London visits from the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are rarer than we might hope, though doubtless many would object, quite reasonably, that visits to the capital need not be its…
Author: Mark Berry
The Busoni Centenary: Kirill Gerstein and the BBC Chorus in Busoni’s genre-defying Piano Concerto at the Barbican
The centenary of Ferruccio Busoni’s death fell earlier this year, not that ninety-nine per cent of the musical world appears to have noticed. Where are the operas, even his masterpiece…
Young Fauré and his masters
Tenor Cyrille Dubois and pianist Tristan Raës are to make Wigmore Hall history in a five-year series of the complete songs of Gabriel Fauré. Dubois will be the first artist…
Pelléas et Mélisande at Munich
Nine years ago, in this same theatre at this same festival, I saw Munich’s previous Pelléas et Mélisande: a staging by Christiane Pohle which I greatly admired, but everyone else…
Idomeneo, rè di Creta in Munich
Take a stroll around central Munich and you may come upon a plaque on Altenhofstrasse indicating the spot where Mozart lived in the winter of 1780-81 whilst at work on…
Le grand macabre in Munich
The Fourth of July has obvious political meaning in the United States. This year, it also offered the date of the long-awaited British General Election: a curious event, strangely without…
Tristan und Isolde at the Bavarian State Opera
Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Tristan, first seen two years ago, marking an end to Nikolaus Bachler’s intendancy, is on first sight at least, a puzzling affair. There are ideas, certainly, though quite…
A double bill of Purcell and Schoenberg in Munich
Purcell and Schoenberg: my kind of double bill. Puritan ‘authenticity’, or whatever it is calling itself at the moment, is so all-pervasive when it comes to the seventeenth century that…
‘Mozart and the Munich Hofkapelle’: an enlightening evening
To the Munich Residenz’s Rococo Cuvilliés-Theater, once simply the Residenztheater, for a fascinating concert entitled ‘Mozart and the Munich Hofkapelle’. It was here, on 29 January 1781, that Idomeneo received…
Semele in Munich
I was sceptical, I admit, for the first two acts of Claus Guth’s new production of Semele, but it came together and offered an anthropological and psychoanalytical interpretation of Handel’s…