Mozart
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes two seasonal releases – one a selection of Tudor choral music and the other a popular Christmas ballet. There’s yet more ballet in a new disc from Russian forces, and late-Romantic orchestral music is represented by two live performances from London orchestras. We’ve piano concertos by Mozart and Ravel, and piano duets by Schubert played by two of Britain’s best younger musicians. An underrated American pianist gives an intelligently planned recital, and a recorder virtuoso teams up with a master lutenist. The curiosities include a live recording by one of the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Theatricality has always been English National Opera’s go-to manoeuvre, the uppercut to the jaw of heavyweight international vocal talent up the road at Covent Garden. The witty provocations of last year’s Le Grand Macabre and even the bizarre excess of Rupert Goold’s Turandot upped the stakes, presenting this season’s directors with something of a challenge. Borrowing first from the world of the West End musical, ENO opted for Des McAnuff’s rather limp Faust. Now, looking to theatre and the edgy talent of Rufus Norris, comes a Don Giovanni electric with iconoclastic, if occasionally Read more ...
David Nice
In the last year of his life he was, as a colleague noted when we learned of Charles Mackerras’s death, the wise old gamekeeper in the spring forest of Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. No wonder Mackerras, we were told last night by his conductor nephew Alexander Briger, wanted that most ecstatic celebration of the natural order for his memorial, just as Janáček had had it played at his funeral. Was it trivialised by an encore number from Mackerras’s deliciously arranged Sullivan potpourri-ballet, Pineapple Poll? Not a jot, mate.He gave his final unforgettable concerts with the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In 2001 Rufus Norris cleaned up on the awards front with his stunning production of Festen, the David Eldridge adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg's disturbing film which started life at the Almeida Theatre. But it was his grimly ironic staging of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret that I would put among the half-dozen or so best productions of a musical that I have ever seen. Now comes an even bigger leap - a hell of a leap (pun intended) - with his major operatic debut at the English National Opera: Mozart's Don Giovanni.In this wide-ranging audio podcast Norris discusses how much of a shock to the Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes a rare recording of a Danish masterpiece and a glorious late-Romantic Austrian symphony. There’s a thrilling set of Bartók piano concertos and music composed by Dvořák’s son-in-law. Going back further in time, we’ve two Mozart releases, one blowing the cobwebs from an operatic masterpiece, the other a period instrument version of a very dark symphony. There’s a vintage live recording of Verdi’s Requiem and a stunning box set of Bach’s keyboard music played on piano by a Canadian pianist who’s not Glenn Gould. Two scintillating live recordings from Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Amanda Roocroft was a star from the moment she graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music. At 25, Sir Georg Solti asked her to sing Pamina at the Salzburg Festival. She declined. It was too soon. Where would there be left to go? "Hurry slowly" would seem to have been her motto and now that she is playing - for the first time - a diva with 300 years of experience, the decisions she has made in her career are more than ever falling into perspective.The 300-year-old diva is, of course, the elusive and mysterious Emilia Marty in Janáček's extraordinary opera The Makropulos Case and Read more ...
David Nice
Maybe it's a truism that most instrumental music, at least before World War One, aspires to the condition of song. Few have gone farther in that respect than the composers of the three purely orchestral works in last night's Prom. Add to the mix a conductor of impeccable operatic credentials who knows how to draw intimate vocalising from his players, a promising lyric-dramatic pianist and one of the most unusual great soprano voices of our time, and an evening of singing heartbreak was the result.It must have been difficult to know which of these private worlds to throw to the Albert Hall Read more ...
edward.seckerson
René Jacobs: singer, conductor, scholar, archivist, alchemist, teacher. In recent years he's been "rehabilitating" the Mozart operas for the Harmonia Mundi label, eradicating 19th-century retouchings and stylistic anomalies in order to restore these great works to their vibrant original colours. He and his handpicked performers have now arrived at Mozart's beloved Singspiel Die Zauberflöte and the results are quite revelatory.
Jacobs talks about his crusade on behalf of style, 18th century and otherwise. He talks about the hours of reading and researching, the endless detective work offering Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No woman has ever achieved a higher profile on the French horn than Sarah Willis. Why? It's not as if she is a renowned soloist. But she is the first and only woman to join the brass section of the world's most celebrated and widely followed orchestra. It will be no surprise if this Saturday the BBC cameras as usual pick her out from row upon row of Teutonic males in the second of the Berlin Philharmonic’s two Prom 2010 appearances. But in addition to her Berliner duties, this year Willis has stepped out from under the orchestra’s giant shadow for the first time.She has recorded a CD of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Presteigne Festival, which has just ended after a packed long weekend of events of various shapes and sizes, is a music fest with a profile very much its own. Presteigne is one of those enchanting pocket county towns that proliferate along the Welsh borders (Monmouth, Montgomery and Denbigh are others): towns whose municipal status seems to belong in some child’s picture book, and is in fact a thing of the distant past.Even Presteigne’s county – Radnorshire – is no more, long since swallowed up by the huge, Celtic-sounding, but geographically meaningless Powys, then regurgitated as one of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It was a huge irony that the focus of last night's Proms programme was the musical duet: the concerto, the waltz, the visual-aural duet of a Ravel tone poem. For the one duet that really mattered - the dance of necessity between conductor, Jonathan Nott, and orchestra, the BBC Symphony - was of the two-left-feet variety. The relationship wasn't quite as dissonant as that between the two notes of Ligeti's Musica ricercata No 2 - part of a cycle of works for piano that deal with one note, then two, then three, then four and so on - which reared its intensely stand-offish two heads in the Read more ...
David Nice
You want to see Yuri Bashmet, arguably the greatest living viola player, but you can't because you've chosen to go to a recital by Yevgeny Kissin, one of the world's top pianists, on the same evening in another hall. Even the option of dashing from one half to another is complicated by timing and distance. No, this isn't Berlin, London or Vienna. It's just a typical dilemma in the 17-day life of the Verbier Festival, high in the major Alps of Switzerland's Valais region.The venues may not be pretty, but their surroundings are stupendous, and I don't think I've ever heard so many first-class Read more ...