For lovers of one particular television quiz, here’s your starter for ten. Who commissioned the following works: Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien, Ravel’s Bolero and Stravinsky’s Perséphone? The same person…
Author: Alexander Hall
The Breadth and Depth that Schubert Finds for the Voice: Christian Gerhaher at Wigmore Hall
Imagine: twenty-seven short pieces by the same composer, curated for an entire evening’s entertainment. What are we thinking here? Sonatas by Scarlatti, waltzes by Chopin? Grieg’s Lyric Pieces or Bartók’s…
Fire, Paprika and Pepper: Spices Galore with Rattle, Kopatchinskaya and the LSO
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…
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…