Tchaikovsky
Gavin Dixon
Sitting in a huge marquee on a June evening, with the sun peeking through every gap in the canopy, it is quite a stretch to imagine yourself in the remote countryside of rural Russia. But this new production of Eugene Onegin manages that, and with a minimum of means.This performance was the first from the Young Artists team at Holland Park. The main cast premiered the show on 31 May, but two performances and two school matinees, are being given by this completely separate line-up, with its own cast, director and conductor. The aim is artist development, and it is an impressive programme, now Read more ...
David Nice
National sensitivities are running understandably high right now in the thick of an ever-escalating aggression. What a shame that the Southbank Centre has excluded Russian artists from performing alongside British and Ukrainian performers to bring a message of peace through the arts in their upcoming fundraiser. Not so "Dance for Ukraine" at the London Coliseum, including Natalia Osipova in its line-up.Other cases of discrimination are emerging. In Switzerland the Ittingen Charterhouse has just cancelled a cello-and-piano recital, claiming that "the reason is the Russian nationality of the Read more ...
Ian Julier
Having conducted two Discovery programmes with the LSO after being a finalist in the 2016 Donatella Flick competition, London-born Kerem Hasan went on to win the Nestlé and Salzburg Festival Young Conductors Award in 2017. Operatic entrées arrived swiftly with his appointment as Associate Conductor at WNO, and a notable Glyndebourne debut with their recent touring revival of The Rake’s Progress followed by Rossini’s L'italiana in Algeri in Innsbruck, where he has been Chief Conductor of the Tirol SO since 2019. March this year sees him at ENO for Così, so no surprise that this Bournemouth Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The legendary quip of a sophisticated ballet critic that we are all one Nutcracker nearer death never rang so true as now. One goes to the theatre with one’s heart in one’s mouth, behind the partypooping mask.Matthew Bourne’s dance panto Nutcracker! had its very fresh charms in 1992 – the classical skit that launched a path to a knighthood, naughtiness nicely bedecked in every shade of pink, on stage and in innuendo. I observed from its press night audience at Sadler’s Wells last night that a good half of them could not have been out of nappies in 1992, or even born. A generation of Read more ...
Ian Julier
Welcome back Andrew Litton, Conductor Laureate of the Bournemouth Symphony, for the latest of many happy annual returns since his tenure as Principal Conductor between 1988 and 1994.Lighthouse was thronged with devoted supporters for both the performance and pre-concert talk in which the conductor highlighted the balletic thread of a programme inspired by his ongoing work as Music Director of the New York City Ballet and works choreographed and performed there by the legendary George Balanchine.Litton had amusingly signed off his talk saying how much he was looking forward to performing the Read more ...
David Nice
Peasant harvesters enter from the facsimile of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington garden to the right (stage left) of the state-of-the-art pavilion and, splendidly led by a solo tenor (Dominick Felix), burst into song. The temptation is to burst into tears, for this is the first time, surely, any of us has heard a rich, full chorus live for over a year. From the pit, the Philharmonia players, a day after their Festival Hall triumph with Esa-Pekka Salonen, sound as lush as you could possibly want in Tchaikovsky’s glorious score, and if all bar one of the principals aren’t quite ideal, the Read more ...
David Nice
Two regrets and a tentative hope before full praise for what has to be the best complete Swan Lake in concert ever. Not everyone will be sorry, as I am, that Jurowski chose for his grand leavetaking as music director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra Tchaikovsky’s first ballet over his second, The Sleeping Beauty, with its far more elaborate and experimental orchestral palette (have any of the three been conducted in full until now at the Royal Festival Hall since I heard Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Beauty as part of a very sparse audience in 1978?). This film was made Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Why, in Lieder singing above all, should an outpouring of deep feeling so frighten critics? Alice Coote’s unabashed emotionalism as a recitalist can sometimes bring out the worst in the stiff-upper-lip brigade, as reactions to her high-impact Winterreise (last given at the Wigmore prior to the current lockdown) revealed. At least with Tchaikovsky’s song output, no one can plausibly claim that they really ought to be delivered with strait-laced placidity. Yet what struck me about this ambitious programme of his songs, interspersed with Russian poems spoken by Ralph Fiennes, was Coote’s ability Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If dance lovers have learnt anything in recent months it's to take nothing for granted. How could we ever have been so blasé about The Nutcracker, whose annual reappearance in multiple productions was as inevitable as crowds on Oxford Street? As a long-departed dance critic once Eeyorishly observed, each year “brings us one Nutcracker closer to death”, a quip that now has a bleaker resonance than even he can have intended.In 2020, productions of Tchaikovsky’s evergreen two-act ballet were planned by almost all the UK’s ballet companies, but only a smattering of performances took place before Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berliner Philharmoniker/Kirill Petrenko: Music by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Franz Schmidt, Rudi Stephan (Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings)Kirill Petrenko’s supposed indifference to making recordings is overstated: there’s a whole load of stuff to watch on the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall, and own-label CD releases have included John Adams’ The Wound Dresser and Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony. That same, excellent, Tchaikovsky performance is the one included here, made in March 2017, this five-disc box set also including a Tchaikovsky 5 taped two years later. This takes a Read more ...
David Nice
“Live music is back,” runs the Barbican's latest slogan, so treasure it and get out there while you can. Thursday evening in London offered an embarrassment of riches. I chose the City of London Sinfonia live in Southwark Cathedral over the Kanneh-Masons on the other side of the Thames in the Barbican only because I knew I could catch up with the family live on screen later. My colleague Jessica Duchen was one of the lucky few in the Royal Festival Hall for violinist Tasmin Little’s farewell recital.You could also have taken your pick, if you could get a ticket, between two pianists – Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As Dvořák’s "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka rose to its impassioned climax, Natalya Romaniw had to battle a helicopter thumping overhead. The helicopter lost (well, of course it did). As Nardus Williams and David Butt Phillip disappeared into the wings after a heart-rending "O soave fanciulla" from La Bohème, a squirrel scampered centre-stage to fill the dramatic vacuum. Anna Patalong and Ross Ramgobin’s wistful COVID-era take on "La ci darem la mano" from Mozart's Don Giovanni (pictured below) made sure that fingers never touched, but lent a previously unknown erotic frisson to a Read more ...