sopranos
Nardus Williams, Elizabeth Kenny, Spitalfields Music Festival review - layers behind a sweet Tower hourFriday, 28 June 2024
Behind this poignant, simple-seeming hour of music for soprano and lute(s) lay a spider-web of connections between outsiders in the City: rebels, prisoners, immigrants, Black Londoners. Elizabeth Kenny’s programme note wove it all together... Read more... |
Sabine Devieilhe, Mathieu Pordoy, Wigmore Hall review - enchantment in Mozart and StraussTuesday, 23 April 2024
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital. In her native France, and in the rest of Europe, she has gathered ecstatic reviews for her performance... Read more... |
Alder, RPO, Petrenko, RFH review - strings and soprano sing their hearts outFriday, 09 February 2024
Had it taken place a week later, this concert might have gone under the dubious banner of "Valentine's Day Love Classics". But not of the bitty, Raymond Gubbay variety: Vasily Petrenko was absolute master of three late romantic scores which happened... Read more... |
Williams, Kenny, Wigmore Hall review - an afternoon of early-Baroque blissMonday, 29 January 2024
It’s hard to imagine that any London audience this winter will hear more thoroughly gorgeous singing – or more refined musical artistry all round – than Nardus Williams delivered at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday afternoon. This was a magical hour of... Read more... |
Album: Tarja - Dark ChristmasWednesday, 13 December 2023
In Finland Tarja Turunen is an institution. There, she’s regarded as a kind of heavy rock-flavoured fusion of Sarah Brightman and Maria Carey. She first came to prominence as the multi-octave singer for symphonic metal kingpins Nightwish but, since... Read more... |
Paris Chapters, Barbier Serrano, Finegan, Ling, Bloomsbury Festival review - beguiling journey around Irishmen abroadTuesday, 24 October 2023
Young French soprano Clara Barbier Serrano has everything it takes to shine in an overcrowded singers’ world, including vivacious communicative skills – I witnessed those for the first time last Tuesday, when she performed at the Oxford... Read more... |
Un ballo in maschera, Chelsea Opera Group, Cadogan Hall review - Italianate vitality, if not much finesseMonday, 23 October 2023
Eighteenth century Sweden is the nominal setting for A Masked Ball, but its essence is a unique mixture of Italian testosterone and French opéra-comique elegance. If this concert performance brought it closer to the indiscriminate vitality of early... Read more... |
La Traviata, Welsh National Opera review - memorable revival, unforgettable leadSaturday, 23 September 2023
It’s always tempting, at curtain-up in La Traviata, to settle back, half-close one’s eyes, and soak up the familiar without the anxiety of the new. Not this time you won’t. David McVicar’s lavish 2009 text-true staging is being revived with a... Read more... |
Davidsen, Oslo Philharmonic, Mäkelä, Barbican review - full workout for the nervous systemMonday, 06 June 2022
It could have been the most electrifying week of the musical year. Alas, Heathrow meltdown kept me from two of Klaus Mäkelä’s Sibelius concerts with his Oslo Philharmonic in Hamburg. But there was still what should have been the grand finale, the... Read more... |
Sandrine Piau, David Kadouch, Wigmore Hall review - the joy is in the detailTuesday, 18 January 2022
“It mustn’t be a surface thing. You have to put in the work,” Janet Baker once said. Sandrine Piau’s Wigmore recital of German song followed by French song was the perfect demonstration of that credo in action.Whereas Piau described the repertoire,... Read more... |
Album: Vangelis - Juno to JupiterFriday, 01 October 2021
Along with Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis is a key figure in the development of - to be loosely colloquial about it – trance and chill-out electronica. His 1970s work was proggy trip music, laced with classical aspirations that... Read more... |
Shakespeare Re-Shaped, Opera Up Close online review - Verdi on the sofaWednesday, 24 March 2021
The screen lights up, the Zoom link connects and there, blinking back at you (30% awkward, 70% enthusiastic) is a familiar face. Is it definitely working? Can you hear me? What do we say now? God, I'm getting old. Even after 12 months of... Read more... |
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