Classical Reviews
Spence, London Symphony Orchestra, Adès, Barbican HallMonday, 16 January 2012
Last Tuesday night saw the London Symphony Orchestra celebrating 20th century English music under the baton of Antonio Pappano, launching proceedings with a stylish (and more than a little sexy) rendition of the dance suite from Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face. Read more... |
Dido and Aeneas/ Actéon, Wigmore HallFriday, 13 January 2012
The Wigmore Hall staged its own Entente Cordiale last night with an operatic double bill bridging both sides of the Channel. Read more... |
2011: Reality 1, Art 0Monday, 02 January 2012
We laughed. We cried. We cursed. We gulped. Not at fiction. But at fact. At the real world. The year's best theatre? Murdoch vs Watson. Thriller? The hunt for Osama. Horror? Read more... |
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... |
Pages
inside classical music
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Best of 2024: TV
They say cinema is dying (you never know, they may be wrong), but you can’t help noticing the stampede of movie stars towards TV and streaming....
Best of 2024: Music Reissues Weekly
A reissue can be an aide-mémoire, a reminder that a record which has been off the radar for a while needs revisiting, that it deserves fresh...
Albums of the Year: Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown
Beth Gibbons’s latest album touched me more deeply than most of...
Gavin & Stacey: The Finale, BBC One review - hilarious h...
The most hyped special of the season came to a...
Best of 2024: Opera
Ireland takes the palm for best of 2024, with Wexford hitting comic heights among its three rarities in Donizettian let’s-make-an-opera, while...
Jamie Foxx, Netflix Special review - doctors and divine inte...
In April 2023 the actor and comic Jamie Foxx had a stroke and was lucky to survive. In his latest Netflix Special, What Had Happened Was......
Best of 2024: Theatre
It's the images that linger in the mind as I think back on a bustling theatre year just gone. Sure, the year fielded excellent productions (and...
Albums of the Year 2024: Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets D...
From the iconic Pop anthems that dominated this Summer, to the Pop Punk resurgence that is still going strong, it’s been an exciting twelve months...