Recently in Reviews
05 Oct 2012
During the years from 1890 to 1940, the so-called ‘land without music’ witnessed a remarkable outpouring of chamber and instrumental music. »
05 Oct 2012
W.A. Mozart, despite a historically antagonistic relationship with his city of birth, retains an omnipresence in Salzburg that emerges in full force with each iteration of the illustrious summer festival. »
05 Oct 2012
Cleopatra, one of few female seductresses in operatic history to emerge not only alive but empowered in the final act, is a fitting role for Cecilia Bartoli in her first season as artistic director of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival. »
04 Oct 2012
The Wigmore Hall 2012-3 season (see link below) started with a gala of glamour. Dmitri Hvorostovsky attracts patrons in jewels and designer gowns. »
04 Oct 2012
The ENO gave the British premiere of Bohuslav Martinů's Julietta many years ago, so this new production was eagerly awaited. But what will audiences new to Martinů get from this production? It's a myth that the English language makes opera more accessible. That just means audiences focus on words, rather than really listening or understanding. »
02 Oct 2012
Welsh National Opera have revived Katie Mitchell’s 2003 production of Handel’s Jephtha, with Robert Murray in the title role and a new focus for the drama. »
28 Sep 2012
Four Rigolettos in nine days (for this critic), of twelve Rigolettos in 24 days (are these world records?). »
28 Sep 2012
John Adams’s Nixon in China has become one of the most successful operas in the late 20th/early 21st century wave of post-modernist attempts to revitalise the operatic tradition. It has even started its own sub-genre, the so-called CNN opera. »
28 Sep 2012
Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s visit to the Proms has become a much anticipated annual event. This year on 28 August, they brought Michael Grandage’s new production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Robin Ticciati, who takes over as musical director at Glyndebourne in 2014. »
28 Sep 2012
The ghost of Peter Pears may no longer hover in the wings, but in an age when ‘defining’ interpretations by the likes of Jon Vickers and Philip Langridge still linger powerfully in collective audience memories, Stuart Skelton’s interpretation of Crabbe’s problematic fisherman is assuming a striking individuality and impact. »
27 Sep 2012
The venerable Santa Fe Opera served up a richly eclectic mix of high-caliber offerings that surely is one of their best festivals in recent seasons.
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28 Aug 2012
Ciro in Babilonia Matilda di Shaban and Il signor Bruschino in Rossini land. »
28 Aug 2012
It is difficult to speak with excessive enthusiasm of the programming of a Salzburg Festival that included both Carmen and La bohème, though it would subsequently be redeemed in part by a staging of Die Soldaten. »
24 Aug 2012
Eternal Echoes is an album of khazones [Jewish cantorial music] for cantorial soloist, solo violin and a blended instrumental ensemble comprising a small orchestra and the Klezmer Conservatory Band. »
24 Aug 2012
It was fitting that in this Year of Creative Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival should honour James MacMillan’s contribution to Scottish musical life with the premiere of a new work. »
20 Aug 2012
Impresaria Francesca Zambello kept up her seemingly tireless process of rejuvenating the Glimmerglass Opera Festival with an ambitious, nay downright risky repertoire choice. »
20 Aug 2012
When announced in November, this was trailed as the original version of Ariadne auf Naxos, a rare treat indeed. »
20 Aug 2012
At the Salzburg Festival, Riccardo Muiti conducted Liszt’s Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe and Berlioz’s Messe solonnelle. »
14 Aug 2012
Michael Tilson Thomas’s recording of Mahler’s Third Symphony is an outstanding contribution to the composer’s discography. »
14 Aug 2012
Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder is conceived as cosmic panorama. King Waldemar curses God and is himself cursed, doomed to ride the skies forever, inspiring awe and horror. »
13 Aug 2012
The massed forces of the 600+ singers and players assembled for this exciting performance of Berlioz’s gargantuan Requiem (Grande messe des morts) made for an impressive visual spectacle in the vast high Victorian Royal Albert Hall. »
12 Aug 2012
The Edinburgh International Festival, in partnership with Opera North, presented Janáček’s The Makropulos Case at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. »
11 Aug 2012
The Edinburgh International Festival got off to a rousing start with Frederick Delius, A Mass of Life, rarely heard because it's scored for huge forces. »
10 Aug 2012
Oliver Knussen burst into British music with an unprecedented flourish. In 1967, the London Symphony Orchestra premiered Knussen’s First Symphony, with István Kertész scheduled to conduct. »
05 Aug 2012
Surrealist fantasy with wit and style! L'heure espagnole and L'enfant et les sortilèges, the Ravel Double Bill at Glyndebourne, mixes charm, intelligence and nightmare. »
03 Aug 2012
Bach probably never intended the full Mass in B Minor to be performed, so it is tricky to talk about what forces he meant it to be performed by. But the Kyrie and Gloria certainly were sent by Bach to the Royal Court at Dresden (which was Roman Catholic), and these movements could be used in the Lutheran Church as well. »
02 Aug 2012
In November 1938 a young Polish Jew, Herschel Grynsban, driven to desperation and despair by the Nazi persecution of his mother, shot a minor German diplomat in Paris. The Nazis retaliated with one of the most savage, vicious pogroms experienced up to that time. A Child of our Time, composed during 1938-41, was Michael Tippett’s musical response to this contemporary tragedy and his attempt to comprehend its universal and eternal relevance. »
02 Aug 2012
Santa Fe, NM : It is not unusual for Santa Fe Opera to produce little known or
rarely heard operas in their enduring devotion to both unusual and ‘lost’ repertory, as well as commissioned and contemporary works. But is it unusual - very - for two such mountings in one season to be smash hits. Santa Fe lately enjoyed two such successes, graced by elevated musical and performance quality, and strong audience acceptance.
