Schubert’s Winterreise is almost certainly the most performed Lieder cycle in the repertoire. Thousands of performances and hundreds of recordings ! But Mark Padmore and Kristian Bezuidenhout’s recording for Harmonia Mundi is proof of concept that the better the music the more it lends itself to re-discovery and endless revelation.
Year: 2018
Ilker Arcay¸rek at Wigmore Hall
The first thing that struck me in this Wigmore Hall recital was the palpable sincerity of Ilker Arcayürek’s artistry. Sincerity is not everything, of course; what we think of as such may even be carefully constructed artifice, although not, I think, here.
Lisette Oropesa sings at Tucson Desert Song Festival
On January 30, 2018, Arizona Opera and the Tucson Desert Song Festival presented a recital by lyric soprano Lisette Oropesa in the University of Arizona’s Holsclaw Hall. Looking like a high fashion model in her silver trimmed midnight-blue gown, the singer and pianist Michael Borowitz began their program with Pablo Luna’s Zarzuela aria, “De EspaÒa Vengo.” (“I come from Spain”).
Schubert songs, part-songs and fragments: three young singers at the Wigmore Hall
Youth met experience for this penultimate instalment of the Wigmore Hall’s Schubert: The Complete Songs series, and the results were harmonious and happy. British soprano Harriet Burns, German tenor Ferdinand Keller and American baritone Harrison Hintzsche were supportively partnered by lieder ‘old-hand’, Graham Johnson, and we heard some well-known and less familiar songs in this warmly appreciated early-afternoon recital.
Brent Opera: Nabucco
Brent Opera’s Nabucco was a triumph in that it worked as a piece of music theatre against some odds, and was a good evening out.
LPO: Das Rheingold
It is, of course, quite an achievement in itself for a symphony orchestra to perform Das Rheingold or indeed any of the Ring dramas. It does not happen very often, not nearly so often as it should; for given Wagner’s crucial musico-historical position, this is music that should stand at the very centre of their repertoires – just as Beethoven should at the centre of opera orchestras’.
William Tell in Palermo
This was the infamous production that was booed to extinction at Covent Garden. Palermo’s Teatro Massimo now owns the production.
The Bandits in Rome
AKA I masnadieri, rare early Verdi, though not as rare as Alzira. In 1847 London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre† commissioned the newly famous Verdi to write this opera for the London debut of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind.
Utah’s New Moby Dick Sets Sail
It is cause for celebration that Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s epic Moby Dick has been realized in a handsome new physical production by Utah Opera.
Bevan and Drake travel to 1840s Leipzig
Julius Drake must have had had a lot of fun compiling this lieder programme, which was inspired by a visit to the home of Robert and Clara Schumann on Inselstrafle in Leipzig. The couple lived in this classical building during the 1840s and the visitors’ book reads like a roll call of the greatest Romantic artists—composers, poets, performers—of the day.