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…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
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…
Simon Rattle’s Prom of Poulenc and Mahler proved both unforgettable and deeply personal
Farewell. This was an essential part of Sir Simon Rattle’s second Prom at the Royal Albert Hall. It was a final farewell to his tenure at the London Symphony Orchestra…
Late-night Bach at the Proms: Iestyn Davies and the English Concert
In an article in the Daily Telegraph, published just prior to this late-night Prom with The English Concert led by director Kristian Bezuidenhout from the harpsichord, countertenor Iestyn Davies tells…
Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO introduce Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri to the Proms
“It’s the great masterpiece you’ve never heard.” So declared Sir Simon Rattle when he introduced Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri to the London Symphony Orchestra in 2015, in a…