Strauss
David Nice
Two suns, two moons, two Philharmonia leaders sharing a front desk, two aspirational giants among Richard Strauss's symphonic poems bringing the number of players, in the second half, to 134. Who’d have thought we’d be witnessing such phenomena when, contrary to what the orchestra’s CEO claimed at the start and the unmasked half of a packed audience seemed to think, we haven’t even reached the “post-Covid era”.Never mind the long-term implications; by the time we reached the huge arc of Strauss’s one-movement Alpine Symphony, everyone in the audience must surely have been feeling the physical Read more ...
Douglas McDonald
This lively interpretation of Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera provides a feast for the senses as a musical highlight of the Edinburgh international Festival. As with the rest of the festival’s 2021 programme, the opera is performed outdoors, in a hangar designed to protect the audience from the Scottish elements and to allow for social distancing.While the venue has proven challenging for some concert performances, it feels appropriate for the setting of Ariadne auf Naxos.The two-hour show is an excellent choice for a slightly chilly evening, as Strauss delights in revealing the Read more ...
David Nice
Whatever else happens on the country opera scene this summer, the golden rose award for sheer chutzpah goes to the ever-ambitious Garsington team in pulling this off in no small style. Planning any production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s intricate 1911 “comedy for music” is daring at the best of times; in the still-shaky Covid era, the decision to go ahead might have seemed foolhardy. The life-saver would seem to have been Eberhard Kloke’s reduced orchestration of the 100-plus-players original, briefly annoying in places where a piano substitutes for instruments still Read more ...
David Nice
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time stalk this haunting dream of a Rosenkavalier. The love games of teenager Octavian and his experienced mistress the Marschallin are sexy and plausible; the comedy of ridiculous Baron Ochs keeps a low profile, but stays real and turns out funny in unexpected places; a winged old gentleman (Ingmar Thilo) embodies the second and fourth manifestations. Does he make up for all the detail in the minor and non-singing roles shed by director Barrie Kosky? For me, yes. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss, firmly rooted in the detail of a mid-18th century Read more ...
Robert Beale
The second of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts-on-film is scarcely less ground-breaking than the first. But this time we are in the orchestra’s second home, the former church now extended to be Hallé St Peter’s in the regenerated part of Manchester's city centre. The same skilful use of camera techniques to show a socially distanced ensemble, with Sir Mark Elder as conductor and, this time, Roderick Williams as vocal soloist, makes satisfying visuals to go with arresting sound. Despite limited resources in the installed lighting, there’s still effective use of washes of colour in the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s Prom was a sombre contribution to an otherwise upbeat season. The mood was reflective – looking back on lockdown. The concert was given at City Halls, Glasgow, where the privations of social distancing were also more keenly felt than in the Albert Hall. Where London orchestras are able to spread out into the choir stalls, the BBCSSO had to severely restrict their numbers, even with the stage expanded significantly into the stalls. The result was a chamber orchestra programme, dominated by string elegies.Thomas Dausgaard had been due to conduct, but the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling iron cauldrons, practically fluorescent with paprika. But it’s all goulash. You know it when you taste it, and all that matters is that it tastes good. And when it’s really good, it tastes even better when warmed through and dished up second time around.Which is by way of saying that I can’t honestly get too worried about the authenticity or Read more ...
David Nice
Out of a silent and empty City of London, unusually still even for a Sunday afternoon, it felt surreal to come upon a centre of light and activity. Raffaello Morales, Renaissance man, conductor of the Fidelio Orchestra and owner/impresario of its eponymous café which has played host to great performances over the past month, had mustered 23 of the finest London-based players to tackle the ultimate in works for string orchestra. Richard Strauss penned his Metamorphosen in grief at the bombings of the great German and Austrian opera houses. It ends with a direct quotation of the music which Read more ...
David Nice
So much for the assertion that nowhere in the world would be staging the big Strauss and Wagner operas for the indefinite future. With a combination of lavish funding and good pandemic management on Austria's part, it’s been possible in Salzburg. Ironic, then, that though no holds are barred in terms of how close everyone on stage and in the pit can be, with any amount of feeling and touching permitted short (I’m guessing) of osculation, this Elektra feels, for the most part, distanced not socially (or, in the case of this work, anti-socially) but in psychological terms.Some of that could be Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Beethoven Symphonies 1-3 – arrangements by Ries & Ebers Compagnia di Punto (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)Just Beethoven’s first three symphonies in this two-disc set, so you wonder whether he’d still be described as a genius had he stopped after the Eroica? Of course; Symphony No. 1’s well-behaved façade conceals a wealth of radical detail, but the leap from there to No. 3 is enormous. Do we really need more Beethoven symphony recordings? Yes, if they’re like these, the eleven-piece Compagnia di Punto (named after a celebrated horn player) performing them in chamber arrangements by Read more ...
David Nice
A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. There's been real thought behind the wealth of programming in the company's attempts to keep the world happy for free during lockdown, including a whole Wagner week. These two of the top masterpieces by Wagner's natural successor - "Richard the Third", as Strauss was dubbed, because there could be no second - both reminded us of what worked and what didn't when Robert Carsen's sort-of-1920s Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Concert programmes that set out to tell us a story can prove a mixed blessing. Yes, it’s valuable and stimulating to find ideas, and narratives, embodied in the musical flow. But great pieces, well-performed, have a habit of cutting loose from the frame of concepts someone has devised for them. At the Royal Festival Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia gathered three singular, idiosyncratic works under the rubric of “Voices of 1945”. No ordinary year, of course: immediately, the title primed us to listen for after-echoes – direct or oblique – of the conflict that had lately shattered Read more ...