Continuing this year’s theme of the relationship between the musical, poetic and visual arts, this Oxford International Song Festival lunchtime recital purported to reflect the topics which ‘fixated the artists…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
The Colour Revolution: Oxford International Song Festival
The Ashmolean Museum’s current special exhibition, Colour Revolution: Victorian art, fashion & design, aims to dispel the notion of the Victorian era as a bleak, black-and-white industrial age by revealing…
Visions and Visuals: Oxford International Song Festival
When you listen to a piece of music, performed live or on a recording, do visual images and visions sweep or fly through your mind, or fix themselves indelibly on…
Handel’s Clori, Tirsi e Fileno: The English Concert at Wigmore Hall
Clori, Tirsi e Fileno is one of Handel’s many ‘dramatic cantatas’, composed during his Italian sojourn of 1706-10 and performed in the private homes and palaces of wealthy patrons, to…
The Britten Sinfonia celebrate Britten at Snape Maltings
On 15 October 1943, Britten’s for tenor, horn and strings received its premiere at Wigmore Hall, performed by Peter Pears, Dennis Brain and a string ensemble conducted by Walter Goehr. …
Magdalena Kožená and Mitsuko Uchida at Wigmore Hall
One performer exudes profundity of thought and subtlety of rhetoric: acute attention to detail, technical finesse and delicate restraint characterise her musicianship. The other has a voice which glows with…
Rouvali falls short: Uninspired Verdi opens the Philharmonia’s new season
The Philharmonia Orchestra is no stranger to offering Verdi’s Requiem as either a work to open a season – or to close it (or anywhere in between). Many of its…
Ian Bostridge and Les Talens Lyriques open the Echter’Classic Festival in Echternach, Luxembourg
The website of the Echternach Tourist Office tells me that this small medieval town (5,600 inhabitants) in the east of Luxembourg, nestled next to the German border, is one of…
King Arthur: Early Opera Company at Temple Church
Gustav Holst condemned the entire genre of semi-opera as ‘almost insuperable’, at once ‘too dramatic for the concert platform’ and ‘too incoherent for the stage’. How, he asked, are these…
Voices and Viols: Ensemble Pro Victoria and the Arculo Consort of Viols at Hatfield House
The extravagantly carved Marble Hall at Hatfield House, which is named after its black-and-white chequered floor, remains much as it was when Robert Cecil, the 1st Earl of Salisbury, built…