Mozart
David Nice
The banquet's laid, the host is absent but the guests can still relish the first-class fare in his memory. Sir Charles Mackerras was perhaps looking down happily in the company of Mozart and Dvořák as another oboist-turned-conductor like himself, Douglas Boyd, put his beloved Scottish Chamber Orchestra players buoyantly through their paces. The special late-night Prom, the second we wish he'd lived long enough to conduct, was one Mackerras had planned so carefully as a serenading double bill especially close to his heart. Our late maestro couldn't have wished for anything more blithe as a Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow I hadn't expected the death three days ago of the great British tenor, though unquestionably a world-class artist, to be commemorated among the international set of the Verbier Festival. Yet last night, before he raised his baton to conduct the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra, conductor Marc Minkowski had a few words to say about Anthony Rolfe Johnson. His mezzo-soprano, the glorious Anne Sofie von Otter, especially wanted to dedicate her performance to a dearly loved friend and colleague.Of course - I'd completely forgotten that over 20 years ago, tenor and mezzo collaborated in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It becomes increasingly hard for a music festival to stick out from the crowd these days. But high culture, high summer and high altitude create a rousing major chord each July in Verbier, which can genuinely claim to be the only festival you reach by cable car. When you get up there you are greeted by an alpine symphony of glaciers slithering off peaks and pastures clanging with cowbells. Streams descant and trill along gutters between chalets. No wonder stellar musicians drop their fee to return, both to play and listen. Egos are left at the bottom of the mountain.But location is only part Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Charles Mackerras has died at the age of 84. In tribute to one of the most highly respected and best-loved of conductors, theartsdesk republishes here an interview he gave on the eve of conducting Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera last October. Despite bouts of ill health, he found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s Read more ...
David Nice
With several replicas of Mozart's libertine stalking the country this summer, there had to be a good reason for seeking him out in the cinema. I had two. One was a curiosity to see how the TV channel Arte and the French Institute in South Kensington would handle a medium so successfully exploited around the world by New York's Metropolitan Opera. The other was to find out whether flavour-of-the-year Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov could follow up his oddball but compellingly detailed takes on Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin and Prokofiev's The Gambler as disintegrating haut bourgeois or Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
It seems somehow wrong to come away from a Don Giovanni feeling a bit noncommittal about the whole thing. It’s the sort of opera that should raise you from your seat – that should fire and inspire – but this performance, directed by Jonathan Kent, never truly got off the ground. The set – a sort of Rubik's Cube of a building designed by Paul Brown that opened in ever more ingenious ways, and morphed from chapel to party house to graveyard – was clever and satisfying and mirrored the steady disintegration of the characters as we progressed. But without the intensity and the drama from these Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The story starts promisingly with a love story between a prisoner Gomatz and Zaide, the favourite concubine of the tyrant Soliman. The two lovers escape with the help of Allazim. They are re-captured. Then Mozart gave up. His sources for the story, by Sebastiani and Voltaire’s Zaïre, ended it by the dubious plot twist that Zaide and Gomatz are actually brother and sister and that Allazim saved Soliman’s life some years earlier and he lets them all free. The strongest bits of the unfinished opera are a few arias, notably “Ruhe sanft” – which has become a concert staple. Perhaps Mozart Read more ...
David Nice
It's official, like it or not: director Katie Mitchell is the high priestess appointed to make plain the ways of ancient family sacrifice to modern man. She had the high ground of collaborating with composer James MacMillan on his stunning new opera The Sacrifice, based on a Mabinogion revenge saga; but the jury's still out over whether her National Theatre retelling of ancient Greek bloodgrudge wasn't rather too doggedly echoed in her production of Handel's Jephtha. Besides, when that came to ENO, there were basic problems of blocking and operatic stagecraft. They loomed large again in this Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Classical Opera Company does exactly what it says on the tin and over the last few years has refreshed parts of the repertoire and corners of the nation that their bigger and more illustrious counterparts never reach. Conductor and artistic director Ian Page talks about questions of style, untapped repertoire and major restorations, like the company's recent staging of Thomas Arne's Artexerxes and its current labour of love rebuilding Mozart's unfinished opera Zaide. The opera now has a third act thanks to Ian's judicious plundering of Wolfgang Amadeus's bottom drawer and a new text from Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Istanbul, Turkey, 3-30 JuneThe 38th annual music festival in the jewelled city of culture-clash continues its strong classical showing with Radu Lupu and Lang Lang, the Borodin Quartet and Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Equally attractive is the chance to hear a lively ethnic and folkloric music programme. www.iksv.org/english/Leipzig, Germany, 11-20 JuneThe 85th annual Bach Festival in his home town also features his two great champions Brahms and Schumann. The Gewandhaus Orchestra and Leipzig Ballet get involved in ballet to Bach by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, Philippe Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The sun rode high, the gardens glowed green, my lemon berry pudding bulged proudly and, on stage, the familiar 24-carat farce that is Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro was working itself out to perfection. It was Garsington - and my baking - at its very finest, a fittingly triumphant opening to the final season at Garsington Manor (they move down the road to Wormsley Estate next year). Sets, direction, singing - two young standouts in particular - all had a part to play, as did the conducting of Douglas Boyd. The country house conductor (an unsung role) has the singular task of somehow warding off Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The opening night of Le nozze di Figaro was not so much an opera of two halves as an opera of two teams. In the pit we had Sir Colin Davis and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House offering a crisply incisive rendering of Mozart’s score; onstage we had the Royal Opera Chorus and a selection of soloists, most of whom seemed set on a rather different – and, in the case of the chorus, downright lacklustre – rendition of the score. Now on its second revival, David McVicar’s all-the-hallmarks-of-a-classic production should have the comfortable swagger of a sophomore, but it was the first-night Read more ...