David McVicar’s La traviata for Welsh National Opera – first seen at Scottish Opera in 2008 and adopted by WNO in 2009 – wears its heavy-black mourning garb stylishly.
Category: Reviews
Hubert Parry – Father of Modern English Song – English Lyrics III
SOMM Recordings Hubert Parry Twelve Sets of English Lyrics vol III with Sarah Fox, Roderick Williams and Andrew West, brings to a conclusion what has been a landmark series, demonstrating how Parry established English Song as a distinct art form, different from German Lieder and from French MÈlodie, and indeed from other Victorian song.
Ravel’s Magical Glimpses into the World of Children
This is the fifth CD in a series devoted to Ravel’s orchestral works.
About an enfant: Ravel’s Opera about Childhood and Debussy’s Prodigal Son
This recording of Ravel’s second (and last) one-act opera was made during a concert, and -somewhat daringly – with rather close microphone placement. As it turns out, everything went smoothly.
‘So sweet is the pain’: Roberta Invernizzi at Wigmore Hall
In this BBC Radio 3 lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall, soprano Roberta Invernizzi presented Italian songs from the first half of seventeenth-century, exploring love and loyalty, loss and lies, and demonstrating consummate declamatory mastery.
Staging Britten’s War Requiem
“The best music to listen to in a great Gothic church is the polyphony which was written for it, and was calculated for its resonance: this was my approach in the War Requiem – I calculated it for a big, reverberant acoustic and that is where it sounds best.”
Halévy’s Magnificent La reine de Chypre (1841) Gets Its Long-Awaited World Premiere Recording
Halévy’s La reine de Chypre (The Queen of Cyprus) is the 17th opera to be released in the impressively prolific “French Opera” series of recordings produced by the Center for French Romantic Music, a scholarly organization located at the Palazzetto Bru Zane in Venice. (Other recent offerings have included Saint-Saëns’s richly characterized Proserpine, Benjamin Godard’s fascinating Dante–which contains scenes set in Heaven and Hell–and Hérold’s Le pré aux clercs, an opéra-comique that had a particularly long life in the international operatic repertoire.)
Moshinsky’s Simon Boccanegra returns to Covent Garden
Despite the flaming torches of the plebeian plotters which, in the Prologue, etched chiaroscuro omens within the Palladian porticos of Michael Yeargan’s imposing and impressive set, this was a rather slow-burn revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s 1991 production of Simon Boccanegra.
Royal Academy’s Semele offers ‘endless pleasures’
Self-adoring ‘celebrities’ beware. That smart-phone which feeds your narcissism might just prove your nemesis.
The Eternal Flame: Debussy, Lindberg, Stravinsky and Jan·?ek – London Philharmonic, Vladimir Jurowski
Although this concert was ostensibly, and in some respects a little tenuously, linked to the centenary of the Armistice, it did create some challenging assumptions about the nature of war. It was certainly the case in Magnus Lindberg’s new work, Triumf att finnas till… (‘Triumph to Exist…’) that he felt able to dislocate from the horror of the trenches and slaughter by using a text by the wartime poet Edith Sˆdergran which gravitates towards a more sympathetic, even revisionist, expectation of this period.