Strauss
Boyd Tonkin
When a trail-blazing orchestra takes on a world-transforming work, it would be pointless to leave the staid old rules of concert etiquette intact. Not only did the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon stretch their repertoire of symphonies performed from memory to cover the epic expansiveness and ear-bending innovations of Beethoven’s Third, the Eroica. For half an hour, as this Prom began, Collon and presenter Tom Service also turned the Royal Albert Hall into Britain’s biggest classroom as they sought to scrub the crust of over-familiarity from Beethoven’s breakthrough monster from 1803, Read more ...
David Nice
They get to work with the best music and language coaches in the business. They make their mark in small parts throughout the Royal Opera season and showcase their art more prominently at the end of it, proving to the world that there are major talents among them (four outstanding ones, I reckon, on this showing). The big question mark is why, for this crucial event, the Jette Parker singers were saddled with one director, also on the Programme, and a movement co-ordinator who seem to have been little help with the interaction between characters, with feeling comfortable in their skins and Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s often said that Ariadne auf Naxos is all about The Composer – not only Richard Strauss but an affectionate parody of his younger self – and Katharina Thoma takes this idea seriously in her Glyndebourne production. In the role, Angela Brower plays an important if silent part in the Opera proper, and brings an upbeat flourish to an absorbing if rather pensive reflection on this uncategorisable piece of theatre.Part spoken play, part tragedy, part commedia dell’arte, Ariadne is 100 percent meta-opera. From the outset, place and time are established so firmly – wartime Glyndebourne – that it Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Der Rosenkavalier, you might think, is one of those operas that belong in a specific place and time and no other. “In Vienna,” says Strauss's score, “in the first years of Maria Theresia’s reign” (i.e. the 1740s). But this, of course, is a provocation. For the Welsh National Opera, Olivia Fuchs updates it to, roughly, the date of composition (1910-11), or perhaps even a few years later, to judge from the flickering gunfire, and the heavy emphasis on militarism in the programme. And she supplies the Marschallin with a Doppelgänger in the person of an old lady dressed 1930s/40s, who haunts the Read more ...
David Nice
Now at the very top of his game and master of sundry great orchestras around the world, Paavo Järvi is the conductor students of the art like to follow for his perfect technique. Time was when he seemed like the cooler version of his peerless father Neeme; now, if he can still at times come across as more cerebral than his impetuous but also excellent younger brother Kristjan, he often seems touched by the kind of inspiration Neeme maintains in his 80th year.They work together under Utopian circumstances every summer with the superband Estonian Festival Orchestra and the promising trainees of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Strauss: Suites from Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck (Reference Recordings)Manfred Honeck’s extended slice of Richard Strauss's Elektra was made in collaboration with the Czech composer Tomáš Ille, Honeck’s inspiration being performances he’d played in with Claudio Abbado with Vienna State Opera in the 1980s. The results are thoroughly absorbing, the joins seamless. We’re used to thinking of Elektra as one of Strauss’s most extreme works, but here it resembles an extravagantly lush symphonic poem. We get a very convincing taste of the full opera, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Gather round the fire, friends: no Santa down the chimney this Christmas Eve, but the curiously comforting Alan Bennett, with his sardonic and occasionally optimistic diaries. The latest published instalment has the slightly wry title Keeping On Keeping On; Bennett tells us the original title was to be Banging On Banging On.Bennett is 82 now, and lives much of the time in NW1 – the very street once home to the Lady in the Van, who parked in his front garden, in a neighbourhood memorialised in the Mark Boxer comic strip, Life and Times in NW1. Now much has gone: the real-life Mr and Mrs String Read more ...
David Nice
Fiftysomething may well be the new 32, the age Strauss and Hofmannsthal made the central figure of the Marschallin in their "comedy for music" Der Rosenkavalier. Hearts and minds no doubt still move with Renée Fleming, senior doyenne of the role in Robert Carsen's Royal Opera production, but she is mirroring her character in bowing out gracefully to the next generation, and fellow American Rachel Willis-Sørensen is clearly the new Princess Werdenberg on the Viennese block. Even cast one's Octavian, the impassioned Alice Coote, is a known quantity to many of us, cast two's London-trained Anna Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Der Rosenkavalier is an opera of thresholds. Characters are caught between states – girlhood and marriage, lover and lover-no-more, woman and whatever lies beyond sexuality and desirability – while around them a city and a nation are also poised on the brink, blocking out the noisy winds of change with waltzes that swirl ever more urgently through parquet ballrooms and gilded staterooms. Doorways give way to doorways in Robert Carsen’s new production of the opera, drawing the eye endlessly forwards, though without ever revealing what really lies ahead.I say new production, but in many ways Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Bruckner’s Third Symphony doesn’t so much begin as become audible. A steady heartbeat in the bass, oscillating violas lit from within by clarinets, and in the middle, slowly pulling clear of the texture, the proud, sombre trumpet motif to which Wagner himself agreed to attach his name. Not the least of Alpesh Chauhan’s achievements in this performance with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was that he established all of this with his very first gesture – not just the subtle, unmistakably Brucknerian layering of the music’s textures but that whole vast, mysterious sense of the music Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Nyman and The Tempest – Prospero’s Books and Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs (MN Records)Think Michael Nyman and one inevitably thinks of the 1980s, and it’s quite possible that Nyman’s scores for Peter Greenaway will prove more enduring than the films themselves. This set, the two Tempest-inspired works remastered and reissued from Decca originals, includes the last Nyman/Greenaway collaboration, Prospero’s Books. A mixture of newly composed numbers and excerpts from an earlier theatrical score, it ended the pair’s working relationship. The reasons aren’t entirely clear from Nyman’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Strauss: Ein Heldenleben, Four Symphonic Interludes from Intermezzo Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (ABC Classics)This isn’t a Heldenleben of extremes, but it’s definitely a performance to live with. ABC’s live recording is exceptionally good; the opening theme on lower strings and horns leaps out with a pleasing oomph. Sir Andrew Davis paces “Der Held” to perfection, the pleasingly rich sound suggesting that Strauss’s hero is narrating his life story from a well-upholstered sofa. The scoring never feels too thick – everything’s nicely blended but you can still taste Read more ...