We’ve been there before with protest music or music aiming to generate change. And music can prompt desired responses – environmental, social or political – including works like Haydn’s ‘Farewell’…
Category: Performances
A Masterful Recreation of Lully’s Atys at Versailles Bridges the Contemporary and the Baroque
Although Lully’s operas are still not widely seen – certainly not outside of France, despite their fundamental part in the development of 17th century music drama – Atys (1676) fares…
Christophe Rousset completes his Lully opera cycle in refined form with Cadmus et Hermione
Reaching the end of his remarkable cycle of Lully operas (in recordings, with performances also usually presented alongside them) Christophe Rousset comes almost to the beginning of that body of…
The Banality of Evil Is Transcended by Silvery Glitz in Das Wunder Der Heliane for Strasbourg
From even the last phase of his life, on his return to Europe from the USA, Korngold has tended to be ignored as a not very serious composer, a late…
Henze’s The English Cat from Munich
For an opera derived from a French novel (Honoré de Balzac) by an English playwright (Edward Bond) and a German composer (Hans Werner Henze), The English Cat has had an…
Japonisme and Jollity: Heinz Zednik’s Die Fledermaus returns to the New National Theatre Tokyo
The New National Theatre Tokyo ushered in the year with the seventh revival of Heinz Zednik’s celebrated 2006 production of Die Fledermaus. At the 24 January matinée, the auditorium shimmered…
Bel Cantanti Opera Offers Beautiful Russian Concert Ahead of Gala Performance Next Month
It’s not often that one gets to hear Russian music in the DMV, but Bel Cantanti’s latest concert at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Bethesda proves just how affecting this…
The Breadth and Depth that Schubert Finds for the Voice: Christian Gerhaher at Wigmore Hall
Imagine: twenty-seven short pieces by the same composer, curated for an entire evening’s entertainment. What are we thinking here? Sonatas by Scarlatti, waltzes by Chopin? Grieg’s Lyric Pieces or Bartók’s…
A Staged German Requiem in Paris: Insula’s unforgettable Brahms
Stagings of Bach Passions are, if not the norm, certainly not unknown; and Insula showed how effective known music with projection can be in Matt Collishaw’s Sky Burial, a film…
Fire, Paprika and Pepper: Spices Galore with Rattle, Kopatchinskaya and the LSO
Songs my mother taught me: the title of the fourth in a cycle of gypsy songs by Dvořák, but this title also stands as a convenient coat hanger for so…