If you want an intellectual challenge, then power your way through the sonnets of John Donne, the leading exemplar of the school of Metaphysical Poets, as I and many other…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
Enchantresses: Sandrine Piau at Wigmore Hall
Sandrine Piau’s recent Alpha disc (also Enchantresses) was mostly re-enacted in front of us (with a signing afterwards) for this remarkable concert at Wigmore Hall. The instrumental group used was…
Chelsea Opera Group make a creditable addition to their repertoire of neglected operas in Bellini’s La straniera
Having presented Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys, based on a Breton legend, back in March, Chelsea Opera Group now gave another opera set in Britanny, Bellini’s La straniera (1829). It’s another…
The whimsical, the valedictory and the heroic: three sides of Richard Strauss
Sometimes comments are voiced to the effect that you’d never know Jane Austen had been writing in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, since there isn’t a single reference anywhere…
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown: Opera North’s Simon Boccanegra
What links Verdi with Shakespeare is a keen awareness of the distinction that needs to be made between the public and the private man: an individual may project a particular…
What comes after the very end? Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde offers some answers
Some composers, like Dvořák for instance, seemed at home in whichever genre they chose to write. Mahler, by contrast, though he repeatedly wrote for the human voice, never attempted an…
A choral and orchestral extravaganza from The Lighthouse, Poole
Hats off to David Hill for overseeing the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s last hurrah of the season with three career-defining works that changed the musical landscape in both Britain and the…
Gustavo Dudamel conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Strauss and Ravel
We often get reminded that a review is just one person’s opinion. In this particular instance, I am going to be shamelessly subjective rather than assume some kind of position…
On a nature trail with Cyrille Dubois and Tristan Raës
Artfully arranged white lilies flanked Wigmore Hall’s stage, but roses were the flower of choice in the perfumed texts of the romances and mélodies performed by Cyrille Dubois and Tristan…
Handel’s Jephtha at the Barbican
Handel’s last oratorio presents, as amongst the composer’s catalogue of undeniable masterpieces, a masterwork of stunning stature. Not a note is misplaced in Jephtha: long though it is (more of…