This recent issue from Alpha brings together two sides of Poulenc’s strikingly individual musical personality. Both works, some ten years apart, inhabit a similar bittersweet quality, yet while his operatic…
Category: Reviews
Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera House
‘R. slept well and has decided to have a massage only once a day,’ writes Cosima Wagner in one of her last diary entries, from Venice, only twenty days before…
Amazone: Lea Desandre and Jupiter at Wigmore Hall
The percussive thump and burr which sparked into life Francesco Provenzale’s ‘Non posso far’ (from his opera Lo Schiavo di sua moglie) at the start of this lunchtime recital by…
Peter Grimes in Paris
That the Four Sea Interludes and the Passacaglia from Peter Grimes have become orchestral showpieces attests to the opera’s musical might, manifest just now at the Palais Garnier by British…
Tristan et Isolde in Paris
A few weeks ago it was one act per night in Los Angeles, in Paris just now it is all three acts at once, as it had been back in…
Brünnhilde’s Dream: an inventive, expressive and impressive sequence by Rozanna Madylus and Counterpoise at Wigmore Hall
The programme originally planned for this Wigmore Hall recital by the ensemble, Counterpoise, might have been titled ‘Fathers and Daughters’. A new monodrama integrating speech, sprechstimme and singing, The…
Machaut’s Remede de Fortune: the Art of Music, Poetry and Love
Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune (c.1340) is at once a coming-of-age tale; a didactic work on the arts of poetry, music, rhetoric and memory; a microcosm of, and manual for, fourteenth-century…
Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion: a flawed work which isn’t all it seems
If one thinks of a classical ‘Passion’ one might not expect the Chinese-American composer Tan Dun to feature in any list of compositions. The liturgical, protestant, Passions of Bach (unfashionable…
The Owl and the Nightingale: stylish musical storytelling from the City of London Sinfonia
‘Avian invective’ is, sadly, an all-too-common dissonance on the cyber-airwaves today. But, twittering tiffs are no modern invention: the medieval bird-debate poem tradition offers rich examples of feathery squabbles, such…
Katya Kabanova: orchestral drama from the LSO and Sir Simon Rattle
Perhaps the most perfectly proportioned of Janáček’s operas, certainly one of the most emotionally and dramaturgically correct—which, in Janáček’s case, is saying quite something—Katya Kabanova has not wanted for recent…