Baroque
Boyd Tonkin
It never rains but it pours – and hails, snows or, above all, thunders. The presiding tone of Semele, in Adele Thomas’s new production for Glyndebourne, matches the current English summer with its grey skies, glowering clouds and stormy outbursts. Jove’s evidently in a rage, despite his rejuvenating lust for the Theban king’s daughter, Semele. He’s not the only one: the first of many lightning-bolts – designed by Peter Mumford with Rick Fisher – that flash around Annemarie Woods’s crepusular set illuminate lonely Juno, spurned and seething spouse of the heavenly overlord. Her dogged quest for Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Cotswold Line railway stations currently sport posters for Alex James’s “Big Feastival”, in which the ex-Blur bassist hosts a food-and-music jamboree on his cheese-making farm. Just up the road at Longborough Festival Opera, the crowd gathered on stage for the nuptials of Orfeo and Euridice would fit snugly in chez James as well.For Olivia Fuchs’s new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, an arch wreathed in laurels presides over a chilled-out parade of casual summer wear, with glam accessories, as the rock-god singer finally gets to wed his beloved. An atmosphere of B-list villeggiatura, more Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Escapees from Eurovision in Westminster on Saturday night might have discovered that a continent-wide enthusiasm for crowd-pleasing international styles arose long before the age of glitzy pop. Two accomplished Spanish groups performed at St John’s Smith Square within this year’s London Festival of Baroque Music. Both came with an attractive, unfamiliar 18th-century repertoire from their homeland. It showed that, across the decades from Handel to Haydn, the hegemonic sounds of Italy could be zestfully customised to suit national tastes. Within the tried-and-tested formulas for a Euro hit, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
St Mark’s shadow fell gloriously over the Wigmore Hall last night with a programme of Christmas music performed in, or inspired by, the great basilica of Venice. The Dunedin Consort braided festive works from pioneers who wrote for its grandly sonorous spaces – Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Grandi – with pieces by their German visitor and student Heinrich Schütz, culminating with his Christmas Story (1660).No one knows better than the Dunedins’ director John Butt how risky it is to posit historical “authenticity” for any interpretation of music composed four centuries or more ago (he wrote a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s been a quiet storm of critical approval building around Weyes Blood. American singer Natalie Mering has been releasing music for over a decade but, during the last two or three years a tailwind of positive verbiage has blown her faster forward. Her last album, Titanic Rising, the first of a loose trilogy, of which this is the second part, made low level inroads to commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, a fine balance of delicate singer-songwriter fare and something more baroque, has the potential to go further.Imagine the strident, indie- Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A dream pairing of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and early-keyboard wizard Kristian Bezuidenhout marked St Cecilia’s Day at the Wigmore Hall with a programme that celebrated music made not in the Black Forest but beside the Thames.Both halves of their concert matched works by Purcell with the fruits of Handel’s early years in London. The German period-instrument stars, with a gifted group of home-grown singers, were directed from the harpsichord (and Baroque organ) by the South African-born Australian fortepianist. Together, they managed to make a cosmopolitan case for musical continuity in Read more ...
David Nice
Handel’s audiences must have taken a very long time to settle – at least an act, to judge from the mostly inconsequential music of Alcina’s first hour. Lovely: we’re on an enchanted isle where puritanical people have been transformed into animal-headed courtiers, and a love-imbroglio merits only a “so what?” Richard Jones and his singers keep it lively and focused, but the bounce needed from Christian Curnyn and the Royal Opera House Orchestra doesn’t come.Eventually the charm of the personalities and the consistency of the staging win over, but it does show how much a conductor’s pacing Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
During the final act of Tamerlano, James Conway’s new production for English Touring Opera has the titular tyrant lead a captive king around the stage on a chain. Given the oppressive, deadlocked mood of Handel’s opera and this interpretation, you may recall Pozzo and Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: that frozen dialectic of master and slave in which power traps its holder as much as its victim. Conway’s farewell gift to ETO, after two decades of high achievement as artistic director, Tamerlano is sung with terrific verve and dramatic credibility by an impressive young cast. This Read more ...
Robert Beale
Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical music.That’s a big ambition, as the two might seem to have little in common. But Anna Himali Howard’s simple production concept of a marriage celebration, where Orpheus is a white British guy and Eurydice an Asian girl, set in the back garden of a semi-detached house – probably in Leeds – is a symbol of the whole enterprise.The design (Leslie Travers Read more ...
Tom Carr
When the pandemic closed in, Canadian experimental indie rock troupe Arcade Fire were on the cusp of heading into the studio to record their new album. COVID had other plans. But rather than pause, the husband and wife duo of Win and Regine Butler continued to work on more songs together. As they admit, this has ended up being the longest time they’ve spent writing for an album.The result, WE, is a concise, 40 minute LP that explores the experience of living through a pandemic: the first side is emotive and dark, tinged with isolation and fear; the latter half brighter and celebratory, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In Handel’s operas (as, indeed, elsewhere in art and life) the worst witch may turn out to have the best character. Without the sorceress Melissa, splendidly full of evil ruses yet endowed with a generous measure of tragic pathos, Amadigi di Gaula might freeze into a static amorous stand-off between pasteboard nobles contending with a harsh – then, suddenly, kindly – fate.Thank goodness that Irish soprano Anna Devin, as the lovelorn enchantress, graces Netia Jones's ingenious if somewhat hyper-active production of Handel’s 1715 heroic romance in Garsington Opera’s pavilion at Wormsley. In a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Well, it wasn’t quite Messiah, but it was a source of joy. In ENO’s end-of-lockdown staging, BBC Two’s transmission of Handel’s resurrection song delivered a scant 54 minutes of music from the Coliseum on Easter Saturday. In contrast, two ancient Poirot movies, staples of Bank Holiday line-ups roughly since the Pleistocene Era, had hogged fully four hours of the channel’s afternoon schedule. Miserly, timid, cheese-paring, grudging: the Proms partially excepted, BBC TV’s default attitude to classical music never fails to disappoint – even when the oratorio in question has been a beloved pillar Read more ...