Handel
alexandra.coghlan
What’s the collective noun for mezzo-sopranos? A "warble"? A "might"? A "trouser"? Whatever it is, it doesn’t get a lot of usage outside a choral context. Where in opera would you ever find multiple mezzos sharing a stage? Hardly anywhere. Except, that is, in contemporary castings of baroque operas.Joyce DiDonato may have been the headliner for Handel’s Alcina at the Barbican last night, but add Alice Coote and Christine Rice to the mix – both singers more than capable of dominating a stage on their own – and you have something approaching glorious excess. Combine them all in a single trio (“ Read more ...
theartsdesk
He was not only a bracing conductor/harpsichordist pioneer in period-instrument authenticity, writes David Nice, but also a gentleman and a scholar. My only direct acquaintance with Christopher Hogwood, who died earlier this week at the age of 73, was in two projects dear to his heart: the recording of Handel’s Orlando, mentioned by its countertenor star James Bowman below as a highlight of his career, and his phenomenally well researched Haydn symphonies series, both for that handsomely logo-ed early music branch of Decca known as L’Oiseau-Lyre.Hogwood was very much a part of my own Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
God it’s good to laugh in an opera house. Not a hear-how-clever-I-am-to-get-the-laborious-operatic-joke laugh, or an I-realise-this-is-supposed-to-be-funny-so-I’m-playing-along one, but a real, spontaneous laugh that tickles into sound before you’ve even had time to register its approach. Back for its second appearance, Robert Carsen’s Glyndebourne Rinaldo is ingenious and witty, joyous and completely over-the-top, and the best possible ending to this year’s summer opera season.Back in 2011 the show was great, but still felt like a work-in-progress. Three years on, and Rinaldo is back and Read more ...
David Nice
The sprightly tread of Handel’s Queen of Sheba, attended by two wonderful Turkish oboists, wove the most fragile of gold threads between full orchestral exotica and Rameau motets of infinite variety last night. Not that any more links need be found: it’s the addition of the late night events which turns the Proms into a real festival, not the mere concatenation of concerts you might find in the main orchestral season. And no-one could have asked for a higher level of engagement last night from either Austrian live wire Sascha Goetzel and his amazingly high level Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Read more ...
Sarah Connolly
I felt so shocked by the events that took place during the premiere of Handel’s Ariodante on 3 July in the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence last week, and so disappointed that our painstaking work with director Richard Jones over the last six weeks had been so comprehensively ruined, that I felt I should document what happened.I am avoiding making any political comments. For a full explanation of the situation concerning the confederated unions of arts workers in France known as Les intermittents, read this article from 2012. Black sheets daubed in white painted slogans (banner pictured Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The latest in a series of "Pinnock’s Passions" concerts at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse saw the doyen of period instrument performance lead a delightful exploration of Handel the musical borrower, entitled "Handel’s Garden". As Trevor Pinnock writes in the programme notes, "throughout his life as a composer he had the habit of taking cuttings, transplanting and grafting from works old and new".In parts this involved playing the original pieces, for instance arias by Reinhard Keiser and Agostino Steffani, followed by Handel’s magpie reworking of them (in Semele and Theodora). Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was smart programming. The final night of London's Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music presented the forces of the Göttingen Ha(e)ndel Festival. Both festivals - the London one ended last night, the Göttingen one starts next week - have taken as their theme this year the tercentenary of the Hanoverian accession, and there is no town which wears its associations with the Hanoverian/British monarchs with quite so much pride as Göttingen; it owes its main souce of an identity, the existence of its university, to Georg-August, the King we know in Britain as George II (statue of William IV Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The last time the BBC dramatised the creation of a great musical work, it didn’t quite hit the spot. Eroica starred Ian Hart as Beethoven glowering at the heart of a drama which had rather less of a narrative through-line than the symphony it honoured. For Messiah at the Foundling Hospital, the BBC have gone to the other extreme and kept eggs out of the one basket. There was a bit of drama, a bit of documentary, some costumed musical performance and there were even two presenters to come at the story from opposite angles. The potential for hodge-podgery was considerable.The story of Coram’s Read more ...
David Nice
Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 “comedy for music” about love, money and masquerading in a putative 18th-century Vienna, is a repertoire staple around the world. Continental houses throw it together without a moment’s thought, a single rehearsal (Felicity Lott memorably recalls a Vienna Staatsoper performance in which the first time her character, the Marschallin, met the mezzo singing the trousers role of her young lover Octavian was when they woke up in bed together at the beginning of the opera).Glyndebourne is different, with a luxuriously long Read more ...
David Nice
If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves. Because it doesn’t happen often in opera that all the elements combine for total musical theatre that stuns: in this case, two great voices – Rebecca Evans’s soprano and Iestyn Davies’s countertenor – at what sounds like the peak of their stylish careers, an orchestra under the exceptional Christian Curnyn totally fused with what’s happening on stage, and an ingenious set from Read more ...
David Nice
Oslo is a winter wonderland, and adults seem to be outnumbered by children, flocking from all over Norway to Disney on Ice. It’s the deep snow and the silence in pockets of the city rather than the kids which make me wonder if anyone has set Handel’s Alcina in the icy lair of C S Lewis’s White Witch, with hero Ruggiero as Edmund fed Turkish delight from the magic phial. There's even a captive lion. Francesco Negrin’s straightforwardly magical production - look, no metatext! - at the sparkling newish Oslo Opera House does a fine job conjuring a snow-free magic island full of adult sexual Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Barbican’s ongoing season of baroque operas and oratorios has been a mixed bag. Most recently The Sixteen’s Jephtha was a rather lacklustre affair, leaving me nervous of committing to the many hours of Handel’s beautiful (but protracted) Theodora. But I needn’t have worried. Harry Bicket and The English Concert gave this late work all the pep and personality that was so lacking last week, driving it through its rather uneven acts to a conclusion of sudden pathos and beauty.It helped that Bicket had booked a dream-team of soloists, led by Rosemary Joshua as chilly heroine Theodora Read more ...