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02 Aug 2012
The gifted Polish composer Karol Szymanowski wrote his three-act King Roger, in the 1920's. It is an allegorical tale of honor vs. pleasure set to quite beautiful music, especially in the orchestral writing, which Santa Fe chose to play in the same season as the Rossini in a wide tip of the hat to unknown but worthy repertory. »
01 Aug 2012
This was unquestionably the best all-round performance I have yet seen from Opera Holland Park, staging and musical performances alike often putting august metropolitan houses from around the world to shame. »
30 Jul 2012
Although John Cage’s Seven Haiku for piano are all about chance and accident, this final concert in Ian Bostridge’s Ancient and Modern series was a masterpiece of meticulous planning and execution. »
30 Jul 2012
Few composers seem as remote and yet as necessary to our age as Beethoven, and perhaps the symphonic Beethoven in particular. Irony is a foreign word to him; blazing affirmation and indeed intensity of struggle seem too much for us. »
27 Jul 2012
Pierre Boulez Le marteau sans maître is important as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, says conductor François-Xavier Roth, who conducted it with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in BBC Prom 17. »
23 Jul 2012
Hearing The Trojans in concert at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Proms was, for me at least, a much happier experience than when it laboured under the crowd-pleasing would-be-musical-comedy served up by David McVicar’s production for the Royal Opera. »
22 Jul 2012
“It is as sunny as the composer’s garden at Busetto, clear as crystal in construction, tender and explosive by turns, humorous and witty without a touch of extravagance or a note of vulgarity.” So wrote Charles Stanford on the occasion of the first performance of Verdi’s final opera, in 1893. »
20 Jul 2012
The Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists programme is celebrating the 10th anniversary of their annual Summer Performance. »
19 Jul 2012
Rare, very rare repertory that is not even opera stole the show at the sixty fourth Aix Festival. »
18 Jul 2012
You pay your money, you takes your chances — that is festival life at its best. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn’t. The fun is in the risk, so the riskier the better.
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18 Jul 2012
Seriousness, elegance and insight characterised this recital of nineteenth-century German song in which Christoph Prégardien and his accompanist, Julius Drake, conducted a moving musical dialogue, perfectly matching each other in the depiction of unbending obsession and unfulfilled aspiration. »
17 Jul 2012
21st-century opera played on period instruments; a ‘drama-less’ opera; a Dali-esque crimson chaise longue, stranded on the platform of the Royal Albert Hall. »
15 Jul 2012
Elijah Moshinsky’s Otello, first seen at Covent Garden in 1987,
and revived numerous times with a range of stellar casts, may be traditional
and conservative, even — excepting the thunderous opening storm scene —
somewhat uninventive; »
11 Jul 2012
Paris Opéra seems to have saved the best for last as they wind up the current season with a trio of diverse and well-judged productions. »
09 Jul 2012
Not about tattoo art, not an evocation of the Holocast, and let us not even try to put our finger on what it is about. »
09 Jul 2012
Ian Bostridge’s thought-provoking ‘Ancient and Modern’ project at the
Wigmore Hall is drawing to a close and this penultimate instalment brought
together Renaissance sensuality and Neo-classical restraint in a meticulously
executed performance. »
