titanic Rising, the first of a loose trilogy, of which this is the second part, made low level inroads to commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, a fine balance of delicate singer-songwriter fare and something more baroque, has the potential to go further.Imagine the strident, indie- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A dream pairing of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and early-keyboard wizard Kristian Bezuidenhout marked St Cecilia’s Day at the Wigmore Hall with a programme that celebrated music made not in the Black Forest but beside the Thames.Both halves of their concert matched works by Purcell with the fruits of Handel’s early years in London. The German period-instrument stars, with a gifted group of home-grown singers, were directed from the harpsichord (and Baroque organ) by the South African-born Australian fortepianist. Together, they managed to make a cosmopolitan case for musical continuity in Read more ...
David Nice
Handel’s audiences must have taken a very long time to settle – at least an act, to judge from the mostly inconsequential music of Alcina’s first hour. Lovely: we’re on an enchanted isle where puritanical people have been transformed into animal-headed courtiers, and a love-imbroglio merits only a “so what?” Richard Jones and his singers keep it lively and focused, but the bounce needed from Christian Curnyn and the Royal Opera House Orchestra doesn’t come.Eventually the charm of the personalities and the consistency of the staging win over, but it does show how much a conductor’s pacing Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
During the final act of Tamerlano, James Conway’s new production for English Touring Opera has the titular tyrant lead a captive king around the stage on a chain. Given the oppressive, deadlocked mood of Handel’s opera and this interpretation, you may recall Pozzo and Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: that frozen dialectic of master and slave in which power traps its holder as much as its victim. Conway’s farewell gift to ETO, after two decades of high achievement as artistic director, Tamerlano is sung with terrific verve and dramatic credibility by an impressive young cast. This Read more ...
Robert Beale
Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical music.That’s a big ambition, as the two might seem to have little in common. But Anna Himali Howard’s simple production concept of a marriage celebration, where Orpheus is a white British guy and Eurydice an Asian girl, set in the back garden of a semi-detached house – probably in Leeds – is a symbol of the whole enterprise.The design (Leslie Travers Read more ...
Tom Carr
When the pandemic closed in, Canadian experimental indie rock troupe Arcade Fire were on the cusp of heading into the studio to record their new album. COVID had other plans. But rather than pause, the husband and wife duo of Win and Regine Butler continued to work on more songs together. As they admit, this has ended up being the longest time they’ve spent writing for an album.The result, WE, is a concise, 40 minute LP that explores the experience of living through a pandemic: the first side is emotive and dark, tinged with isolation and fear; the latter half brighter and celebratory, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In Handel’s operas (as, indeed, elsewhere in art and life) the worst witch may turn out to have the best character. Without the sorceress Melissa, splendidly full of evil ruses yet endowed with a generous measure of tragic pathos, Amadigi di Gaula might freeze into a static amorous stand-off between pasteboard nobles contending with a harsh – then, suddenly, kindly – fate.Thank goodness that Irish soprano Anna Devin, as the lovelorn enchantress, graces Netia Jones's ingenious if somewhat hyper-active production of Handel’s 1715 heroic romance in Garsington Opera’s pavilion at Wormsley. In a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Well, it wasn’t quite Messiah, but it was a source of joy. In ENO’s end-of-lockdown staging, BBC Two’s transmission of Handel’s resurrection song delivered a scant 54 minutes of music from the Coliseum on Easter Saturday. In contrast, two ancient Poirot movies, staples of Bank Holiday line-ups roughly since the Pleistocene Era, had hogged fully four hours of the channel’s afternoon schedule. Miserly, timid, cheese-paring, grudging: the Proms partially excepted, BBC TV’s default attitude to classical music never fails to disappoint – even when the oratorio in question has been a beloved pillar Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just before the doors closed again on live audiences at the Wigmore Hall, Iestyn Davies and members of the Arcangelo ensemble celebrated the private side of a very public composer. The peerless counter-tenor, whose powerfully polished command of phrase and line makes this music feel as natural and necessary as breathing, sang Handel’s nine German-language arias to pious texts by Bartold Heinrich Brockes (who also wrote the words to the “Brockes Passion”). In between clusters of songs, the Arcangelo players – violinist Matthew Truscott, lutenist Thomas Dunford and cellist Jonathan Manson, with Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a year of absences and separations, here was another one we had to bear. Built around a programme of Baroque double concertos, last night’s Prom should have brought Nicola Benedetti and Alina Ibragimova together in a violin super-duo that promised marvels. In the event, a family bereavement kept Ibragimova away from the audience-free Royal Albert Hall. Yet, and again in the phoenix-from-the-ashes spirit of the arts in 2020, the improvised solution proved an uplifting delight. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which backed the soloists, has always sounded like a band of stars. Its Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like many authors before him, the Argentinian novelist and curator is also a bit obsessed by Bach’s Goldberg Variations, especially as played by the maverick Canadian genius Glenn Gould. Well, Luis – snap. The last pre-lockdown Goldbergs I heard live fizzed into the Devon twilight a year ago during the Dartington Festival, in a blistering, furiously-paced performance by pianist Joanna MacGregor that Read more ...