In early October 1822, Gioachino Rossini summoned the librettist Gaetano Rossi to a villa (owned by his wife, the soprano Isabella Colbran) in Castenaso, just outside Bologna. Their project: to work on a new opera, which would be premiered during the Carnival in Venice on 3rd February the following year, based on the legend of Queen Semiramide.
Year: 2018
Dorothea Rˆschmann at Wigmore Hall: songs by Schumann, Wolf and Brahms
One should not judge a performance by its audience, but spying Mitsuko Uchida in the audience is unlikely ever to prove a negative sign. It certainly did not here, in a wonderfully involving recital of songs by Schumannn, Wolf, and Brahms from Dorothea Rˆschmann and Malcolm Martineau.
The Path of Life: Ilker Arcay¸rek sings Schubert at Wigmore Hall
Wigmore Hall’s BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert 2018-19 series opened this week with a journey along The Path of Life as illustrated by the songs of Schubert, and it offered a rare chance to hear the composer’s long, and long-germinating, setting of Johann Baptist Mayrhofer’s philosophical rumination, ‘Einsamkeit’ – an extended eulogy to loneliness which Schubert described, in a letter of 1822, as the best thing he had done, “mein Bestes, was ich gemacht habe”.
Heine through Song: Florian Boesch and Malcolm Martineau open a new Wigmore Hall season
The BBC Proms have now gone into hibernation until July 2019. But, as the hearty patriotic strains rang out over South Kensington on Saturday evening, in Westminster the somewhat gentler, but no less emotive, flame of nineteenth-century lied was re-lit at Wigmore Hall, as baritone Florian Boesch and pianist Malcolm Martineau opened the Hall’s 2018-19 season with a recital comprising song settings of texts by Heinrich Heine.
Elgar Orchestral Songs – SOMM
Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures are extremely well-known, but many others are also worth hearing. From SOMM recordings, specialists in British repertoire, comes this interesting new collection of other Elgar orchestral songs, sponsored by the Elgar Society.
Prom 74: Handel’s Theodora
“One of the most insufferable prigs in a literature.” Handel scholar Winton Dean’s dismissal of Theodora, the eponymous heroine of Handel’s 1749 oratorio, may well have been shared by many among his contemporary audience.
Remembering and Representing Dido, Queen of Carthage: an interview with Thomas Guthrie
The first two instalments of the Academy of Ancient Music’s ‘Purcell trilogy’ at the Barbican Hall have posed plentiful questions – creative, cultural and political.
Landmark Productions and Irish National Opera present The Second Violinist
Renaissance madrigals and twentieth-century social media don’t at first seem likely bed-fellows. However, Martin – the protagonist of The Second Violinist, a new opera by composer Donnacha Dennehy and librettist Enda Walsh – is, like the late sixteenth-century composer, Carlo Gesualdo, an artist with homicidal tendencies. And, Dennehy and Walsh bring music, madness and murder together in a Nordic noir thriller that has more than a touch of Stringbergian psychological anxiety, analysis and antagonism.
The Rake’s Progress: British Youth Opera
The cautionary tale which W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman fashioned for Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 opera, The Rake’s Progress – recounting the downward course of an archetypal libertine from the faux fulfilment of matrimonial and monetary dreams to the grim reality of madness and death – was, of course, an elaboration of William Hogarth’s 1733 series of eight engravings.
Two of Garsington Opera’s 2018 productions to reach a wider audience
Garsington Opera is delighted to announce that on Saturday 6 October, BBC Radio 3’s ‘Opera on 3’, will broadcast the production of its first festival world premiere – The Skating Rink by David Sawer set to a libretto by Rory Mullarkey based on a novel by Chilean author Roberto BolaÒo.