Classical Reviews
2011: From Russia - With Love?Saturday, 31 December 2011
It took a relatively little-noticed television documentary, Vlad’s Army, broadcast in Channel 4’s Unreported World strand to confirm that theartsdesk has a readership in Russia. Peter Oborne’s film (the presenter pictured below) caught the pro-Kremlin youth movement, the Nashi, with its defences down, and the result depicted, no holds barred, how politics works there today. Read more... |
2011: Schoolroom Fairies and a Cross-Dressing MezzoFriday, 30 December 2011
Two precisely imagined dream-visions bookend a cornucopia on the musical front. I’ll start with the deadly but save the apparently frivolous for the top slot. Christopher Alden’s pitiless exiling of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Elizabethan wood to 1960s school block was to opera what Lars von Trier’s Melancholia was to film: audience-sundering, often alienating, sometimes enticing, but very much its own consistent world. Read more... |
2011: Welsh Warblers and Wagner Gone WestThursday, 29 December 2011
Living and working 150 miles from London, one either clutches at local straws or gets on a train. I’ve done both in 2011, as usual, but in a way the local is more stimulating, not because it’s better (ha!) but because there’s so much less of it. Read more... |
2011: Beethoven, Bartók, and the BardTuesday, 27 December 2011
Beethoven has been a real touchstone for classical music in the UK in 2011; flattening all in their way, the mighty Leipzig Gewandhaus and Riccardo Chailly delivered high-speed, high-risk thrills in their complete cycle of symphonies. Read more... |
The Bostridge Project: Ancient and Modern, Wigmore HallFriday, 23 December 2011
The poster boy for a generation of thinking, reading, researching soloists, tenor Ian Bostridge is a regular recitalist. But the programmes he has curated for the current Bostridge Project at the Wigmore Hall have given him the opportunity to show that there’s a lot more to his skills than just performance. Read more... |
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Saraste, Barbican HallSaturday, 17 December 2011
Is it ever a good idea to programme two symphonies by one composer in a single concert? Maverick Valery Gergiev is likely to stand alone in applying the rule to Mahler. Yet curiously his Prom marathon of two big instalments made more sense as stages on a journey than yoking together the outwardly less time-consuming symphonic adventures of Sibelius. Read more... |
London Symphony Orchestra, Gardiner, Barbican HallFriday, 16 December 2011
Just a few weeks ago, John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique delivered what was unquestionably one of the year’s finest concerts – performing Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies with more wit, swagger and verve than even the mighty Leipzig Gewandhaus could muster. Read more... |
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gardner, Barbican HallSunday, 11 December 2011
It’s typical: you wait ages for a Belshazzar’s Feast and then two come along at once. And judging by the performance delivered by Ed Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night, Andrew Nethsingha and his massed Cambridge choirs will have their work cut out to follow it next week at the Royal Festival Hall. Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Honegger, Paul Hillier, LiberaSaturday, 10 December 2011
|
Anne Schwanewilms, Charles Spencer, Wigmore HallFriday, 09 December 2011
Now that Margaret Price is no more and Kiri's well past her heyday, whose is the most limpid soprano of them all? "The beautiful voice" was a label slapped by PR on Renée Fleming, but that fitfully engaging diva is all curdled artifice alongside Anne Schwanewilms, the German soprano who shines in Strauss and should be an example to any singer for ease, charm and what to do with the hands in the exposed light of song recital. Read more... |
Honegger: Une cantate de Noël, Pastorale d’été, Symphony No 4 London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, New London Childrens’ Choir/Jurowski (LPO)Pages
inside classical music
latest in today
Joan, ITV1 review - the roller-coaster career of a 1980s jew...
If you’re looking for an advertisement for how crime doesn’t pay, Joan will do very nicely....
National Ballet of Canada, Sadler's Wells review - see...
What to expect of the National Ballet of Canada since its last...
Lear, Barbican Theatre review - a very stormy saga, Korean-s...
What do the cult TV show Squid Game and National Changgeuk Company of Korea’s Lear have in common? Oddly, a K-Pop...
Album: Goat - Goat
With the Pagan festival of Mabon and the Autumnal Equinox only just past us, it seems appropriate for Scandi psychedelic rockers, Goat to provide...
Monet and London, Courtauld Gallery review - utterly sublime...
In September 1899, Claude Monet booked into a room at the Savoy Hotel. From there he had a good view of Waterloo Bridge and the south bank beyond...
Joker: Folie à Deux review - supervillainy laid low
“Psychopaths sell like hotcakes,” William Holden observed in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, and those individuals have been doing...
A Tupperware of Ashes, National Theatre review - family and...
Queenie is in trouble. Bad trouble. For about a year now, this 68-year-old Indian woman has been forgetful. Losing her car keys; burning rice in...
First Person: conductor Robert Hollingworth on a four-choir...
I’m sitting in a café in Kraców, Poland, rehearsals finished for the resurrection of a mass setting written nearly 400 years ago in...
The Battle for Lakipia review - why post-colonial Kenya is a...
The Battle for Lakipia is a beautifully filmed and thoughtfully directed documentary that was made over a two-year period. Its focus is...
Album: Coldplay - Moon Music
From the very first chords of "Yellow" in 2000, Coldplay have been an ever present at the summit of popular music's hierarchy. Their uncanny knack...