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…
Category: Reviews
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…
The Sphere of Intimacy: magical miniatures from Cyrille Dubois and Christophe Rousset
At the end of the seventeenth century, the Parisian publisher Christophe Ballard, in collaboration with his son Jean-Baptiste-Christophe, undertook an ambitious artistic project to publish a new periodical, Recueils d’airs…
Echo: an exquisite new disc from Ruby Hughes
“Words mean more than what is set down on paper”, the poet Maya Angelou has written. “It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning”. These assertions may…
Barnaby Smith goes back to Bach
Barnaby Smith’s debut solo disc was titled, simply, Handel. This, his second, once again a collaboration with the Illyria Consort, announces its focus with similar succinctness: Bach. It is, in…
Leoncavallo’s Zingari: another gem from Opera Rara
When Ruggero Leoncavallo’s one-act dramma lirico, Zingari, premiered at the London Hippodrome in September 1912, the Manchester Guardian noted that the large audience greeted it with enthusiastic applause, repeatedly calling…