Songs my mother taught me: the title of the fourth in a cycle of gypsy songs by Dvořák, but this title also stands as a convenient coat hanger for so…
Author: Alexander Hall
The Power to Inspire: Dame Sarah Connolly at Wigmore Hall
Composers have always been inspired to write for others: this is one of the rich seams of inventiveness running through so much music, old and new. Over many decades Dame…
Where Love is a Battlefield: Handel’s Partenope at English National Opera
Has a young woman’s search for a suitable partner got any easier these days? Victorians knew all about the role of matchmakers; a century or so previous to that debutante…
A Russian Rarity Fails to Truly Cohere: Staatsoper Hamburg’s New Ruslan and Lyudmila
There are a number of instances where the overture is much better known than the entire opera. One of those is Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila. Little other music by this…
The Guildhall School’s Double Billing of Smyth and Respighi
Fairy tales have always been a deep source of inspiration for the creative arts. In the German context they tie in with an age-old fascination for and involvement with the…
An all-British line-up with the Sinfonia of London
These days it’s comparatively rare to come across a concert programme consisting entirely of works by different British composers, performed by an orchestra made up of mostly British-born musicians, with…
Britten and Mahler From the Concertgebouw’s Crack Chamber Ensemble
Death is the great leveller, affecting all individuals irrespective of nationality, ethnicity or creed. It comes to us all, each and every one of us, and the most prescient of…
It’s all in the telling: Jennifer France, Edward Gardner and the LPO
Music encompasses many different kinds of storytelling, with and without overt narration. In the world of fictional narratives, there are often heroes or victors, villains or antagonists, stereotypical characters, and…
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir present a composer who catches you by surprise
It was all going so well for him. He was already a celebrated opera composer, having made opera buffa something of a calling card, and in just 23 years had…
In from the cold: Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri at Hamburg State Opera
Fashions come and go. What might be hailed by one generation is often ridiculed by the next one. That was the fate of Schumann’s secular oratorio Das Paradies und die…