Sailing home to Corinth, bearing treasures won in a music competition, the mythic Greek bard, Arion, found his golden prize coveted by pirates and his life in danger.
Category: Reviews
Le Banquet CÈleste: Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista
The life of Alessandro Stradella was characterised by turbulence, adventure and amorous escapades worthy of an opera libretto. Indeed, at least seven composers have turned episodes from the 17th-century Italian composer’s colourful life into operatic form, the best known being Flotow whose three-act comic opera based on the Lothario’s misadventures was first staged in Hamburg in 1844.
Purcell’s The Indian Queen from Lille
Among the few compensations opera lovers have had from the COVID crisis is the abundance – alas, plethora – of streamed opera productions we might never have seen or even known of without it.
Ethel Smyth: Songs and Ballads – a new recording from SOMM
In 1877, Ethel Smyth, aged just nineteen, travelled to Leipzig to begin her studies at the German town’s Music Conservatory, having finally worn down the resistance of her father, General J.H. Smyth.
Wagner: Excerpts from Der Ring des Niebelungen, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Paavo J‰rvi, RCA-Sony
This new recording of excerpts from Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen is quite exceptional – and very unusual for this kind of disc. The words might be missing, but the fact they are proves to have rather the opposite effect. It is one of the most operatic of orchestral Wagner discs I have come across.
Wagner: Die Walk¸re, Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Simon Rattle, BR Klassik
Simon Rattle has never particularly struck me as a complex conductor. He is not, for example, like Furtw‰ngler, Maderna, Boulez or Sinopoli – all of whom brought a breadth of learning and a knowledge of composition to bear on what they conducted.
Dvo?·k Requiem, Jakub Hr?öa in memoriam Ji?Ì B?lohl·vek
AntonÌn Dvo?·k Requiem op.89 (1890) with Jakub Hr?öa conducting the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The Requiem was one of the last concerts Ji?Ì B?lohl·vek conducted before his death and he had been planning to record it as part of his outstanding series for Decca.
Philip Venables’ Denis & Katya: teenage suicide and audience complicity
As an opera composer, Philip Venables writes works quite unlike those of many of his contemporaries. They may not even be operas at all, at least in the conventional sense – and Denis & Katya, the most recent of his two operas, moves even further away from this standard. But what Denis & Katya and his earlier work, 4.48 Psychosis, have in common is that they are both small, compact forces which spiral into extraordinarily powerful and explosive events.
A new, blank-canvas Figaro at English National Opera
Making his main stage debut at ENO with this new production of The Marriage of Figaro, theatre director Joe Hill-Gibbins professes to have found it difficult to ‘develop a conceptual framework for the production to inhabit’.
Massenet’s ChÈrubin charms at Royal Academy Opera
“Non so pi˘ cosa son, cosa faccio … Now I’m fire, now I’m ice, any woman makes me change colour, any woman makes me quiver.”