Mozart
David Nice
"Mitsuko Uchida plays Mozart" might have been the marketing tag to sell out this first concert in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's 2017-18 season (despite student and free under-18s take-up, the Usher Hall still wasn't full). "Dvořák Symphony No. 8" was in fact the headline, marking the launch of Robin Ticciati's last series as the SCO's hugely successful Principal Conductor. As it turned out, Berlioz's early Overture Les Francs-Juges offered the real shake-up of the evening, the shock of the new as good as a contemporary work – better than most instances – with an unusual complement for 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 ...
Richard Bratby
Apparently it was Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s idea to invite Jörg Widmann to be the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Artist in Residence this season – indeed, according to backstage rumours she made the phone call herself. If that’s true, it’s a hugely encouraging bit of intelligence. Widmann’s the perfect choice of artist to surf the energy that Gražinytė-Tyla is currently generating in Birmingham. He’s a charismatic soloist, and a composer of music with real potential audience appeal: flamboyant, vivid, grounded in (but never inhibited by) tradition, and madly in love with the sound Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Richard Goode is one of the world’s great pianists, but you wouldn’t guess it from his humble and unpretentious stage manner. He wears thick glasses and squints into the music, and when he plays he sings along under his breath. When he is not playing, he often turns and gestures vaguely at the orchestra, not so much aping the conductor as moving with the flow of the music. He clearly lives every note, and everything he does is to the service of the score.Not virtuoso showmanship, then, and little bravado, though his playing is always lucid and engaging. That’s an ideal combination for Mozart’ Read more ...
Robert Beale
Every 21st birthday deserves a party, and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester celebrated the anniversary of its opening with a weekend of fun and "access" events, ending with a recital by four pianists on its four Steinway pianos – playing them all at once, in eight-hand arrangements.It was very different from the opening 21 years ago, when orchestras dominated the programmes. This time even Manchester Camerata, the chamber orchestra with which the hall co-promotes events, moved round the corner to play in the gallery at HOME, a newer arts centre. But one of the early discoveries about this Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Vienna Philharmonic makes a beautiful sound, no question about that: the question is what to do with it. Michael Tilson Thomas has some ideas, but they are mostly low-key. He is currently touring with the orchestra, and seems to have been chosen as a safe pair of hands, offering elegant and lyrical interpretations, but without any extravagance. The result was a concert that was all about the orchestra, and although the players had a few rough patches, it fully justified their world-class standing.Even so, it was often hard to shake the feeling that Tilson Thomas was playing it safe. His Read more ...
graham.rickson
Morag Tinto’s documentary is a profile of composer Alma Deutscher, who hit the headlines at the end of last year when her opera based on the Cinderella story premiered in Vienna. What’s unusual about that, you might ask? Apart from being female, Alma was 11 years old when she finished writing it. Eleven. Think about it. I can’t recall much about my own talents at that age, apart from being able to tie my own shoelaces and build passable models out of Lego.Alma is the real deal; frighteningly talented but disarmingly likeable. We see her at the family home in Surrey, the footage intercut with Read more ...
David Nice
For the first time ever Paavo Järvi has been showing other nations why the Estonian Festival Orchestra is among the world's best – travelling to other Nordic countries after their annual gathering in Estonia’s summer capital of Pärnu, with the big bastions of Vienna and Berlin to come early next year. I caught their first ever trip abroad, a fleeting visit to Jūrmala just outside the Latvian capital Riga, two hours south of Pärnu passing nothing but forests, rivers, lakes and the occasional small settlement. And then it was back to base in the loveliest of seaside towns, and what remained of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Before reuniting us in high spirits with a pair of much-loved old friends, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante and Brahms's Second Symphony, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi at the Proms took us into a darker, and unexpectedly affecting, place. Written for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Flamma by Järvi’s fellow-Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür evokes the mysterious, and terrifying, power of fire with a nod to its sacred role in Aboriginal culture.In June, just on the other side of Kensington from the Royal Albert Hall, Londoners witnessed and felt that power in the most horrific Read more ...
David Nice
So much light in the Glyndebourne production of Brett Dean's Hamlet; so much darkness in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito according to director Claus Guth. Something is irredeemably rotten in the state of ancient Rome, at odds with the fundamental enlightenment and radiance of Mozart's last complete opera. And yet the basis is a sentimental one: two little boys playing around a lake not dissimilar to Glyndebourne's grow up for one – the fundamentally loving Sesto – to betray the other, Emperor Titus. Is the shooting of a wild magpie which betrayed the idyll to be replayed in adult human terms? I Read more ...
David Nice
When Glyndebourne's Music Director Robin Ticciati conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the new production of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito starting tonight, you can be sure that it will sound utterly fresh, startling even. As did their collaboration on two earlier Mozart operas, La finta giardiniera in 2014 and Die Entführung aus dem Serail the following season – and, in a class of its own, his richly vindicated decision to conduct the last three Mozart symphonies with his Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a single evening last October.This three-act orchestral drama, with the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Clonter Opera is a finishing school for young opera performers, with its own well appointed theatre and professional administration and artistic direction, based on a farm in Cheshire near Jodrell Bank. It’s seen a succession of promising young post-conservatoire singers come to perform in fully staged productions for many years, and is also (from an audience point of view) the only countryside summer opera venue of any substance in the north of England. It even manages to accommodate the entire house capacity with proper, covered eating facilities under its roof – appropriate to the local Read more ...