I first heard Barbara Hannigan in 2008.
Author: Claire Seymour
New perceptions: a Royal Academy Opera double bill
‘Once upon a time …’ So fairy-tales begin, although often they don’t conclude with a ‘happy ever after’. Certainly, both Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilËges, paired in this Royal Academy Opera double bill, might be said to present transformations from innocence and ignorance to experience and knowledge, but there is little that is saccharine about their protagonists’ journeys from darkness to enlightenment.
Desert Island Delights at the RCM: Offenbach’s Robinson Crusoe
‘Britannia waives the rules: The EU Brexit in quotes’. Such was the headline of a BBC News feature on 28th June 2016. And, nearly three years later, those who watch the runaway Brexit-train hurtle ever nearer to the edge of Dover’s white cliffs might be tempted by the thought of leaving this sceptred (sceptic?) isle, for a life overseas.
Leonard Bernstein: Tristan und Isolde in Munich on Blu-ray
Although Birgit Nilsson, one of the great Isolde’s, wrote with evident fondness – and some wit – of Leonard Bernstein in her autobiography – “unfortunately, he burned the candles at both ends” – their paths rarely crossed musically. There’s a live Fidelio from March 1970, done in Italy, but almost nothing else is preserved on disc.
Monarchs corrupted and tormented: ETO’s Idomeneo and Macbeth at the Hackney Empire
Promises made to placate a foe in the face of imminent crisis are not always the most well-considered and have a way of coming back to bite one – as our current Prime Minister is finding to her cost.
WNO’s The Magic Flute at the Birmingham Hippodrome
A perfect blue sky dotted with perfect white clouds. Identikit men in bowler hats clutching orange umbrellas. Floating cyclists. Ferocious crustaceans.
Puccini’s Messa di Gloria: Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra
This was an oddly fascinating concert – though, I’m afraid, for quite the wrong reasons (though this depends on your point of view). As a vehicle for the sound, and playing, of the London Symphony Orchestra it was a notable triumph – they were not so much luxurious – rather a hedonistic and decadent delight; but as a study into three composers, who wrote so convincingly for opera, and taken somewhat out of their comfort zone, it was not a resounding success.
WNO’s Un ballo in maschera at Birmingham’s Hippodrome
David Pountney and his design team – Raimund Bauer (sets), Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes), Fabrice Kebour (lighting) – have clearly ‘had a ball’ in mounting this Un ballo in maschera, the second part of WNO’s Verdi trilogy and which forms part of a spring season focusing on what Pountney describes as the “profound and mysterious issue of Monarchy”.
George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill at Wigmore Hall
This week, the Wigmore Hall presents two concerts from George Benjamin and Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern, the first ‘at home’ on Wigmore Street, the second moving north to Camden’s Roundhouse. For the first, we heard Benjamin’s now classic first opera, Into the Little Hill, prefaced by three ensemble works by Cathy Milliken, Christian Mason, and, for the evening’s spot of ‘early music’, Luigi Dallapiccola.
Marianne Crebassa sings Berio and Ravel: Philharmonia Orchestra with Salonen
It was once said of Cathy Berberian, the muse for whom Luciano Berio wrote his Folk Songs, that her voice had such range she could sing the roles of both Tristan and Isolde. Much less flatteringly, was my music teacher’s description of her sound as akin to a “chisel being scraped over sandpaper”.