Concert performances are often seen as pale imitations of the real thing, only one step behind that nebulous term, ‘semi-staged’. And yet, sometimes they remain memorable in their own right:…
Author: Colin Clarke
Handel in Shoreditch: a Tamerlano Triumph
Those who attended Irish National Opera’s Bajazet at the Linbury Theatre will be familiar with the story here. Handel accorded titular status to Tamerlano; different librettos, though: Handel’s principally uses…
A Tale of Seven Climates: Tansy Davies’s The Passion of Mary Magdalene
Tansy Davies’s works rarely fail to stimulate: her opera Between Worlds focused on the Twin Towers attack, which I described at the time as ‘a personal triumph,’ while works such…
Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony at the RFH
There was a time when London’s walls were papered with Mahler 2s; certainly, in the 1980s, performances were regular occurrences with nary a month going by without one or other…
Telemann Old and New: Florilegium at Wigmore Hall
What a treat to hear a full concert of Telemann’s magnificent music. The dates of composition of the pieces span 30 + years: hence, “Telemann Old and New,” with the…
The Britten/Piper outlier: Owen Wingrave at Guildhall School of Music & Drama
The most famous result of collaboration between Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper is The Turn of the Screw (1954), arguably Britten’s most successful opera and surely the one in which…
George Jeffreys & the Birth of the English Baroque
It was completely apt that the first music heard in Solomon’s Knot’s evening dedicated to composer George Jeffreys was some Byrd: the five-part Bow thine eare, O Lord (a contrafactum…
A Coney Island Cosi: ENO’s Oh-So-Busy Production
Relocation, relocation, relocation: Coney Island, Booklyn, is a long way from the Bay of Naples. But such is the setting for Phelim McDermott’s Cosi fan tutte; or is that Cosi…
Songs of Love & War
Laurence Cummings and the Academy of Ancient Music brought around half of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals (Madrigali guerrieri e amorosi, 1704) to Milton Court. It was preceded by a…
A Staged German Requiem in Paris: Insula’s unforgettable Brahms
Stagings of Bach Passions are, if not the norm, certainly not unknown; and Insula showed how effective known music with projection can be in Matt Collishaw’s Sky Burial, a film…