Classical Features
The Seckerson Tapes: Craig Urquhart, Lenny's right hand manSaturday, 23 January 2010
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The Seckerson Tapes: Craig Urquhart, Lenny's right hand manSaturday, 23 January 2010
Craig Urquhart was Leonard Bernstein's personal assistant for the last five years of his life. In this touchingly frank interview with Edward Seckerson he talks about the man he knew, the man he revered, the man who wanted to be all things to all people and who consistently pushed himself to the limit in the service of the music that drove him.
The Bernstein Project is a ten-month celebration of Leonard Bernstein - one of the most charismatic men of the 20th...
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Christopher Nupen on Filming Music and MusiciansMonday, 18 January 2010
"What is it about Schubert’s music that has such power 180 years on? It has nothing to do with who he slept with or what he had for breakfast – it’s the work," insists filmmaker Christopher Nupen, whose series of films about composers is currently showing on BBC Four. "If you’re dragged towards the quotidian and the sensational, you’ll be pulled away from that elusive essence in the work that nobody has ever succeeded in explaining, but which remains one of the highest expressions of the human... Read more... |
Interview: Maria Luigia Borsi, singing in the Italian traditionFriday, 15 January 2010
In this era of spectacular divas from Russia, Latvia and Romania, it is often remarked that the Italian lyric soprano is a commodity in distressingly short supply. Hoping to rectify that sorry situation is Tuscany’s Maria Luigia Borsi, who will be making her London debut at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday, singing a luxuriant programme of Puccini, Catalani and Mascagni. Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Vasily Petrenko's ShostakovichThursday, 03 December 2009
The charismatic St Petersburg-born Vasily Petrenko has really been turning things around at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since he took over as Principal Conductor in 2005. With both standards and audiences on the up he has embarked upon his first major recording project – to record all 15 Shostakovich Symphonies for the Naxos label. Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Mark PadmoreThursday, 26 November 2009
English tenor Mark Padmore has enjoyed a career that has seen him grow from a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, through membership of The Sixteen and Hilliard ensembles, to becoming the international Evangelist of choice in performances of Bach’s Passions across the globe. He talks about the people who influenced him – William Christie and Philippe Herreweghe among them – and the prospect of Britten operas in waiting. Padmore is currently enjoying a year-long residency at the... Read more... |
Why Kipling Scuppered Elgar's Sea-SongsMonday, 09 November 2009
Elgar’s flag-waving nautical song-cycle The Fringes of the Fleet was performed to packed houses up and down the country in 1917, then sank virtually without trace for the next 90 years. As the work receives its first professional orchestral recording since Elgar's own, Tom Higgins, the conductor of the recording, explains how the work came into being, and why Rudyard Kipling had it banned. Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Messiah, ENOThursday, 05 November 2009
With its powerfully emotive stagings of Bach's St John Passion and Verdi's Requiem English National Opera has built something of a reputation for bringing sacred masterworks to the secular stage. Award-winning director Deborah Warner, conductor and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings, and ENO's indefatigable chorus master Martin Merry tell Edward Seckerson about the challenges of making a credible stage spectacle... Read more... |
Interview: William ChristieTuesday, 20 October 2009
"It's mostly very clipped and formal, but parts of it have been getting wonderfully wilder and wilder in the last few years." William Christie, whom I’ve met several times in the last decade, is describing his famous French garden in La Vendée, which has featured in many a glossy magazine. But he could also be describing himself. Read more... |
The Night Shift, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, QEHFriday, 16 October 2009
Go on, admit it. You’ve done it too. Someone is talking in your vicinity and you’ve turned round to give them evils. It’s a manoeuvre I’ve been perfecting for years. The classic rebuke is in the speedy twist of the neck, a withering glance in the perpetrator’s general direction (but not, crucially, into their eyeballs: too confrontational) followed by the slow, affronted turn back to face the front. For one night only, the gesture says, you are singlehandedly ruining my life. I didn't pay... Read more... |
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