In May 1608, the English traveller and eccentric, Thomas Coryat (c.1577-1617), set off on a continental tour of Europe which would take him, often on foot, through France and Italy…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
Prom 17: London premiere of Jennifer Walshe’s The Site of an Investigation
I am sure one could find something these two works had in common if one tried; one always can. The question is whether it would be anything more than a…
Richard Blackford’s Pietà at the Three Choirs Festival
The Stabat Mater is a Latin hymn, probably dating from the 13th century, which commemorates and mediates upon the sorrow and grief of the Virgin Mary at the Crucifixion, as…
Dyson’s Quo Vadis at the Three Choirs Festival
George Dyson began composing his nine-movement ‘cycle of poems’, Quo Vadis, in 1936 and completed it as the Second World War was ending, in 1945, but if it the grand…
Beyond the Garden: a haunting one-act opera by Stephen McNeff
Theodor Adorno called her ‘the monster’; the wife of the writer Friedrich Torberg derided her as ‘a grande dame and at the same time a cesspool’. Yet, Alma Mahler was…
Post-Straussian sumptuousness at the Three Choirs Festival
For many, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs (1948) represent the last great flowering of German Romanticism. 84 years of age, worn down by the tribulations and devastation of the Second…
Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
During its final week of the 2021-22 season the Chicago Symphony Orchestra featured several concert performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera conducted by Riccardo Muti. The cast of…
Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder: Anna Prohaska and Christian Gerhaher at Wigmore Hall
A decidedly superior Liederabend, in terms of verse, musical setting, and performance. Hugo Wolf remains a connoisseur’s composer: slightly perplexing, perhaps, but then there is no playing to the gallery,…
A harrowing but very ‘human’ Winterreise from Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis at Wigmore Hall
There could really only be one work with which Mark Padmore would conclude this season residency at Wigmore Hall, a series forming his final solo recitals at the Hall, but…
Rouvali’s mighty and stereophonic ‘Resurrection’ closes his first season with the Philharmonia
The final concert of the Philhamonia Orchestra’s Spring-Summer season came to an end with that greatest of Mahler blockbuster symphonies, the choral ‘Resurrection’. It also marked the end of Santtu-Matias…