tue 19/03/2024

Britten

Turning the Screw, King’s Head Theatre review - Britten and the not-so-innocent

David Hemmings was, by his own later admission, a knowing and bumptious boy when Britten cast him as the ill-fated Miles in his operatic adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The upheaval Hemmings wrought in Aldeburgh’s Crag House when...

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Albert Herring, Opera North review - immersive and intimate fun

Reviving Giles Havergal’s 2013 production from its “Festival of Britten” of that year, Opera North have an Albert Herring that’s both immersive and intimate, to quote their own publicity.Immersive because it was designed specifically for the...

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Perfection of a Kind: Britten vs Auden, City of London Sinfonia, QEH review - the odd couple

“Underneath the abject willow/ Lover, sulk no more;/ Act from thought should quickly follow:/ What is thinking for?” In 1936, early in their tempestuous friendship, WH Auden wrote a poem for Benjamin Britten that urged the younger artist to pursue...

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Paris Chapters, Barbier Serrano, Finegan, Ling, Bloomsbury Festival review - beguiling journey around Irishmen abroad

Young French soprano Clara Barbier Serrano has everything it takes to shine in an overcrowded singers’ world, including vivacious communicative skills – I witnessed those for the first time last Tuesday, when she performed at the Oxford...

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Peter Grimes, English National Opera review - not quite the pity or the truth

Britten’s biggest cornucopia of invention seems unsinkable, and no-one seeing his breakthrough 1945 opera for the first time in this revival will fail to register its forceful genius. David Alden’s expressionist nightmare of a production, though,...

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Nick Pritchard, Ian Tindale, Edinburgh International Festival 2023 review - a partnership in which to lose yourself

Several years ago I got chatting to a young tenor who was training at the Royal Northern College of Music. He was enjoying his studies, but complained that, as a British tenor, he got offered a lot of Britten and Handel but not an awful lot else....

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National Youth Choir of Scotland, RSNO, Bell / Quasthoff, Amatis Trio, Edinburgh International Festival 2023 review - from the heights to the depths

The National Youth Choir of Scotland have the most easily pronounceable acronym in Scottish music: everyone up here knows who you’re talking about when you mention NYCOS.They’ve been going from strength to strength under their Artistic Director,...

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Classical CDs: Nuts, bolts and blu-tac

 Michael Blake: Afrikosmos Antony Gray (piano) (Divine Art)It’s all in the name; the six volumes of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos were indeed the model for Afrikosmos, a sequence of 75 short pieces by South African composer Michael Blake (b.1951). As...

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Sinfonia of London, Wilson; Kolesnikov/Tsoy; Bozzini Quartet; Phantasm, Aldeburgh Festival review - new sounds for old

You don’t expect to visit the Britten-Pears shrine in Suffolk and come back raving about Edward Elgar. Yes, Elgar. On Sunday evening, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London brought the composer’s Second Symphony to Snape Maltings: that marshland...

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Osborne, BBC Philharmonic, Glassberg, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - energy and virtuosity

The BBC Philharmonic ended its 2022-23 season in Manchester with a programme that might have been chosen as a showpiece for virtuosity.There was orchestral virtuosity in the form of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, pianistic virtuosity in the shape...

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Classical CDs: Nursery rhymes, anvils and polar explorers

 Isata Kanneh-Mason: Childhood Tales (Decca)Ernst von Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Song is one of the great concertante works for piano and orchestra, rightly compared to a full-scale concerto by soloist Isata Kanneh-Mason. You’ll...

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Castalian String Quartet, Wigmore Hall review - late Britten keeps equally demanding company

Rigorous, hauntingly original and unlike each other, Britten’s three numbered quartets could share a programme and still stake equal claims on our attention. That might be tough on the players, but the Castalians haven’t been easy on themselves in...

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