When it comes to the style and essence of their music Ottorino Respighi and Luigi Dallapiccola really come from entirely different places. Church Windows and Il prigioniero, heard side by…
Author: Marc Bridle
Lise Davidsen and Freddie De Tommaso: voices of star quality in an exceptional recital
The last couple of times I have reviewed Lise Davidsen at the Barbican – who is beginning to feel at home in this hall as Birgit Nilsson once did at…
Kathryn Rudge sings an exquisite Sea Pictures beside Vasily Petrenko’s safe Mahler Sixth
The coupling of Elgar’s Sea Pictures and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is not an obvious one. One tangible link is that Mahler conducted Sea Pictures in the final year of his…
Zipangu and Lonely Child: Two Claude Vivier masterpieces in magnificent performances by the London Sinfonietta
The Quebquois-born composer Claude Vivier – still largely neglected, despite many of his works having an almost fearless intensity entirely relevant for today – was the subject of a rare…
Baroque pornography in Alexis Piron’s Vasta, Reine de Bordélie
One of the more enduring pleasures of having had a classical education – at least if you still remember it – is reading the richness of its literature: from Homer…
Exile and Isolation: Julian Anderson’s Suite from Exiles, the LSO and Simon Rattle
Often you go to concerts and the programming isn’t especially obvious – why are these works being played besides each other? This is particularly the case with concertos and symphonies.…
A formidable Dame Patricia Routledge as the formidable Dame Myra Hess
It came as something of a shock to me to discover that Dame Patricia Routledge is now 92 years old. She is much shorter than one imagines, given the massive…
ENO’s Valkyrie fails to catch fire: an under-ambitious start to Richard Jones’s Ring Cycle
Very little exists in a visual way of Wieland Wagner’s Bayreuth Die Walküre from the mid-to-late 1960s. What does, largely requires us to use our imagination. It is something which…
Simon Keenlyside and Anna Pirozzi: chilling psychopaths in Covent Garden’s impressive revival of Macbeth
Macbeth is the first great fusion of music and drama in Verdi’s operas. It needs a great production, however, to bring those elements together and this is largely what Phyllida…