Mozart
alexandra.coghlan
While we are far from lacking in top early music ensembles in the UK, there’s no denying that the French have a special affinity for this repertoire. While The Academy of Ancient Music and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are virtuosic champions of the genre, if we were all stuck in a sinking hot air balloon I’d lose both before sacrificing Les Musiciens du Louvre, Les Talens Lyriques, Le Concert d'Astrée or Les Arts Florissants. So it was with anticipation that I made my way to the Barbican last night to hear the UK debut of Le Cercle de l’Harmonie, the newest French orchestra on Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The extraordinary Longborough Opera Festival is with us again and for the next six weeks, in Martin and Lizzie Graham’s Palladian barn theatre near Stow-on-the-Wold. This year the world’s unlikeliest Ring cycle reaches Siegfried. But the improbability doesn’t end with Wagner; there is also Verdi (Falstaff) and Mozart – also, typically, a cyclic project, which has arrived at Così fan tutte. The whole set-up is so amazing that one longs to be enthusiastic about everything. But that can sometimes be difficult.What is it about Così fan tutte? In Cardiff, Benjamin Davis set it on Clacton pier Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It was Groundhog Day. Murray Perahia, due to play the Schumann Piano Concerto last night under Bernard Haitink, was indisposed and at the last minute Maria João Pires rushed in with Mozart 27. Just the same happened in 2006, strangely enough, with exactly the same three artists and orchestra. As you ponder that for a coincidence, what this shows is the powerful bonds that exist between musicians, between Haitink and these two pianists, whose virtues have much in common: impeccable lucidity and light-filled emotion.But it didn’t help last night’s programme at all unfortunately. For this Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Mozart's Idomeneo is subjected to a famous bit of abuse in Milos Forman's Amadeus. "A most tiresome piece," a courtier critic sniffs. "Too much spice. Too many notes." As it happens, not a wholly inaccurate statement. The work is quite an exotic curry of an early Classical opera. And in last night's concert performance at the Barbican, conductor Thomas Hengelbrock and the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble presented the dish in as richly fruited, densely scented, dramatically packed a rendition as you could imagine. One could fully see why Enlightenment ears might tire of its pungent demands - and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Tamino and Pamina, in Mozart’s great masonic opera, go through fire and water, as well as trials spiritual and emotional, before achieving their sunlit triumph at the end of it all. They would have sympathy with Anthony Whitworth-Jones and his Garsington Opera team in what must have been quite as frightening a battle to locate, plan, design and build their new pavilion on the Getty estate at Wormsley, near Stokenchurch on the M40, within barely more than a year.I ended my review of their final production (Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) at the manor last June by reporting that the company Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A tall and exceptionally striking Valkyrie of a blonde, Alison Balsom (b 1978) is the polar antithesis of a hard-drinking, slightly tubby, very male trumpeter from central casting. For the photoshoots which fetch up on her CD sleeves, and public performances such as Last Night of the Proms in 2009 and this month’s Classic Brits, she pours herself elegantly into a series of dresses in the style of a hot young violinist kidnapped by the marketing department. But there is of course a great deal more to Balsom.In civvies there is only a lingering whiff of the glamour puss. She smiles, she laughs Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Two 1950s Mozarts in one weekend might seem like pressing the contemporaneity of great art unnecessarily far. But Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, revived on Sunday, is a much less crude update than the WNO Così. True, the dramatis personae might have wandered in from a Fellini film set vintage 1960, with Giovanni recast as Marcello Mastroianni, but the setting itself, by Paul Brown, is at least quasi-classical, columned and arcaded, with a whiff of Hellfire Caves and, in the end, a sort of Chirico-esque fragmentation, none of which conflicts too drastically with the social and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“I’ve seen an asp, a hydra, a basilisk”, Fiordiligi sings as she tries to ward off Ferrando in the second act of Mozart’s cynical dissection of true love. Benjamin Davis’s new production for WNO converts these beasts into a crocodile, a dragon, assorted dogs and a teddy bear: and not as figments of Fiordiligi’s overheated imagination, but as the all too real promenade furniture of whichever British seaside resort Davis and his designer, Max Jones, have chosen as their 1950s version of 1780s Naples.With this kind of relocation, you can usually tease out some kind of connotation which lends “ Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Contemporary music and 11 new productions are at the heart of a strong ENO 2011-12 season announced today. Highlights include a new opera from Damon Albarn (Doctor Dee) on the extraordinary life of Elizabethan alchemist and intellectual John Dee, the UK premiere of Detlev Glanert's Caligula, Wolfgang Rihm's chamber opera (which will open at the Hampstead Theatre) Jakob Lenz and the first Coliseum staging of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, "the most controversial opera of the past 50 years", according to artistic director John Berry.Contemporary music and Read more ...
David Nice
Bear with me while, like supergroomed rising star Miloš Karadaglić retuning his guitar to a mellower vein, I adjust my concert-hall vocab and describe this as a no-gimmicks sell-out gig underground with young musicians from the London Philharmonic’s Foyle Future Firsts scheme presenting two varied sets and Karadaglić headlining. And now I’ll just revert to old habits and declare the meat to be a slice of Classicism chromatically spiced (Mozart) and a 20th-century maverick pushing Neo-Baroque into near-atonality (Stravinsky), our top guitarist serenading by way of late-night coda. All this to Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month, we’ve some virtuoso pianola, Bruckner and Chopin get downsized, and there’s some full-fat Mahler. Rare American orchestral works rub shoulders with Mozart, and a Russian conductor gives his final performance. A British pianist tackles Ravel, and a Danish accordion player seeks Slavic inspiration. Brass players from San Francisco take on contemporary music, and Trio Mediaeval revive 13th-century polyphony from Worcester. And a young Norwegian brings Grieg to vivid life.CD of the Month Grieg: Chasing the Butterfly: Recreating Grieg’s 1903 Recordings and Beyond Sigurd Read more ...
David Nice
Without the definite article, what kind of a Flute is Peter Brook's - beyond, that is, the literal manifestation of a stick on a string that makes no soothing noises? Best describe it as a crescent moon of a version, loosely based on Schikaneder's text with less than half of Mozart's music and matching slivers of voices, attached to mostly fledgling stage presences. The diminishing returns of Brook's operatic deconstructions, from the bold Tragedy of Carmen through the more seriously compromised Impressions of Pelléas, here reach a dead end in a kind of bleached purgatory.Which could hardly Read more ...