OAE
David Nice
There are two avenues down which to approach the well-kept flower beds of Mozart’s early operas. One is to be surprised how rarely the muse of fire which rages through Idomeneo, his first undisputed masterpiece, descends on a work composed just a few years earlier like La finta giardiniera (The Counterfeit Garden Girl), and that’s how I felt sitting through a performance of it for only the second time in my life. The other is to rejoice in the few signs of things to come, the intimations of immortality, which was clearly the thinking behind its selection by Glyndebourne’s new music director Read more ...
geoff brown
Of all the epithets you could pin on that roast beef of Old England, William Boyce, “gamechanger” is one of the more unlikely. Like any good 18th-century Englishman, this composer followed the widespread Italianate model of the late Baroque, infused it with Handel, and a swig or two of Purcell, and just got to work. Latterly he spent far too much time setting toadying odes for Britain’s Hanoverian kings; no chance for revolution there. But “Gifted Conservatives”, unlike “Gamechangers”, wouldn’t today be an enticing name for a concert season’s thematic link. So there he was, Boyce the Read more ...
David Nice
Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 “comedy for music” about love, money and masquerading in a putative 18th-century Vienna, is a repertoire staple around the world. Continental houses throw it together without a moment’s thought, a single rehearsal (Felicity Lott memorably recalls a Vienna Staatsoper performance in which the first time her character, the Marschallin, met the mezzo singing the trousers role of her young lover Octavian was when they woke up in bed together at the beginning of the opera).Glyndebourne is different, with a luxuriously long Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ramon Humet – Niwa - Chamber Works London Sinfonietta/Nicholas Collon (Neu Records)Ramon Humet's Four Zen Gardens opens this arresting compilation; nine short movements for three percussionists. A solitary rainstick adds a splash of aqueous colour to the metallic textures, dominated by vibraphone and gongs. The music feels static, ritualistic, recalling John Cage's Ryoanji. You're curious about how it's been notated, the effect seeming both improvised and carefully structured. The quiet fade is haunting. Humet was born in Barcelona in 1968 but it's no surprise to read that he now lives in an Read more ...
David Nice
Not every Yuletide fixture need be commercial and routine. Certainly St John’s annual Christmas Festival packs them in, but why wouldn’t it when the voices for the last two events, backed up by no less than the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, are the best you could possibly find for the great monuments of Handel and Bach?Admittedly, Bach’s cornucopia of celebration isn’t an oratorio like Handel’s Messiah, rather a sequence of six self-contained cantatas, of which last night’s team omitted two which are in no way inferior to the others (indeed, Part Four, with its horns adorning two Read more ...
geoff brown
Readers who recall the 1872 Paris premiere of Offenbach’s Fantasio have had 141 years to wonder when its British debut would arrive. The long wait ended yesterday when Opera Rara, that valiant and necessary company dedicated to dusting off neglected beauties in concert versions and recordings, joined forces with its Artistic Director Sir Mark Elder and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. One flick of the baton and the overture began, with two limpid flutes gracefully dangling arm in arm over the unison cellos’ bass line.But the overture to what? Based on a play by Alfred de Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In a couple of weeks Marin Alsop will become the first woman ever to conduct the Last Night of the Proms. Yesterday's programme of 19th century works by Brahms and Schumann, on the fifth of the eight Saturday nights of the season, thus had its Proms-specific raison d'etre, a signpost towards that history-making final Saturday. Just as the last night's high jinks have their own, ordered traditions, the Proms planners definitely enjoy giving a self-referential logic to the season.The programme, which Alsop conducted entirely from memory, was a cleverly constructed juxtaposition of works which Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 at the age of 50. It was his first opera and his greatest. In its five acts, its visits to the woods of Diana, the groves of Venus, the fires of Pluto and the domestic meltdown in the house of Phaedra, is some of the most assured, inventive and stylish music ever written for the stage. As operatic debuts go, it is a miracle. That William Christie, the pre-eminent French Baroque specialist of our age, would be capable of summoning up some of the premiere’s dazzle was not surprising. But that Jonathan Kent would be able Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
In this revival of Richard Jones's 2009 production, the action has been very effectively shifted to post-war Windsor with Sir John Falstaff (Laurent Naouri) as down-at-heel gentry maintaining delusions of superiority, rubbing up against an ascendant middle class. Nannetta and Fenton are presumably about to play their part in the baby boom. Period features abound, from chintz and mock Tudor to soda siphons, troupes of Brownies and a Victrola cabinet.There are witty little touches, which add to the visual appeal of the production, such as the presence of a (not terribly realistic) cat in every Read more ...
David Nice
You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the OAE’s publicity didn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, by advertising this concert with Alfred’s tag at its head, the intention was surely to highlight the shock of the new in all three works played and/or conducted by András Schiff.As it happened, Schiff made it all sound unshockingly natural on one level within the charmed circle of equally Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Music is the food of dance - music as either an emotional language to speak back to, or an environment to set a mood or find associations in. The former is highly demanding, and Henri Oguike and Richard Alston are two who are clinging to the wreckage of British contemporary dance as art, not theatre. To see them on consecutive nights is to be reminded how ambitiously contemporary dance can aim, when the imagination reaches with a limited body language to try to link into a parallel world of utterly different definitions.I try to think what good dance feels like to watch - and I say, “feels Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Period instruments demand absolute honesty from their players. Their sound is their personality - candid, quirky, eccentrically beautiful - but their soul is revealed in the spirit of the playing, where beauty is not skin deep and the expressiveness of phrasing in the strings is created in the bow arm and from a truthfulness of intonation that does not hide behind vibrato. Watching and listening to Sir Simon Rattle and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment realise Mozart’s last three symphonies was to experience some sense of their innate fantasy, daring, and sense of Read more ...