Britten
alexandra.coghlan
It’s the oldest coup de théâtre in the postmodernist playbook – the curtain rises to reveal an audience staring back at us – but still, in the opening seconds of Willy Decker’s Peter Grimes, one of the most effective. Our theatrical doubles here are sinister creatures indeed, massed rows of sombre Victorians whose brutal Christianity is no less severe than the angles of John Macfarlane’s set. As gazes meet across the courtroom in that moment we confront ourselves, discover ourselves in the folk of the Borough, implicated absolutely in their tragedy. Returning for its first Covent Garden Read more ...
David Nice
Just think, said a veteran enthusiast of Britten's operas when I showed him the earliest publicity designs for Christopher Alden's production, you could set them all in a school, even Gloriana - what about headmistress Bess and head prefect Essex? But could you squidge everything into the one shape, I wondered? At ENO, it makes instant sense in the composer's near-perfect musical translation of Shakespearean wood magic that Oberon is the schoolmaster who prefers changeling pre-pubescents to now-adolescent, discarded Pucks. That's the strongest of starting points. But can the basic premise Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s a neat-sounding idea for a concert: a sequence of works composed in the year the previous composer died. Neat, but not necessarily revealing. This one started with Elgar’s Cockaigne, composed – symbolically, I assume – in 1900, and ended with Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, completed in 1934, the year of Elgar’s death. In between came Britten’s Nocturne, written in VW’s last year, 1958. With a little more time, they might have added Birtwistle’s Melancolia (1976, Britten), and left everyone completely bemused.
What did it all show? That the Brits have different ways of not being up Read more ...
David Nice
With regional youth orchestras dropping from a thousand short-sighted, wholesale cuts - flagship Leicestershire the latest under threat - it should be enough just to celebrate 60 seasons of the LSSO, safe for now under the City of London's munificent wing. But last night was more than just another fun concert. No one ought to miss any appearance of the, ahem, enormously charismatic Leif Segerstam, composer of 244 symphonies to date and master orchestral trainer, who always goes for depth of sound rather than surface glitter. Nor is it every year you get to hear the Britten Cello Symphony, one Read more ...
David Nice
Despite footsteps in the snow, as creepily characterised by Debussy's prelude of the same name, and sleighbells to launch a childlike symphonic journey, interior illumination should have been at the core of this concert. Sadly, given Colin Matthews's refined but fussy designer lighting in his Debussy orchestrations, a low-wattage Rimbaud/Britten zoo from one-tone soprano Christine Schäfer and hard sunbeams failing to probe the inner mysteries of the tomb-effigies Mahler envisaged in his Fourth Symphony's slow movement, it wasn't. Fortunately Vladimir Jurowski found novelty enough elsewhere to Read more ...
David Nice
If you were one of the world's top soloists but with a limited concerto stock - as woodwind players' tend to be - wouldn't you find it more rewarding to work as a principal in the orchestral ranks? That's the ideal, surely, but few carry it out in practice. Nicholas Daniel, the beefiest-sounding oboist to appear on the scene since the great Maurice Bourgue, is one who does. Last night he not only shone in the bright ensemble of Beethoven's Second Symphony; he also scored a triumph with a tough new gift to him and the Britten Sinfonia, James MacMillan's latest teeming-with-life concerto.I'm Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Conductor and choral scholar Stephen Layton once said that he often wondered what happened to the little boy at his primary school who he thought sang better than he did. The discovering and nurturing of raw talent is an issue very close to his heart and he offers three heartfelt cheers for the work of TV's Gareth Malone in that regard. Stephen was one of the lucky ones - he won a series of scholarships which defined his future and took him from Winchester Cathedral via Eton to King's College Cambridge.
He is currently Director of Music at Trinity College, Cambridge and newly appointed as Read more ...
graham.rickson
To paraphrase a cliché, it’s rare to leave a theatre humming the lighting. But here, Matthew Haskins’ lighting designs help make this production so powerful and evocative, whether projecting grotesque, distorted shadows on the back wall of Madeleine Boyd’s claustrophobic set, or illuminating characters’ subtle facial expressions. Dawn and dusk are both beautifully realised, and when we’re finally shown a brightly lit stage at the opera’s shocking close, you almost have to shield your eyes.Watching an opera about the corruption of childhood innocence is an uncomfortable sensation, and this Read more ...
edward.seckerson
"It is a curious tale. I have it written in faded ink, a woman's hand, governess to two children, long ago..." So begins Benjamin Britten's operatic re-imagining of Henry James's ghostly chiller The Turn of the Screw. Oscar Wilde called it "a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale" but how are we supposed to interpret it? In a remote country house, a governess fights to protect two children from menacing spirits. But are these spirits real or imagined?Are they figments of a fevered imagination? Did evil really occur at Bly before the governess's arrival and, if so, what? So many Read more ...
David Nice
Forget Dan Brown’s phony grail trail which has led so many paying pilgrims to Rosslyn outside Edinburgh. For the last week of the Festival Fringe the Chapel, most intricate and mysterious of 15th-century sanctuaries, has become a temple of high art dedicated to Mozart, Shakespeare and Britten. Ambitious indeed of a bunch of Cambridge undergrads and alumni to mount The Magic Flute and the operatic Midsummer Night’s Dream side by side. Did they pull it off? Just, in the case of the Britten, which is saying something given a score which is... well, again, intricate and mysterious are the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Charles Mackerras has died at the age of 84. In tribute to one of the most highly respected and best-loved of conductors, theartsdesk republishes here an interview he gave on the eve of conducting Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera last October. Despite bouts of ill health, he found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The beautiful gardens of Garsington Manor might seem an ideal setting for Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its ilex groves, its miniature forests of pyramid yew, and its paths overhung (o’er-canopied?) with climbing roses. So it’s a mild shock to confront on the actual stage what looks like a huge attic store-room littered with beds, chucked in at all angles, a few lamps, various items of bric-à-brac, and, upstage centre, a large C. S. Lewis-style wardrobe through which, in due course, characters enter and exit.Bed admittedly is iconic in the Dream, a work in which half the Read more ...