Mozart
David Nice
They get to work with the best music and language coaches in the business. They make their mark in small parts throughout the Royal Opera season and showcase their art more prominently at the end of it, proving to the world that there are major talents among them (four outstanding ones, I reckon, on this showing). The big question mark is why, for this crucial event, the Jette Parker singers were saddled with one director, also on the Programme, and a movement co-ordinator who seem to have been little help with the interaction between characters, with feeling comfortable in their skins and Read more ...
David Nice
The message must be getting through. On the First Night of the Proms, Igor Levit played as encore Liszt's transcription of the great Beethoven melody appropriated as the European Anthem; in Prom 2, Daniel Barenboim unleashed his Staatskapelle Berlin on Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance following an inspirational speech about European culture, education and humanism. Yesterday afternoon's manifesto was a given, showcasing the finest of all European bands under a Dutch citizen of the world who resided for many years in London. Bernard Haitink is also the world's greatest living Mozart conductor now Read more ...
stephen.walsh
About The Magic Flute there’s a certain amount of domestic theatre and a great deal of pantomime. It calls for fun, sentiment, movement, a measure of spectacle, and plenty of direct communication with the audience. But like the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream it needs no excuse, no big ideas.At Longborough, Thomas Guthrie flirts briefly with such things. A boy lies in bed reading, I suppose, a fairy-tale; Papageno appears brushing his teeth; Tamino and Pamina come on, inexplicably, as puppets (that return momentarily for the ordeals). But these are fleeting concepts, swiftly Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“The subject is neither political nor religious; it is fantastical” wrote Verdi to the librettist Piave about his opera Macbeth. “The opera is not about the rise of a modern fascist: nor is it about political tyranny. It is a study in character” adds director Elijah Moshinsky in the programme for this opening production of the 2017 Buxton International Festival. To which (at least if your last encounter with Macbeth was Welsh National Opera’s production last year, seemingly set in a Travelodge somewhere near Edinburgh Airport) it’s tempting to respond, for this relief much thanks.Moshinsky Read more ...
graham.rickson
Péter Eötvös: Paradise Reloaded (Lilith) Soloists, Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Gregory Vajda (BMC)Experiencing new operas on disc without seeing them performed means that any judgements have to be based on the music alone. Péter Eötvös’s Paradise Reloaded (Lilith) worked for me, largely because the score is consistently entertaining. This is a reworking of an earlier Eötvös opera, The Tragedy of the Devil. Playwright and librettist Albert Ostermaier shifted the focus away from Lucifer to Lilith, Adam’s first wife; the opera examines what might have happened if she, instead of Eve, were Read more ...
David Nice
Why stage a stiff opera about half-frozen royals by a not-yet-divine Mozartino? The best Mitridate really deserves is one of those intimate concert performances with brilliant young singers at which Ian Page's Classical Opera excels. Yet this is the third revival of a 1991 Royal Opera production by Graham Vick, never among his more probing psychological studies (which in any case the 14-year old Mozart, impressive but no teenage genius here, hardly deserves). The best in show is Paul Brown's colourful if restrictive costuming, and this latest cast looked very promising on paper. The actual Read more ...
David Nice
The time is out of joint for Turkey at the moment, but it’s still a country equally split between those looking to the west for the culture of ideas and the more conservative element which at least needs its voice respected. They co-exist peacefully in a great cosmopolitan city like Istanbul, which recently joined Ankara and Izmir in rejecting increased powers for its leader. Facing difficult challenges and late cancellations, the vivacious Yeşim Gurer, director of the 45th Istanbul Music Festival, held a fine balance between the urban intelligentsia's hunger for fine western ensembles and Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who missed the opening Southbank concerts of the Chinike! Orchestra, figurehead of a foundation which aims to give much-needed help to young Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) classical musicians, could and now can (on YouTube) catch snippets of the players in action on the splendid documentary about young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. There's no doubt at all that Kanneh-Mason, BBC Young Musician 2016, who reprised his already celebrated interpretation of Haydn's C major Cello Concerto in All Saints Hove on Saturday night to launch the Brighton Festival, is the real deal, and so are the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
For most pianists, playing the Ligeti Piano Concerto would be enough exertion for one night, to be followed by a stiff drink and some down time. Not for the tireless Shai Wosner at Kings Place last night. By the time the Ligeti came along, not only had he already played a Mozart concerto, he then went on to appear in every remaining item in the programme. It was exhausting just to watch – but also exhilarating.This concert was the latest instalment of Aurora Orchestra’s five-year survey of all the Mozart piano concertos, in roughly chronological order. The accompanying programming is Read more ...
David Nice
It's funny how Parisians grumble about any major new venue which lies outside their chic central stamping ground. First they moan about having to trundle out to the Philharmonie concert hall in the Cité de la Musique, and now they look as if they'll need some persuading to support major music-making in Les Hauts-de-Seine, an administrative département which generously supports its culture. In fact the Seine Musicale on the Île Seguin, part of a projected cultural hub which was the brainchild of Jean Nouvel, is only an efficient 20 minutes' metro journey from just about anywhere in the centre Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Isn’t it funny? You wait ages for an opera by an eleven-year-old and then two turn up at once. The world’s feature journalists descended on Vienna at Christmas for a new take on Cinderella by Alma Deutscher. What they heard, for what it’s worth, was a precocious, glittery pastiche of Classical manners. Last night was the real deal. Die Schuldigkeit des Ersten Gebots, by Mozart: "The Obligation to Keep the First Commandment". Not a title to make the heart beat faster, is it? Ian Page and his increasingly prominent Classical Opera company commissioned Nigel Lewis for a snappy new English Read more ...
David Nice
Leif Ove Andsnes directing two great Mozart piano concertos from the keyboard may be the chief attraction when the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra comes to London's Cadogan Hall on Friday to celebrate its 40th birthday. It was certainly the bait which lured me to Oslo last week. But in talking to the Renaissance man who has led the ensemble since its foundation in 1977, Terje Tønnesen, I discovered that what I heard – including a Haydn symphony just as revelatory as the Mozart concertos – was just the tip of the creative iceberg. Londoners will get a greater slice of that individuality Read more ...