thu 28/03/2024

18th century

Williams, Dunedin Consort, Truscott, Wigmore Hall review - star soprano, total teamwork

When your special guest is a young soprano with all the world before her, the total artist already, your programme might seem to run itself. Yet the Dunedin Consort’s sequence seen and heard in Glasgow, Edinburgh and (last night) London followed a...

Read more...

Bavouzet, Manchester Camerata, Takács-Nagy, Stoller Hall, Manchester review - spirit of the 1780s

It was very much the formula as before, as Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy moved their edition of the Mozart piano concertos a step closer to completion with Nos. 11, 12 and 13.That formula has served them well in the past: it’s not “...

Read more...

In The Realms of Sorrow, London Handel Festival, Stone Nest review - disappointed love has all the best tunes

Raw, muscular, visceral, haunting – this was Handel as you’ve never experienced him before. In this striking entry for the London Handel Festival,  an uncompromising production by Adele Thomas with conductor Laurence Cummings took four of the...

Read more...

First Person: conductor Harry Bicket on filming the complete Handel for The English Concert's big new project

Of the many questions we asked ourselves during lockdown, I suspect that many of us looked at our lives and professions and asked, “Why?”.Perhaps a period of forced introspection is a positive thing if it helps clarify what is truly important and...

Read more...

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Wigmore Hall review - virtuoso brilliance and thoughtfulness reveal Haydn's range

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet mischievously described interpreting Haydn’s piano sonatas as “putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton… You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can...

Read more...

Hewitt, BBC Philharmonic, Davis, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - the classical style

Two intriguing themes and two great guest artists were offered by the BBC Philharmonic to their Saturday night audience in the Bridgewater Hall: the themes were what “classicism” really is, and the variety of music inspired by (or written for) dance...

Read more...

Lowe, The Mozartists, Page, Wigmore Hall - an education, not quite a triumph

Ian Page’s “journey of a lifetime” with his Mozartists, taking the greatest genius year by year, lands us in 1773 with the adolescent Mozart's first durable crowdpleaser, the pretty-brilliant motet for soprano and orchestra Exsultate, jubilate (last...

Read more...

Bach Christmas Oratorio, Monteverdi Choir, EBS, Gardiner, St Martin-in-the-Fields review - soul-piercing song and dance

Across three and a half decades, John Eliot Gardiner’s 1987 recording of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists spoiled one for live performances. Not that many of those weren’t equally fine and alive in...

Read more...

Hewitt, Hallé, Schuldt, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - lightening the gloom

If there was a certain doom-laden dimension to Clemens Schuldt’s Bridgewater Hall programme with the Hallé ( … Requiem … Mozart in D minor … Strauss describing Death and …), it was easily lightened by the conductor’s own approach and personality....

Read more...

El Gran Teatro del Mundo, St John's Smith Square review - a diverting tour of an unusual musical form

In some ways the concerto da camera was the 18th-century music equivalent of the hatchback – only slightly larger in scale than a basic chamber work but with an ambition that allowed it to carry ideas associated with more substantial structures...

Read more...

Orfeo ed Euridice, Opera North review - more than a concert

Though billed as a “concert performance”, this was really much more than that. With the resources of their own theatre, Opera North’s team present a staging that employs a big, built-up and raked floor, with a simple platform in the centre and a...

Read more...

Dunedin Consort, Butt, Lammermuir Festival review - majestic Mozart at St Mary’s Haddington

The Dunedin Consort are most readily associated with the music of the Baroque, but this concert showed that they’re every bit as good at playing the music of the next generation. At times, in fact, I was taken aback by the magisterial scale of the...

Read more...
Subscribe to 18th century