Janáček
David Nice
It didn't help that the London Symphony Chorus sounded rough and hectoring rather than earthily ecstatic - and I'm not sure how well they had been coached in the Czech-language mass settings. Heroic tenor Simon O'Neill, Sir Colin's last-minute Otello in the LSO's 2009-10 season, slipped in a couple of bizarre "Svats", too, between the "Svets" of his colleagues, but his anguished trumpeting - strikingly complemented at one point by a shrill, muted equivalent in the orchestra - suited his role as urgent celebrant. There were angelic sounds from soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, and Catherine Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Amanda Roocroft was a star from the moment she graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music. At 25, Sir Georg Solti asked her to sing Pamina at the Salzburg Festival. She declined. It was too soon. Where would there be left to go? "Hurry slowly" would seem to have been her motto and now that she is playing - for the first time - a diva with 300 years of experience, the decisions she has made in her career are more than ever falling into perspective.The 300-year-old diva is, of course, the elusive and mysterious Emilia Marty in Janáček's extraordinary opera The Makropulos Case and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Opera spends so much of its time killing off female protagonists that it's refreshing to come back to The Makropulos Case. In it Janáček, in one of his many moments of generosity, imagines what might happen if you allowed a woman not just to live but to live forever. The answer? They become a bloody nightmare.It's a funny old opera, The Makropulos Case. Nihilistic to its core in the thrust of the libretto, but curiously life-enhancing musically. The first act should knock you out with boredom, so heavy is its tread (one initially thinks) through the obscurities of a probate case. That it didn Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Short of rolling around the podium like a delirious pig in a mudbath, Sir John Eliot Gardiner couldn't have hidden his enjoyment of the warm, plush sounds and well-upholstered vibrato of this wonderfully old-fashioned orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, less well at last night's Prom. As he embarked on one of the broadest, most unashamedly Romantic openings to Dvořák's Eighth Symphony I have ever heard, I wondered what the hell his years of all-out warfare on modern performance techniques had been about. Was Sir John doing a Kim Philby? Was the period movement's greatest propagandist Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are some recitals where you think only about the abstracted music - the harmonic arguments, the structural cleverness, the textural ingenuity - and there are others where you are forced to confront the presence of a set of living, breathing, leering musical beasts. Last night's stunning Wigmore Hall debut by Sarajevan-born pianist Ivana Gavrić - to a sellout crowd - was a very compelling example of the latter: a performance where the musical storytelling was being so well communicated that it was almost as if she was speaking to the audience or rolling a projector. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Charles Mackerras has died at the age of 84. In tribute to one of the most highly respected and best-loved of conductors, theartsdesk republishes here an interview he gave on the eve of conducting Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera last October. Despite bouts of ill health, he found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes a flamboyant fin-de-siècle Italian symphony that could give you a nosebleed. A little-known American band provide a fresh take on a British 1930s warhorse, and classy Viennese musicians play some delectable Schumann symphonies. Everyone’s favourite Latin American youth orchestra give us a Stravinsky classic, coupled with a fascinating Mexican rarity. Contrast is provided by two wonderful discs of more intimate music-making - Zoltan Kodály’s magnificent solo cello sonata and some lesser-known songs by Britten. Finally we dip our toes into the world of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
She was the Tosca who played live to an audience of one billion in 107 countries; she is the director of English National Opera's new staging of the opera they once dubbed Puccini's "shabby little shocker". How times change. In this exclusive ENO podcast, Catherine Malfitano says that it's high time we moved on from the Tosca-as-diva portrayal - that, she says, should remain offstage where Puccini left it.
She talks about the games she plays with her young performers to find a deeper truth and how she draws daily upon the fruits of a glorious career spanning 30-plus years in over 70 roles. Read more ...
David Nice
Poland's most imaginative composer after Chopin, and his natural heir in the realm of sensual reverie, certainly knew how to yoke a full orchestra to his dreams and fantasies. Yet the work by Szymanowski I've most longed to hear in concert is the three-movement Mythes for violin and piano. A recording of it by Kaja Danczowska and the great Krystian Zimerman quickly acquired cult status in the 1980s. So it seemed like a heaven-sent gift to hear it live in the hands of an even more rounded violinist, young Norwegian Henning Kraggerud, and another maverick Polish pianist, Piotr Anderszewski. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I have no compunction laying into vastly overrated composers, crazily overpaid conductors or lazily over-employed directors. I feel slightly more guilty doing the same to struggling singers or musicians. But a cast of tiny children dressed up as bunnies? Now, come on, even I draw the line somewhere. Sort of.
Actually, they weren't all dressed up as bunnies. Some were caterpillars, some bugs, some cubs. There were adults too, kitted up as dragonflies, badgers, dachshunds and vixens, and some even playing others adults: a schoolteacher, priest, poacher and forester. Janacek's world Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Filmed extracts of a fantastically vivid 1954 production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen have been unearthed by the great blogger Doundou Tchil of Classical Iconoclast. Václav Neumann is the conductor; Berlin's Komische Oper is the house. Whets the appetite for tonight's Bill Bryden revival production at Covent Garden. Hard to imagine the sets or the acting (watch that singing vixen scrambling about before the poacher) being bettered. My friend says I'm setting myself up for a fall. But Sir Charles Mackerras will no doubt give Neumann a run for his money.
Book for The Cunning Little Read more ...
David Nice
It's amazing how much you can tell of what lies ahead from the way a conductor handles a master composer's first chord. Katya Kabanova's opening sigh of muted violas and cellos underpinned by double basses should tell us that the Volga into which the self-persecuted heroine will eventually throw herself is a river, real or metaphorical, of infinite breadth and depth. And that was exactly what Mark Wigglesworth conjured from ENO strings in a performance more alert to the value of every note and colour in Janáček's lightning-flash score than any I've heard. David Alden's production and a Read more ...