18th century
Justine Elias
The opening images of Tornado are striking. A wild-haired young woman in Japanese peasant garb runs for her life through a barren forest and across burnt-orange fields. As her pursuers, a rough-looking band of thieves, draw nearer, she seeks refuge in a seemingly deserted mansion. Where are we? When are we?Tornado’s title card informs us that we’re in the British Isles – actually, Scotland – c. 1790, but fans of director John Maclean’s first film, Slow West, will be familiar with this cinematic landscape of brutal virtues, a place where myth, mist, and murder combine to overwhelm the senses. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With French baroque opera all but banished from the UK’s major opera companies, it’s left to concert halls and country houses to fill the void. There’s a full-length treat ahead this summer with Rameau’s opéra-ballet Les Indes Galantes at Hampshire’s Grange Festival, but first Temple Music served up an amuse-bouche from Christian Curnyn and his Early Opera Company.Before there was George Bernard Shaw (or My Fair Lady, for that matter) there was Rameau’s take on the myth of Pygmalion – the artist so in love with his own creation that she comes to life. The composer’s one-act opera is the Read more ...
Giulio Cesare, The English Concert, Bicket, Barbican review - 10s across the board in perfect Handel
David Nice
Is Giulio Cesare in Egitto, to give the full title, Handel’s best and shapeliest opera? Glyndebourne’s revival of the legendary David McVicar production last year made it seem so, not least thanks to the presence of two of last night’s soloists, Louise Alder as Cleopatra and Beth Taylor as Cornelia. Highlight of 2022 was the English Concert’s more sparely presented Serse. This concert Cesare from that stable lived up to both standards.Star billing in the Barbican’s publicity was national treasure Alder (pictured below with Meili Li), and not unreasonably so: Cleopatra’s pearl necklace of Read more ...
David Nice
Full marks to the Royal Opera for good planning: one first night knocking us all sideways with the darkest German operatic tragedy followed by another letting us off the hook with a short comedy by Wagner’s compatriot Telemann. The premiere of Pimpinone predates that of Die Walküre by nearly a century and a half and we mark its 300th anniversary this year. But is it too slight for resurrection?Initially I wondered. The first of Telemann’s three acts, each originally placed as an intermezzo within the composer’s adaptation of Handel’s opera seria Tamerlano for his polyglot city of Hamburg Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
When Giuseppe Torelli made the journey from his birthplace of Verona to Bologna in the late 17th century, the trumpet was still seen as something of a brash outsider, suitable for military displays but not for sophisticated music ensembles. Within decades, it would seem perfectly natural for both Vivaldi and Bach to write major works featuring the trumpet.But both owed a considerable debt to Torelli who – beyond being Vivaldi’s teacher – put the instrument on the map by composing 30 concertos for it. So it’s not difficult to see why La Serenissima launched its glorious, vibrant celebration of Read more ...
Simon Thompson
I was in Germany last week, and nearly every town I went to was advertising a St Matthew or a St John Passion taking place in the week up to Easter. It says something about how deeply engrained Bach’s Passion settings are in German culture that they can muster up so many performances while, in most years, we in Scotland get only one for the whole country.What a one it is, though. The Dunedin Consort are leaders in this repertoire and their acres of experience tell with every well-turned phrase, every carefully shaped cadence, and every dramatically pointed chord that gives life, meaning and Read more ...
David Nice
When you’ve already come as close as possible to perfection in the greatest masterpiece, why risk a repeat performance with a difference? Because Bach’s St Matthew Passion needs to be an annual fixture without routine, and because inspirational IBO director Peter Whelan can be guaranteed not only to recapture the magic but to try a few new things, and to choose new soloists with fine judgement.Two replacements matched the impact of last year's Evangelist and alto 1. Having got over the astonishment at the perfect countertenor, Hugh Cutting, in 2024, it was always a given that the great Helen Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That friend you have who hates musicals – probably male, probably straight, probably not seen one since The Sound of Music on BBC 1 after the Queen’s Speech in 1978 – well, don’t send them to Charing Cross Theatre for this show. But that other friend you have – enjoyed Hamilton, likes a bit of Sondheim, seen a couple of operas – do send them. They’re not guaranteed to like Stiletto, but they’ll find it interesting at worst and, whisper it because it's a new musical, they might actually thank you! We’re in 18th century Venice, pleasingly evoked by Ceri Calf's atmospheric set design and Anna Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Over the last three years of the London Handel Festival, two experimental productions have proved to be highlights – not just of the festival itself – but of the musical year. In 2023, Adele Thomas’s In The Realms of Sorrow brought sweat, muscularity and subversion to four of Handel’s early cantatas with stunning effect. In 2024, Aci by the River introduced a darkly witty take from director Jack Furness, transporting us up the Thames and on to a film set where the Cyclops was incarnated as a tyrannical Italian film director.But it’s the nature of creative experiment that while sometimes you Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just now, the notion of a long-term project that concludes in 2041 sounds like an optimistic bet on the far future worthy of some 18th-century Enlightenment philosophe – Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, maybe. The musicians of The Mozartists are clearly hoping for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as their MOZART250 programme ambitiously tracks, in annual increments, the music that Wolfgang Amadeus wrote exactly 250 years ago.We’ve reached 1775, and thus last night saw a concert performance at Cadogan Hall of La finta giardiniera, written by already-accomplished late-teenager for the Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine if Bach had set Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili’s allegory of Beauty breaking free from Pleasure with the guidance of Time and Enlightenment: he’d probably have hit the spiritual highs. The 21-year-old Handel, at least as this multifaceted performance so vigorously and poetically argued, plumps for hedonistic delights.Despite a radiant quiet curtain praising the truer, purer heavenly love, it was Pleasure in the shape of mezzo-in-a-thousand Helen Charlston who held us captive, along with the rainbow hues Peter Whelan drew from his phenomenally responsive Irish Baroque Orchestra in this Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Drained as they are at present of crucial funds, WNO are managing to put on only two operas this spring, and spaced out to the point where it could hardly be called a season. For their new Peter Grimes we must wait till April. Meanwhile we can relish Tobias Richter’s sparkling nine-year-old Figaro, skilfully revived, with a few tweaks, by Max Hoehn.Whatever the pressures, there is not the slightest diminution of standards. I missed the pre-pandemic revival. But Hoehn has now cut out the overture stage business (no great loss), and the opera is sung in its original Italian, which for my money Read more ...