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. …
Category: Recitals/Concerts
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…
Ruby Hughes and friends at the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival
The theme of this year’s Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival is ‘A Family Affair’. As Lord Salisbury and Artistic Director Guy Johnston explain in their introductions in the Festival programme,…
Glowing Wagner and Mahler’s Fourth from Vladimir Jurowski and the Bayerisches Staatsorchester
I first heard the Bayerisches Staatsorchester in the early 1980s – and one’s earliest memories, of ones first orchestras, often remain long over time. Wolfgang Sawallisch – never a favourite…
From Darkness to Light: Barbara Hannigan opens the LSO’s new season at the Barbican
The London Symphony Orchestra was the first of the major orchestras to open their autumn season in September. Unlike their brethren across the Thames (to the south), they chose not…
‘Celebrating Women Baroque Composers’: Roberta Invernizzi at Wigmore Hall
Early developments in print technology reveal much about women’s involvement in musical life and composition in the Renaissance and early Baroque. The earliest extant published music by a woman is…