Kings Place’s annual celebration of a particular ‘theme’ has entered its sixteenth year, and in 2024 it is the turn of Scotland to be ‘unwrapped’. The year-long series will explore…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
Songs of Antiquity: James Newby and Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall
Titled Songs of Antiquity, this recital by baritone James Newby and pianist Joseph Middleton began and ended both in the past and in darkness, the Prologue and Epilogue composed by…
A seasonal masterpiece: Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols at Temple Church
Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, for three-part treble voices and harp, is one of the composer’s most joyful works, its expression direct, strong and true. It was composed in the…
Resonemus laudibus: a Renaissance Christmas from The Sixteen at Wigmore Hall
“Let praises resound!” was the rallying cry of this Wigmore Hall lunchtime recital of Christmas music by The Sixteen. It’s common, these days, for vocal ensembles to juxtapose old and…
The English Concert celebrate Saffron Hall’s 10th anniversary with a superb Rodelinda
Not many concert venues double up as school assembly halls. Actually, that statement does a double disservice: first, to Saffron Hall, which opened on the site of Saffron Walden County…
Anthony Roth Costanzo makes his debut at Wigmore Hall with La Nuova Musica
On the page this looked rather a rag-bag sort of programme. Some early Mozart opera seria arias and songs, alongside two of Gluck’s best-known arias from Orfeo ed Euridice, welded…
Perfection, of a Kind: Britten vs. Auden – City of London Sinfonia at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
‘I’ve seen & am seeing Auden a lot, & our immediate future is locked with his, it seems.’ So wrote Benjamin Britten to his sister, Barbara, on 3 September 1939.[1]…
Gallery of Memories: Mary Bevan & Anna Tilbrook at the Oxford International Song Festival
There was a veritable feast of new music at this year’s Oxford International Song Festival, much of it commissioned by the Festival itself. Gallery of Memories, a song cycle by…
The Glass Eye: an important and impressive new song cycle at the Oxford International Song Festival
Introducing Alex Ho’s new song cycle, The Glass Eye, before this evening recital at the Oxford International Song Festival, Artistic Director Sholto Kynoch noted that this was the most substantial…
Filiations – Les compositrices de la Conservatoire de Paris: Oxford International Song Festival
In a review in Le Temps in 1937, Florent Schmitt commented, ‘It was, if I may say, the great feminine week: at the Concerts Lamoureux the Concerto of Mlle Jeanne…