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.
Category: Reviews
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.
Complementary Josquin masses from The Tallis Scholars
This recording on the Gimell label, the seventh of nine in a series by the Tallis Scholars which will document Josquin des PrÈs’ settings of the Mass (several of these and other settings are of disputed authorship), might be titled ‘Sacred and Profane’, or ‘Heaven and Earth’.
Piotr Becza?a – Polish and Italian art song, Wigmore Hall London
Can Piotr Becza?a sing the pants off Jonas Kaufmann ? Becza?a is a major celebrity who could fill a big house, like Kaufmann does, and at Kaufmann prices. Instead, Becza?a and Helmut Deutsch reached out to that truly dedicated core audience that has made the reputation of the Wigmore Hall : an audience which takes music seriously enough to stretch themselves with an eclectic evening of Polish and Italian song.
Soloists excel in Chelsea Opera Group’s Norma at Cadogan Hall
“Let us not be ashamed to be carried away by the simple nobility and beauty of a lucid melody of Bellini. Let us not be ashamed to shed a tear of emotion as we hear it!”
Handel’s Serse: Il Pomo d’Oro at the Barbican Hall
Sadly, and worryingly, there are plenty of modern-day political leaders – both dictators and the democratically elected – whose petulance, stubbornness and egoism threaten the safety of their own subjects as well as the stability and security of other nations.
Dutch touring Tosca is an edge-of-your-seat thriller
Who needs another Tosca? Seasoned opera buffs can be blasé about repertoire mainstays. But the Nederlandse Reisopera’s production currently touring the Netherlands is worth seeing, whether it is your first or your hundred-and-first acquaintance with Puccini’s political drama. The staging is refreshing and pacey. Musically, it has the four crucial ingredients: three accomplished leads and a conductor who swashbuckles through the score in a blaze of color.
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”.