Handel
Franco Fagioli
I started singing when I was nine years old in my primary school choir. I sang plenty of solos there before moving on to another children’s choir; that was a formative experience for me. At this point, I was singing the soprano part and from here I was invited to sing in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. This was my first experience of opera, and one that gave me great joy and satisfaction.My first major performance was as Hansel in Humperdinck's fairy-tale opera at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires. This was a special experience, on the one hand because it was one of my first leading roles and on the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Held annually every Holy Week, Kraków’s Misteria Paschalia is one of the continent’s most vibrant early music festivals. With an increasing focus on international collaborations, the 2018 edition welcomed Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort as artists in residence, and their director, Professor John Butt, as Resident Artistic Director. With early British sacred music at the fore, other European exponents of the genre included Phantasm, the Marian Consort, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and last year’s artists in residence, Le Poème Harmonique.Visiting over the Easter weekend, the first Read more ...
Ruby Hughes
Who was Giulia Frasi? This is so often the response I get when I mention the name of this Italian singer who came to London and became Handel’s last prima donna during the final decade of his life and, consequently, the supreme soprano of English music in the mid-18th century. Over the last five years or so, as I explored the music she inspired and performed, Frasi has become my own muse in a way. Music of the Baroque defines where my musical roots lie and has always been central to my repertoire. Some of my happiest memories are of performing music from this era.It was when I was researching Read more ...
graham.rickson
Lūcija Garūta: Music for Piano Reinis Zariņš (piano), Liepāja Symphony Orchestra/Atvars Lakstīgala (LMIC/SKANI)The Latvian composer Lūcija Garūta (1902-1977) reached maturity in the early days of Latvian independence, a supremely talented pianist, composer and polymath. Garūta was among the first Latvian women to drive a car, besides sailing a private yacht and pursuing an interest in science. She travelled to Paris and studied, briefly, with Alfred Cortot and Paul Dukas, identifying with Latvia’s musical “new romanticism”, a movement which sought to look forward rather than idealise Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It was the work with which Handel conquered London, the Italian opera that finally wooed a suspicious English audience to the charms of Dr Johnson’s “exotic and irrational entertainment”. Three hundred years later, neither Rinaldo nor London’s audience has changed much. The opera is still a musical patchwork of greatest hits loosely stitched together with an outrageous Crusading plot, while the opera-going crowd still doesn’t mind at all, so long as it comes with a good bit of spectacle and some baroque razzle-dazzle – both of which were abundantly supplied at the Barbican by Harry Bicket and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The advertising for La Nuova Musica’s Orlando billed it as “Handel’s most psychologically complex opera”. Whether or not you agree (and there are plenty of heavyweight rivals – Alcina, Giulio Cesare and Agrippina just for starters) there’s also the issue that it’s only half the story. Orlando may be a complicated portrait of mental instability and madness, but it’s also a magical pastoral comedy peopled with lovelorn shepherdesses and wizards, featuring quite the silliest ending of all Handel (although this too, admittedly, is a much-contested category). This performance did little to Read more ...
David Nice
There's something here for everyone, as a "roll up!" slogan for one of the greatest shows in town might put it. Even opera buffs don't seem to have found much to fault with the cornucopia of sounds, moving pictures, objects, paintings, drawings and even a working stage set handsomely displayed in the spacious areas beneath the Victoria & Albert's gleaming new Exhibition Road entrance.Discrimination proves key. "Operas and cities" is the brief, which could have sprawled or resulted in some inapposite choices, but what we have is impeccable. In the first two "theatres", it looks as if there Read more ...
graham.rickson
Antheil: A Jazz Symphony, Piano Concerto No. 1, Capital of the Word, Archipelago “Rhumba” Frank Dupree (piano), Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz/Karl-Heinz Steffens (Capriccio)George Antheil’s worst move was probably calling his 1945 autobiography Bad Boy of Music. If he'd genuinely been that naughty, he'd have become a household name instead of fading into obscurity. A recent Chandos disc of Antheil symphonies underwhelmed me, but this raucous anthology makes a much more persuasive case for Antheil's talents. Try the invigorating Jazz Symphony from 1925. Performed here in its Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How do you make a venerable warhorse frisk like a coltish show-pony? Hire William Christie as the trainer. In a performance of scintillating drama and crystal-clear definition, the past master of Baroque revival and re-invention coaxed the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its thoroughbred choir across all the tricky fences on Handel’s long and winding course. At the end of Israel in Egypt, with the Egyptians vanquished and the Israelites freed, the voice of Miriam the prophetess – one of the two soprano solo parts – exhorts her people to “Sing ye to the Lord, for he has triumphed Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
''…after various Accidents, it comes to pass that he recovers both Her and his Kingdom”. Handel's Radamisto may be a tale of warring kingdoms, noble self-sacrifice and mature, wedded love, but it’s also a fairly daft piece of dramatic belief-suspension, whose various knotty conflicts get miraculously untangled in a brisk few bars of recitative, just in time for a rousing final chorus and whatever the ancient Armenian version is of a nice cup of tea.Director John Ramster is well aware of this, embracing the opera’s idiocies along with its musical glories in his witty new production for Read more ...
David Nice
"Love is in the air," croons or rather bellows presenter Juri Tetzlaff, getting his audience of adults and children to bellow back the wordless refrain, arms swaying above their heads. Mezzo Sophie Rennert, dragged up as noble Lotario, and soprano Marie Lys as widowed princess Adelaide dance tenderly to the strains. They're not singing one of the most ravishing love duets in opera this morning because this is the one-hour family version of Handel's Lotario. And a better advertisement to the parents for the whole thing I can't imagine. The show proper is the best I've seen out of four of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To hear The English Concert playing Handel is to arrive in technicolour Oz after a lifetime of black and white baroque in Kansas. We’re not short on period bands in the UK, but few bring this music into anything like the kind of focus that Harry Bicket and his crack team of musicians achieve, nor demonstrate such love and joy in the process. The solo line-up may have been starry, but the hero of this Ariodante was the orchestra.Even by Handel’s standards, the plot of Ariodante is a curious one. A happy beginning and ending frame a central conflict of disturbing darkness (a Much Ado-style Read more ...