Tchaikovsky
Hanna Weibye
When dealing with the big beasts of the classical repertoire, the Royal Ballet has a history of both playing it straight and playing it very, very well. Peter Wright’s venerable production of The Nutcracker is a case in point: although sticking close to the original scenario and choreography, Wright (along with designer Julia Trevelyan Oman) created in 1986 a show that feels ever-fresh in 2013. Full of visual delight, wonderful dancing, and festive cheer, this Nutcracker also feels genuine, as if the people behind it continue to feel the magic themselves.In his story treatment, Wright eschews Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese orchestra bearing the composer’s name. Calleja’s growing legions of fans were much in evidence, of course, more Maltese than Italian flags, but what can they have made of the music stand which came between them and their hero? Five arias, one of which he will have sung a zillion times, and still – despite the presence of TV cameras – the music was Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra made quite a splash with their Tchaikovsky symphony series under Mariss Jansons back in the 1980s. The watchwords then were freshness and articulation, a re-establishment of Tchaikovsky’s innate classicism - and so it was again as Vasily Petrenko stepped out as the orchestra’s new Chief Conductor. The opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony sounded so light and articulate, so suggestive of clean, icy cold air, and the clarity that brings that the subtitle “Winter Daydreams” suddenly seemed a little vague.When Petrenko’s poetic first clarinetist eased us into Read more ...
David Nice
Prokofiev’s Fifth is a symphony for which the conductor’s setting tends to be turned to either bright and light or dark and heavy. Perhaps because of the composer’s perceived joker role as set against Shostakovich the symphonic chronicler of Soviet tragedy, Vassily Sinaisky at the 2005 Proms made a glib, glossy showpiece of it. Valery Gergiev has always veered to the black side. But last night Yannick Nézet-Séguin worked sympathetically with the humane inscaping of the orchestra Gergiev did so much to mould, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, to give the best of all possible worlds, emphasising the Read more ...
David Nice
Take note of the title, with its “could”, not “must”. “The word ‘must’ is not to be used to Princes,” quoth Good Queen Bess as echoed in Britten’s Gloriana. Yet that was the verb used by New York writer Scott Rose, guest-posting on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog. He declared that hit-and-miss superstar soprano Anna Netrebko, having proved fair game for the drive against Putin’s Nazi-rulebook laws in Russia by aligning herself politically with the regime as a named supporter of his re-election campaign, “must state her position on gay rights in Russia”.The momentum has gathered over in Read more ...
David Nice
It was mostly Russian night at the Proms, and mostly music you could dance to, as a hand jiving Arena Prommer rather distractingly proved in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony. Even Prokofiev’s elephantine Second Piano Concerto was transformed into the ballet music Serge Diaghilev thought it might become in 1914. Much of this was thanks to the fleet feet and mobile shoulders of febrile BBC Philharmonic conductor Gianandrea Noseda. But even he could do very little with the odd man out in every way, Edward Cowie’s Earth Music I.One blunt question has to be asked: why a BBC commission Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So much is wrong with Derek Deane’s arena Swan Lake, as if he read a poem and rewrote it as a press release. If you want big fat images of swans, 60 white-feathered girls in precision-tooled lines, this is for you. Take your photos on your phone, take them home and say, “I was there.” If you want to feel the private passion of the story, surrender to the music and the peculiar fantasy, to examine your own motivations and ability to choose love, forget this - go elsewhere.I've attended this 16-year-old production again and again, faithfully searching every time to find what others effusively Read more ...
David Nice
In 1980, an orchestra and conductor then hardly known in Britain came to the Royal Festival Hall. I went to hear Elisabeth Söderström in Strauss’s Four Last Songs; I left stunned by an unorthodox Sibelius Second Symphony and above all by one of the encores, Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten by one Arvo Pärt. Thirty three years later Neeme Järvi, now indisputably one of the great master conductors and at the helm of a Swiss orchestra rather than the Swedes he’d then conducted (the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra), not only began with a work by fellow Estonian Pärt but also ended Read more ...
David Nice
Studying Russian for three years to read Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin in the original doesn’t guarantee the finest interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s equally great lyric homage. Yet it certainly seems to have focused the imagination of Covent Garden’s new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and allows him to inflect every move his characters make with the right emotion.His basic premise begins at the end: with the older, more dislocated Onegin and Tatyana aching their way back to that time in a mid-19th century adolescence when happiness was so close. That makes it clear at the start that Read more ...
judith.flanders
The worldwide success of John Cranko’s 1960s version of Tchaikovsky’s opera, in turn an adaptation of Pushkin’s verse-drama, might have taken even the choreographer by surprise. Tchaikovsky himself worried that “Pushkin’s exquisite texture will be vulgarized if it is transferred to the stage”, and added, “How delighted I am to be rid of Ethiopian princesses, Pharaohs, poisonings, all the conventional stuff.”No scenic effects? No excess? No melodrama? Well no, not quite. First, Cranko was not permitted by his opera house to use Tchaikovsky's opera, so instead had Kurt-Heinz Stolze Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If anyone who saw Matthew Bourne’s irreverent rewrite of The Sleeping Beauty currently at Sadler’s Wells is curious about the original classical ballet, they’ll find it in rousing glory and glinting style with English National Ballet at the Coliseum.Of all the so-called fairytale ballets, this is the most deceptive. Its story is perfunctory, a vehicle for a magnificent display of classicism at its height, essentially an exhibition of balletic jewellery, the romance and reverie all embedded within Tchaikovsky's greatest score. One can see why contemporary choreographers home in on bulking up Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
The seasonal Nuts-fest continues (and culminates) with another two to add to the roast – live: English National Ballet’s recent production, and digital: the Mariinsky Theatre’s 3D film version. To the cinema we go. This is the first 3D Nutcracker ever, following the Mariinsky’s 3D Giselle last year – and the screening of dance is a good thing, as few can afford to fly the world over to see a number of Nutcracker productions.The 3D aspect makes the experience more tangible. The best moments are the aerial shots when you feel most interspersed, but as the 1934 Vassily Vainonen version was Read more ...