Britten
Richard Bratby
The CBSO is justifiably proud of its association with Benjamin Britten. There’s rather less proof that he reciprocated, dismissing the orchestra as "second-rate" after it premiered his War Requiem in 1962. Throughout the 1950s, he’d repeatedly promised to write an orchestral work for Birmingham, only to renege on the deal after the orchestra’s then chief conductor Rudolf Schwarz moved on to the BBC in 1957. What the CBSO did get from Britten, in September 1954, was the world premiere of an unwieldy Symphonic Suite from what's generally agreed to be one of his patchier operas, the 1953 Read more ...
David Nice
What's not to like, or love, would have to be the sensible response to both the opening programme of Kings Place's year-long Cello Unwrapped festival at Kings Place and its life-enhancing execution. Symmetries abounded – between Alban Gerhardt's double-stopping summons with the "Canto Primo" of Britten's First Cello Suite at the start and his late-night farewell symphony, Kodály's towering Sonata for solo cello; also between two glistening suites for which the label "neo-Baroque" is too narrow, Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin and Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Nicholas Collon and his Aurora players Read more ...
David Nice
"That cursed mist" may hide the French from the crew of the HMS Indomitable and cause far more deadly damage to moral certainty. But clarity and strength are the assets of Orpha Phelan's new production for Opera North: no gimmicks, superb company work and three principals for the battle of good and evil all equal to their dramatic challenges at a level I haven't seen for decades.Britten and his co-librettists EM Forster and Eric Crozier pose some challenges in their adaptation of Melville's story, all well handled here: there's a bit too much moralising, especially about avenging angels and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Owen Wingrave is the Britten opera that always comes with a caveat, an apology. Dramatically flawed (a problem partially, but by no means entirely, accounted for by its genesis as a television opera) and musically uneven, it has nevertheless emerged recently as a favourite choice for young singers, with Guildhall (2013), the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2016) and now British Youth Opera (2016) all choosing to stage it, with varying degrees of success.Owen, last of the soldiering clan of the Wingraves, leaves officer training, casting his family’s history aside in favour of an avowed Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is too other-worldly to have anything as mortal as a musical heartbeat. Pulsing through it instead are musical quivers, jolts of eerie energy first heard in the opening cello glissandi. Denaturing the instrument, transforming it from a voice so nearly human to one of harmonic and textural androgyny, Britten cuts away the safety cables of Shakespeare’s framing court scenes, plunging his young lovers straight into the fairy forest where anything is possible and nothing is as it seems. As a theatrical sleight of hand it’s almost impossible to match, but Peter Read more ...
David Nice
As the hand-held credits popped up on screen to pianist and musical director Manoj Kamps's superb quartet arrangement of Mozart's Magic Flute Overture, the European Union's Culture Programme logo brought a spontaneous burst of applause. Not the norm for Suffolk this week, I'm told, but this audience knew how international opera is, how we're all connected in Europe's musical world.A year and a half after its inception as a collaboration between the Aix-en-Provence Festival and the European Network of Opera Academies – I was there at the very first meeting but had not seen the show until last Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Memo to self: never read the director’s programme essay. Jacob Dorrell, director of the University of Birmingham’s summer production of Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera at the Barber Institute, explains: “I wanted to bring to the Barber stage a community of people one would never expect to appear in an opera: today’s working-class community.” Dorrell is a young director, early in his career, so let’s leave aside the fact that his vision of “today’s working-class community” – a world of jeggings, leopard print, trackie bottoms and midriff-baring maternity wear – seems to come out of Coronation Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Nothing galvanises an audience quite like physical risk. As soprano Sarah Tynan rose on a hoop into the darkness, intoning the final words of "Départ" from Britten's song cycle Les Illuminations, you could almost hear her heart race. Beneath, a troupe of circus performers held the rope – and her life – in their hands.In choreographer/director Struan Leslie’s vision, performers decked out as Rimbaud’s "sturdy rogues" brought sinew, grace and heart-stopping spectacle to a night illuminated by explosive, raw-fresh string music: it was all about the vertical.For Leslie, Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
David Nice
Cherrypicking from 17 concerts to come up with the one by last year's Leeds International Piano Competition winner may seem a bit unfair to the French Institute's ever more ambitious annual It's All About Piano! Festival. It was hard, for instance, to miss out on the youth element, the Satie bookending the weekend's events, or for that matter the absolute star of the festival two years ago, David Kadouch, who then gave one of the best, and most intriguingly programmed, recitals I've ever heard and teamed up for a Saturday night duo recital with Adam Laloum. Let's just say that the alternative Read more ...
geoff brown
In the deep recesses of my brain lies a distant memory of an early lesson in musical appreciation in primary school. Excerpts from Beethoven’s "Pastoral" Symphony were being played. The teacher asked us what images came to mind. The answers came fairly quickly, prodded by the music’s title: a babbling brook, a thunderstorm, twittering birds. I was on my way.That childhood scene suddenly popped up during this spotty BBC Symphony Orchestra concert. It featured the latest manifestation of a burgeoning trend to do the audience’s visual imagining for them by commissioning a film-maker and dangling Read more ...
David Nice
Back in 1949, Britten’s Let’s Make an Opera, with its enduring second part The Little Sweep, blazed a trail for children’s opera in Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall. Little has changed about this generously-sized village institute – a funding appeal for much-needed renovations is under way – and Jenni Wake-Walker’s Jubilee Opera is still waving the banner for music education with works that make the right sort of demands. The Drummer Boy of Waterloo, marking the bicentenary of that most famous of battles, is the latest.After Britten, this vital genre didn’t exactly flourish, in the UK at least – Read more ...
David Nice
A Hawksmoor church ought to be the right setting for the psychological terror of Britten’s great chamber opera, a slanted but still chilling adaptation of Henry James's novella. True, the once-deroofed interior has been coolly revamped as a rehearsal and performance venue, but imaginative lighting and a clear acting space, with room for a 13-piece ensemble to the side, ought to do the trick.Unfortunately this setting, straight from Aldeburgh, isn’t exactly that for what its "conceivers" describe as “not a conventionally staged production… not ‘semi-staged’, nor… a concert performance”. It’s Read more ...