Mozart
David Nice
"Touch her and you die," sings Masetto in telling Don Giovanni to keep away from his Zerlina. There's certainly trouble, though not instant death, when fingers briefly meet. Mozart's dark comedy has much in Da Ponte's text about hands-on business but only a few points where it's actually seen; love and sex don't really happen, though there are two skirmishes, one fatal. So Andrew Staples' Swedish Radio studio staging can just about pass as the first social-distancing ensemble opera of the C-19 era (★★★★) - when it works, it's excellent - and Daniel Harding palpably fires up a team of world- Read more ...
David Nice
Only the birds will be singing at country opera houses around the UK this summer. Glyndebourne seems over-optimistic in declaring that it might be able to launch in July; other companies with shorter seasons have made the regretful but right decisions to call it a year. This reminder from 2017 of what such setups can achieve at the very highest level, newly downloaded on to the excellent OperaVision website, could hardly be more timely, nor the choice more uplifting for the soul: opera's greatest comedy, at a level of intimacy which the last major production to launch this year to date, Read more ...
David Nice
So Susanna and Figaro got married on Saturday, just before the entire Almaviva household and its home, the London Coliseum, went into quarantine. Let's at least celebrate the fact that these splendid singer-actors, with youth especially on the five main principals' side, saw so much hard work on forging an ensemble and co-ordinating as best they could with conductor Kevin John Edusei in the Coliseum's big, Mozart-unfriendly space come to fruition, if only for one night.Director Joe Hill-Gibbins, a genuinely original force in theatre whose Edward II at the National shook up the literalism of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Christopher Gunning: Symphonies 2, 10 & 12 BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Kenneth Woods (Signum)You’ve probably heard Christopher Gunning’s music without realising it: he’s been a prolific film and television composer for decades. A pupil of both Edmund Rubbra and of Richard Rodney Bennett, he's best known for the insidiously catchy theme for ITV’s long-running Poirot series. Three of Gunning’s 12 symphonies are included here, written between 2003 and 2018. Whereas many contemporary film composers specialise in short, colourful bursts of descriptive music, Gunning knows how to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Cosi fan tutte is, as the opera’s subtitle clearly tells us, “A School for Lovers”. But too often these days it can feel like a school for the audience. Joyless productions lecture us sternly on the battle of the sexes – on chauvinism, feminism, cynicism and sex – until we’re battered into fashionable discomfort. A happy ending? For Mozart’s most complicated comedy? Don’t be naïve.Director Laura Attridge has bucked the trend in her new staging for English Touring Opera, and it’s bliss. Against the odds we find ourselves in a colourful screwball-comedy – a sunny, funny musical game of kiss- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Leif Ove Andsnes’s long-term partnership with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra has already yielded rich fruit, and the Mozart quartets and trio he performed last night with members of the top-notch nomad band proved just as succulent. However, I would hardly have been alone in leaving the Wigmore Hall with my strongest impressions stirred by the single solo work that the versatile Norwegian master-pianist allowed himself. All of the items of the bill dated from 1785 and 1786: the two piano quartets (in G minor and E flat) with which Mozart effectively launched the form as a serious vehicle for Read more ...
David Nice
"New Dawns" as a title smacked a bit of trying to shoehorn a fairly straightforward Aurora programme in to Kings Place's Nature Unwrapped series. Only Dobrinka Tabakova's short and sweet Dawn made the link, and that was old, not new (composed in 2007). Maybe the dawn intended in Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, K491. was the way in which its opening theme embraces all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, while there is certainly some shock of the new in Beethoven's First Symphony (also being played over at the Royal Festival Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Jurowski, such are the Read more ...
David Nice
Three concerts, three fascinating venues, seven world-class young(ish) players, an audience of all ages and a musical storytelling event for 200 schoolchildren: this is how to launch a festival with outwardly modest means. Artistic Director of Classical Vauxhall Fiachra Garvey already has form, as the founder of the West Wicklow Festival (of chamber music), in the part of Ireland where he accommodates his schedule "to help with the yearly lambing, dipping, shearing, harvesting and all the other elegant and refined activities of home" (he was delighted, he told us, to discover Vauxhall's City Read more ...
David Nice
"What is it about Mozart?" asked Sviatoslav Richter in 1982. "Is there a pianist alive who really manages to play him well?...Haydn is infinitely less difficult to play (he's almost easy, in fact). So what is Mozart's secret?" Just over a decade later, he went a long way towards unlocking that secret in a Moscow recital, playing three sonatas and the C minor Fantasia in Grieg's two-piano adaptations with Elisabeth Leonskaja, the younger colleague whose playing he so inspired. And I'm sure that if he were alive today, he would have given the ultimate accolade to his one-time protégée's recital Read more ...
David Nice
Assuming the world holds together that long, there will be something we can rely on annually all the way to 2041, the 250th anniversary of Mozart's death: among the celebrations each year, a Wigmore Hall concert like this one, placing Amadeus among the other composers of his time, great and small(er). For very occasion we'll trust the brilliant Ian Page to assemble a crack team of players and to introduce us to new voices of outstanding quality.Last night it was the turn of soprano Samantha Clarke, not long graduated from the Guildhall School, taking its 2019 gold medal, and flagged up here Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Switch off for a phrase or two and it’s easy to miss the point in a Haydn symphony that makes each one of them odd and unique. In No. 74, played last night with understated class by the English Chamber Orchestra, that point occurs in the first movement, at the end of the second theme. All has gone just as you’d expect. A three-chord call to attention – only one more than the so-revolutionary Eroica – and straight to the business of the day, a worker ant of a melody, busying around with inscrutably purposeful energy. The second theme swoops in – then stops, like a sparrow at the end of a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
No great innovations in this Seraglio – as ETO are styling Mozart’s early Singspiel (its full title in translation is The Abduction from the Seraglio – but a traditional staging that makes the most of all the work’s characters and quirks. Mozart’s evocation of an exotic, and unknown, Oriental world is perfectly rendered by director Stephen Medcalf, who finds an ideal balance between the various love interests and the regular invitations to slapstick comedy. He does it all with a light touch, and with a real focus on the characters – all well cast. Sets are modest – it’s a touring show – but Read more ...