The Christian calendar regards Easter as its acme, for the message is all about the Resurrection. Though it is a movable feast and therefore not linked to a particular date,…
Author: Alexander Hall
Nine is the Number of the Game: Tan Dun Conducts the London Philharmonic
Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have once said: “China is a sleeping giant, when she wakes she will shake the world”. It occurred to me while listening to the Chinese-American…
Le Familier et le Moins Familier with Marianne Crebassa
Originally announced as a programme of works by thirteen different composers detailing the journey of a woman’s love throughout her lifetime, and tailor-made for Elsa Dreisig, the content of this…
I Feel the Air of Another Planet: Barbara Hannigan and the Belcea Quartet
Listen to Beethoven’s Second Symphony and you would be hard put to make a connection with the composer’s inner turmoil and his realisation that the increasing signs of incurable deafness…
Blood and Gore in Hamburg: Richard Strauss’s Elektra
Do you want screams, blood-curdling cries, the unearthing of a buried axe, twisted minds messing with your own head? Richard Strauss gives it to you all in his Elektra. Those…
What Rome Wants, Rome Gets: Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto in Hamburg
In the grand scheme of things, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra weren’t the most erotic or passionate of all lovers in history, nor does their story of alignment stand out as…
Pomegranates and Passion: Stravinsky’s Perséphone
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…
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…