Mozart
David Nice
Opera on film's most magical offering, better by some way than Joseph Losey's cinematically tricksy Don Giovanni, at last makes it to Region 2 in this BFI dual-format release. I've watched Ingmar Bergman's sublime response to Mozart many times, and played scenes to students, in the Criterion Collection edition, but here it is, easily seen in the UK, all spruced up and ready to delight a new generation of kids as well as adults who still don't know it.I disagree with Sameer Rahim's booklet essay that there is nothing of the "dark retelling" about it; once past the "family of man" audience Read more ...
David Nice
"What could be more serious than married life?" asked Richard Strauss, whose operas became a surprising pillar of Glyndebourne's repertoire some time after the early days dramatised in David Hare's play. "Honour" might have been the answer of conductor Fritz Busch, who unlike Strauss never made accommodations with the Nazi regime. The two ingredients, personal devotion and public integrity, are interlaced with surprising shafts of depth as well as elegance in the artistic context of The Moderate Soprano. This reviewer certainly didn't leave the Duke of York's Theatre at the end of Jeremy Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphonies 1-4 Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Linn)Slimmed-down Brahms is more common than it used to be, and geeks will probably cherish a pioneering set recorded in the 1990s by Sir Charles Mackerras with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Robin Ticciati’s new cycle, taped in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall last May, is superb on its own terms, though his isn't the only way to play Brahms. Don't chuck out those Karajan LPs just yet. Who's to know exactly what these pieces sounded like when first performed, and how big a complement of strings Brahms preferred? The gains here Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone passionate about great conducting would jump at the chance to hear 89-year-old Bernard Haitink giving three days of masterclasses with eight young practitioners of the art, his eighth and possibly last series in Lucerne (though he's not ruling anything out). That was the hook to visit this year's Easter Festival. Concerts and a site-specific event may have looked like optional extras, but turned out to be also of the essence, including a profoundly well planned and executed programme masterminded by András Schiff and a rare staging of Schumann's Scenes from Faust as the Festival's very Read more ...
David Nice
Former Royal Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Charles Dutoit has been exposed, to little surprise from musicians, as something of a roué whose apparent refusal to take "no" for an answer has rubbed up against the new #MeToo world. So his place in last night's concert was taken by Venezuelan Rafael Payare, not yet 40. Unfortunately it seems certain Dutoit would have captured the élan vital of Richard Strauss's Don Juan better than Payare - an accomplished soundsmith, on this evidence, but fatally uninterested in the operatic drama of Strauss's tone poems, or for that matter the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
I was on a panel of six critics convened to choose the winner of a special "media award" at the Glyndebourne Opera Cup on Saturday evening. What follows is therefore not a review, but rather a chance to chew over the concept and its highs (and occasional lows). And you may be intrigued to hear that our panel and the main jury picked the exact same top three winners.From its first season in 1934, Glyndebourne has been inextricably associated with the music of Mozart. As every edition of its new contest is supposed to be devoted to just one composer, Wolfgang Amadeus was the natural choice for Read more ...
Robert Beale
Just over a year since his Bridgewater Hall début, Ben Gernon appeared with the BBC Philharmonic there again – this time well into his role as their Principal Guest Conductor, yet his first concert with them there since officially taking up the position. A lot has happened in his career in those 13 months, both with the Philharmonic and elsewhere, and his website now boasts many more laudatory quotes beside the one from me a year ago, that he “knows how to give his musicians the freedom to do what they do best”.But that’s still one of the main impressions of the way he works with the Read more ...
Robert Beale
It began in semi-darkness. Appropriate for Arvo Pärt, perhaps – after all, Manchester Camerata have played his music in Manchester Cathedral to great atmospheric effect in the past. But the Choir of Clare College Cambridge, conducted by Graham Ross, delivered his Da pacem Domine in a hall where it seemed as if the lights had failed … not quite the same thing.They sang the brief, four-part, a cappella piece fairly accurately and, for the most part, confidently, but the 26 young singers could not create the spark, or the richness of tone, that might have brought its holy minimalism to real life Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Jörg Widmann writes fast. He is also one of the few young German composers who can write distinctive and idiomatic music without feeling the weight of his country’s musical heritage on his shoulders at every turn. Surprisingly, then, his Clarinet Quintet, which here received its UK premiere at Wigmore Hall, was eight years in the making, and was initially abandoned because "music history ... suddenly appeared as a great burden". Typically, though, his return to the project at the start of 2017 marked a period of intense creativity: "I felt that the music was simply pouring out of me."Widmann Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Rapture, ecstasy, ardour, and a few cheeky fumbles in the bushes – Louise Alder and James Baillieu’s Wigmore recital promised “Chants d’amour” and delivered amply, giving us love in all its bewildering, technicolour variety. From the heady eroticism of Bizet to the lazy, summer affections of Faure, the light, youthful lusts of Mozart to Strauss and Liszt’s mature desire, it was a programme calculated to stir both loins and ears.Alder’s star, very much in the ascendant in 2017 thanks to her exquisite Sophie in WNO’s Rosenkavalier, a scene-stealing Marzelline in the Proms Fidelio, as well as Read more ...
graham.rickson
Chaconne - Sofya Gulyak (piano) (Champs Hill Records)Traditionally, a chaconne is an instrumental piece in triple time with a continually repeating bass line. Sofya Gulyak, winner of the 2009 Leeds Piano Competition, gives us seven. Best known is Busoni’s extraordinary Chaconne in D minor, a bold reinvention of a famous Bach number for solo violin. Gulyak is terrific, her performance combining craggy grandeur and warm intimacy. The final major chord has rarely sounded so well-earned. An early Chaconne in G major by Handel is a friendlier affair, Gulyak making the work shine. The rapid Read more ...
David Nice
Singing students from the Guildhall School should have been issued with a three-line whip to fill the inexplicably half-empty Milton Court concert hall for last night's charmer. After all, every musician, and not just sopranos, should know that this is how it ought to be done. True, an effervescent personality like Lucy Crowe's can't be simulated. But every other respect of her stunningly sung and varied Mozart can be aspired to: the relaxed, natural stance (and in this instance, knowing how to play a recalcitrant shoe heel for comedy), knowing what to do with the hands, how to execute Read more ...