Strauss
theartsdesk
Even more deserving of the sobriquet “the beautiful voice” than Renée Fleming, the natural successor who virtually copyrighted it, Kiri te Kanawa was one of the great sopranos of the 20th century. With those big, candid brown eyes and bone structure she’s still a beauty, as the images of her cameo role in the Royal Opera’s La Fille du régiment underline. The voice now – well, as I wrote in my review of Monday’s opening, it’s what you’d expect of a 70 year old with form. Last night was the big birthday with Downton Abbey butler Carson (Jim Carter) wheeling on the cake for that other stately Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).It was Sir Mark Elder’s turn to step up for his first appearance in the series, and he drew some glorious sound from the Hallé, while being Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“How tired we are of travelling,” the soprano sings, underscored by a solo horn. The end is near: “Is this perhaps death?” No fuss, no drama, but weariness and a calm acceptance. Since Strauss and his wife Pauline were in their eighties and living quietly in Switzerland when he wrote Four Last Songs, it is clear that they had come to terms with their inevitable demise. In the end musically, Strauss pays touching tribute to his wife, the soprano, and to his father, Franz, the horn player. Throughout, we have the soaring vocal line supported by the brass. Here, that combination reaches its Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There are occasions when just one band isn’t enough. Hence the rare experience of the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic joining forces for a performance, in the Strauss’s Voice series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, of An Alpine Symphony under Juanjo Mena. With around 130 players at his command, on stage and off, along with wind and thunder machines, xylophone, castanets, cowbells and other paraphernalia, Mena had the palette for vividly bringing out all the richness of the orchestral colour.Since this was Strauss’s last tone-poem, 15 years in the making since a day Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s all about the voice – Strauss’s Voice, which is the title of the series of concerts being given by the musical forces of Manchester to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. It is becoming a happy custom these days for the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic, the Manchester Camerata, the Royal Northern College of Music and Bridgewater Hall to collaborate on the big occasions. Over the next couple of months, they will between them present all the orchestral songs as well as great orchestral works in a dozen concerts and other events, devoted to Richard Strauss.As honorary patron of the series, Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Song of Paradise: Piano music by Reginald King Mark Bebbington (Somm)Reginald King (1904-1991) was a child prodigy, and taught at the Royal Academy of Music in the 1920s. In 1927 he formed a light orchestra to play in the restaurant of a West End department store. He broadcast for the BBC regularly between 1929 and 1964, by which time popular tastes were shifting decisively away from "light" music. King’s talents as a composer and conductor were praised by Elgar, and he devoted his final decades to composition. There’s a nice anecdote in Alan Hughes’s sleeve note, describing how King arrived Read more ...
Mark Valencia
As farewell galas go it was less an obituary, more a celebration of an artist who has earned every whoop of the rock-star welcome she received from an adoring crowd. Dame Felicity Lott – "Flott" to her friends (i.e. pretty well everyone present) – was cheered to the echo by her fans and eulogised at either end of the evening by Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly. The recital she gave in between defied criticism and made a nonsense of any attempt at an abbreviated star rating because (saving pianist Graham Johnson’s presence) this was a one-star event – and, like all astral bodies, Flott was Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Elgar: Enigma Variations, Rehearsal documentary BBC Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Bernstein (ICA Classics DVD)Leonard Bernstein’s DG recording of Elgar’s Enigma ruffled a few feathers when it appeared in the early 1980s. This ICA Classics DVD is a much better option – the accompanying live performance recorded with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall in April 1982 with good sound and a decent image, and the rehearsal footage which was shown on BBC Two a few days later. Director Humphrey Burton points out in his booklet note that Bernstein in his final decade tended towards Read more ...
David Nice
“Strike again,” cries Elektra as her brother stabs their mother to death. It’s third strike lucky for this Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s singular mythic horror. In previous manifestations of designer-director Charles Edwards’ rather over-freighted but ever improving staging, conductors Semyon Bychkov and Mark Elder, as well as top-less soprano Lisa Gasteen and the more nuanced but sometimes underpowered Susan Bullock, missed the heart of the matter. Known sensation Andris Nelsons and the much-anticipated Christina Goerke were much more likely to hit Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Legends, myths, and Nietzsche’s Superman - which for the purposes of this London Philharmonic Prom was none other than Vladimir Jurowski himself. His extraordinary ear, his nurturing and layering of texture, was a constant source of intrigue and delight and at least one performance - that of Sibelius’ tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter - was revelatory in its musical insights. That began distinctively with a strange little serenade for cello (Kristina Blaumane) and took us to wild and wonderful places in the hinterland of Sibelius’s imagination.But on a blind listening who might we have supposed Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss’s lavish postscript to 50 years of music theatre is about so much more than the theme of its source, Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole ("first the music and then the words", with a big invisible question mark). Its overall subject of rival claims in opera also embraces spoken drama, poetry, dance and specific bel canto, all of them marshalled by the most experienced of theatre directors. And a director is what this concert performance probably needed to bring its cast members into dramatic harmony. Different levels of experience may have been at play, but at least the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Major-Domo promises fireworks during the Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma, the director of Glyndebourne’s new staging, drops a bombshell - actually several bombshells. Glyndebourne’s wartime history (as a refuge for evacuees) would seem to have chimed with the darker implications of the opera within - namely, the Composer’s opera seria of the title. So here we are, in these darkest of days, occupying the house of a wealthy nobleman for sure but not in Vienna or even Germany but in deepest Sussex. So why, one wonders, is everyone speaking German Read more ...