For the second of my armistice anniversary concerts, I moved across town from the Royal Festival Hall to the Barbican.
Category: Reviews
The Silver Tassie at the Barbican Hall
‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.’ The words of George Orwell, expressed in a Tribune article, ‘The Sporting Spirit’, published in 1945.
The Last Letter: the Britten Sinfonia at Milton Court
The Barbican Centre’s For the Fallen commemorations continued with this varied and thought-provoking programme, The Last Letter, which interweaved vocal and instrumental music with poems and prose, and focused on relationships – between husband and wife, fellow soldiers, young men and their homelands – disrupted by war.
Fiona Shaw’s Cendrillon casts a spell: Glyndebourne Tour 2018
Fiona Shaw’s new production of Massenet’s Cendrillon (1899) for this year’s Glyndebourne Tour makes one feel that the annual Christmas treat at the ballet or the panto has come one month early.
The Rake’s Progress: Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic
Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress is not, in many ways, a progressive opera; it doesn’t seek to radicalise, or even transform, opera and yet it is indisputably one of the great twentieth-century operas.
A raucous CosÏ fan tutte at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Precisely where and when CosÏ fan tutte takes place should be a matter of sublime indifference – or at least of individual taste. It is ‘about’ many things, but eighteenth-century Naples – should that actually be the less exotic yet still ‘othered’ ne?polis of Wiener Neustadt? – is not among them.
For the Fallen: James Macmillan’s All the Hills and Vales Along at Barbican Hall
‘He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.’ So, wrote fellow war poet Charles Hamilton Sorley of the last sonnets of Rupert Brooke.
English Touring Opera: Troubled fidelities and faiths
‘Can engaging with contemporary social issues save the opera?’ asked M. Sophia Newman last week, on the website, News City, noting that many commentators believe that ‘public interest in stuffy, intimidating, expensive opera is inevitably dwindling’, and that ‘several recent opera productions suggest that interest in a new kind of urban, less formally-staged, socially-engaged opera is emerging and drawing in new audiences to the centuries-old art form’.
Himmelsmusik: L’Arpeggiata bring north and south together at Wigmore Hall
Johann Theile, Crato B¸tner, Franz Tunder, Christian Ritter, Giovanni Felice Sances … such names do not loom large in the annals of musical historiography. But, these and other little-known seventeenth-century composers took their place alongside Bach and Biber, Sch¸tz and Monteverdi during L’Arpeggiata’s most recent exploration of musical cross-influences and connections.
Bampton Classical Opera to perform Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors
Gian Carlo Menotti’s much-loved Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors was commissioned in America by the National Broadcasting Company and was broadcast in 1951 – the first-ever opera composed specifically for television. Menotti said that it “is an opera for children because it tries to recapture my own childhood”.