You’d have to be a strange kind of human being not to smell death in Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony. Icy, spooky and deeply unsettling orchestral sounds at the outset give way…
Author: Alexander Hall
Fine singing in English National Opera’s new production of The Elixir of Love
OK, so here’s the deal. I can sell you a love potion which will make the object of your desire fall head over heels in love with you. Guaranteed. You…
Why aligning yourself with Satanic forces is never a good idea: Staatsoper Hamburg’s new production of Der Freischütz
It’s not an uncommon experience for people to wake up in the middle of the night, believing they have heard unsettling noises, or feeling those early palpitations of concern about…
Fun and games in Vienna: the Guildhall’s Die Fledermaus
Beware the dangers of playing pranks on friends who might nurse their grudges until the right moment presents itself to seek redress. Revenge is after all a dish best served…
In times of want: English National Opera’s La bohème
Away from all the bright lights, the mesmerising world of show business, there’s another world: the world of the poor, the needy and the downtrodden. Who ever thought such a…
Razzmatazz and reflection in Poulenc’s Gloria
For someone who was largely self-taught, Poulenc certainly knew how to get the attention of audiences and hold it. In many ways he was your preternatural French composer: elegant, yet…
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Rite of Spring: His Snegurotchka (The Snow Maiden)
Back in the dim and distant past there was climate change too. In the fairy tale that forms the narrative thread of Rimsky-Korsakov’s third and favourite opera, The Snow Maiden,…
PROM 52: Carmen and the cigarette girls come to town
There’s a long tradition of bringing productions from Glyndebourne to the BBC Proms in London. It’s one way of making them more widely accessible. The original production of Bizet’s Carmen…
PROM 45: Jamie Barton sings Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder
In the great pantheon of German Romanticism there is a natural association of certain poets with certain composers: Heine and Schumann or Mörike and Wolf, for instance. Friedrich Rückert is…
PROM 27: Towards the celestial region in Saariaho, Mozart and Richard Strauss
Religion has much to answer for, not least in the range of musical inspiration it has delivered over the ages. In the 1960s people were drawn to southern Mexico to…