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.
Month: July 2012
Beethoven Ninth Symphony, Daniel Barenboim, BBC Prom 18
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.
Pierre Boulez : Le marteau sans maÓtre BBC Proms
Pierre Boulez Le marteau sans maÓtre is important as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, says conductor FranÁois-Xavier Roth, who conducted it with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in BBC Prom 17.
Hector Berlioz, Les Troyens (concert performance, BBC Proms)
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.
Rossini Il viaggio a Reims, Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House’s Jette Parker Young Artists programme is celebrating the 10th anniversary of their annual Summer Performance.
David et Jonathas at the Aix Festival
Rare, very rare repertory that is not even opera stole the show at the sixty fourth Aix Festival.
Le Nozze di Figaro in Aix-en-Provence
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.
Christoph PrÈgardien, Wigmore Hall
Seriousness, elegance and insight characterised this recital of nineteenth-century German song in which Christoph PrÈgardien and his accompanist, Julius Drake, conducted a moving musical dialogue, perfectly matching each other in the depiction of unbending obsession and unfulfilled aspiration.
Florida Grand Opera Appoints New Artistic Administrator
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2012/07/changes_at_flor.php
Laurent Pelly on Glyndebourne’s Ravel Double Bill
The Glyndebourne Festival highlight this year could be the Ravel double bill – L’heure espagnole and L’enfant et les sortilËges. Laurent Pelly directs. Anyone who saw his brilliant Humperdinck Hansel und Gretel at Glyndebourne in 2008 will know what to expect – a staging of great imagination and verve, true to the spirit of the composer.