Mozart
David Nice
One miracle of musical performance is that a work you’ve loved for years can be revealed as never before in an outstanding interpretation. That happened to me last week at the New Ross Piano Festival when 22-year-old pianist Magdalene Cho turned us upside down in Bach’s Sixth Partita. It happened again last night when Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra hit 1788 with one of the three symphonic masterpieces Mozart composed in a single summer, the 39th.Problematic, on the other hand, was the first-half Mozart, third of the four concertos he composed for his beloved horn virtuoso Joseph Read more ...
David Nice
35 years ago, persona-now-non-grata John Eliot Gardiner revealed how performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito allying period instruments with great voices could electrify in a new way. And here we were last night with Pablo Heras-Casado, a conductor as at home in Wagner at Bayreuth as he clearly is with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, stunning us with a consistently vigilant and alive Mozart Requiem.The programme was typically inventive. It started with the ultimate joyburst, Bach’s Singet dem Herrn – “singet" as in zing it – with Heras- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
One door closes, and another one opens. A lot. It’s extraordinary what value those two simple additions to the Royal Albert Hall stage lent to Glyndebourne’s performance of The Marriage of Figaro at the Proms.Combined with some niftily manoeuvred furniture, minimal suggestions of a garden for the outside scenes, and the genius touch of a bathtub for the Count in Act Three, a few strategically deployed items made sure that we enjoyed pretty much a full staging of this signature piece for the Sussex house.The cast, in period costume, used the width of their space well and climbed, when Read more ...
David Nice
Over 100 years ago, John Christie envisaged Wagner’s Parsifal with limited forces in the Organ Room at Glyndebourne. He would have been amazed to see it arrive on the main stage this year. But émigrés Carl Ebert and Fritz Busch persuaded him that Mozart was the real country-house ideal. Le nozze di Figaro remains Glyndebourne’s perfect opera, and Mariame Clément’s new production, launched last night with the 588th performance here, keeps it real.Clément has a near-perfect cast, with Louse Alder and Huw Montague Rendall as the Almavivas sure harbingers of success (pictured below in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Marianne Moore once famously defined poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Operas also fill, or anyway should fill, their artificial horticulture with genuine beasts – and flowers. And no work demands the population of a fanciful landscape with authentic passion more urgently than Così fan tutte. Mozart transforms this shabby little shocker of a plot – as the meddling know-all Don Alfonso “tests” the two sisters’ fidelity to their sweethearts – into a vehicle for music of exquisite truthfulness that grows from a bed of fraud and lies.At the Nevill Holt festival in rural Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was held prisoner.Six million Jews were murdered in the camps, but Lasker-Wallfisch survived because she was a musician. She describes the “welcoming” ceremony in which arrivals were “stripped of every vestige of human dignity”. Stark naked, they had their heads shaved and a number tattooed on their arms.But the woman conducting this identity- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just now, the notion of a long-term project that concludes in 2041 sounds like an optimistic bet on the far future worthy of some 18th-century Enlightenment philosophe – Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, maybe. The musicians of The Mozartists are clearly hoping for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as their MOZART250 programme ambitiously tracks, in annual increments, the music that Wolfgang Amadeus wrote exactly 250 years ago.We’ve reached 1775, and thus last night saw a concert performance at Cadogan Hall of La finta giardiniera, written by already-accomplished late-teenager for the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Donizetti: Songs Vols. 3 & 4 Michael Spyres (tenor), Carlo Rizzi (piano) – Vol. 3, Marie-Nicole Lemieux (mezzo-soprano), Giulio Zappa (piano) – Vol. 4. (Opera Rara)“The songs Donizetti poured forth during his composing career have [..] been unjustly neglected…. In their totality these compositions make a powerful case for Donizetti as a key figure in nineteenth-century domestic music-making,” writes Roger Parker, who acts as repertoire consultant to Opera Rara, and is in the process of establishing a new critical edition of them. Opera Rara is releasing a total of eight volumes, or Read more ...
David Nice
Tamino in the operating theatre hallucinating serpents? Sarastro’s acolytes wheeling lit-up plasma packs? From the central part of the Overture onwards – just when we thought we'd escape directorial intervention in Olivia Clarke’s racy conducting - Jamie Manton’s production of Mozart's adult fairy-tale looks distinctly unpromising. But by Act Two, it becomes one of the most moving Magic Flutes I’ve ever seen. Glorious singing and youthful energy help to make it so.So do the high-tech design of Justin Nardella and sometimes deliberately uncomfortable lighting of Charlie Morgan Jones. Neon Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Drained as they are at present of crucial funds, WNO are managing to put on only two operas this spring, and spaced out to the point where it could hardly be called a season. For their new Peter Grimes we must wait till April. Meanwhile we can relish Tobias Richter’s sparkling nine-year-old Figaro, skilfully revived, with a few tweaks, by Max Hoehn.Whatever the pressures, there is not the slightest diminution of standards. I missed the pre-pandemic revival. But Hoehn has now cut out the overture stage business (no great loss), and the opera is sung in its original Italian, which for my money Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Who’s in and who’s not – on the secret, the joke, the relationship, the family, the club? That’s the fulcrum of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ ingeniously simple Figaro for English National Opera. A white box and a row of doors supply the only set to speak of for a production less interested in the entrenched tensions of upstairs-downstairs than the shifting alliances and fragile coalitions of a household in flux. Gender, money, status – even survival – all take their turn as the axis dividing a more than usually eccentric cast of characters in a contemporary staging whose interest – and wit – is all in Read more ...
Robert Beale
There was excellent music making in the Hallé concert in Manchester last night, and there was self-admitted “noise”. Briefly, the two coincided in one work.The outstanding music making of the evening came from pianist Giorgi Gigashvili, winner of the 2024-25 Terence Judd-Hallé Award, now fulfilling the opportunities that success gave him. Together with the orchestra and conductor Roderick Cox, he gave a beautiful and stylish performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 (in C major – the one they used to bill as “the Elvira Madigan concerto”, if your memory goes back that far).His playing was Read more ...