18th century
David Nice
If you don’t believe in the angels, or at least the good, of Don Giovanni, don’t stage it. Mozart may well be telling us, as Kasper Holten partly seems to be, that the antihero is a void, a mask-wearer and a creature of thrusting appetites, on his way to the abyss. But he also gives the young avengers, bent on punishing the libertine for his murder of Donna Anna’s father, music of such diamond-cut beauty that only someone bent on the text alone would ignore its force (whether we happen to be more compelled, dramatically speaking, by the rake’s enigma is irrelevant). To shed all but the last Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As a generalist (or dilettante) who writes about world, jazz, pop and classical music, I have no doubt that 10 years ago Andreas Scholl was one of the great voices of the planet alongside names like Abida Parveen from Pakistan and Caetano Veloso from Brazil, a vocal Sun King. From an early age he had had success upon success, audiences gave him huge standing ovations, women swooned over him (OK – slightly older women like my mum, who followed him around Europe).And all this singing in a countertenor, castrato, feminine high register. In pop music, of course, this was par for the course; you Read more ...
fisun.guner
If you’re going to make a programme about the Rococo, that ornate and playful decorative arts movement that began in France at the start of the 18th century and flourished under the French king Louis XV, naturally you’d want to start in Bavaria. Or perhaps not. But Waldemar Januszczak does, heading off with his bag-on-a-stick and his lolloping gait in the nature of a weary pilgrim to visit a German Rococo splendour or two in stone and pastel-coloured stucco. “Travel was one of the great inventions of the Rococo Age,” he tells us, before settling down on the steps of the Basilica of the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You really think they’d have learned by now. Any operatic vow to sacrifice the next living creature you see in return for salvation will reliably end up with the luckless suppliant faced with their lover/son/spouse. For those who haven’t already learned this handy lesson from Mozart’s Idomeneo, there’s Handel’s Jephtha. Its skeletal (and frankly rather daft) plot matters little, however. It’s the scaffolding for some of the composer’s most glorious oratorio writing, which last night was given the full (and often equally glorious) Sixteen treatment.There’s a gloss to The Sixteen’s sound that’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last night’s Mozart and Haydn concert at the Barbican was billed as Magdalena Kožená with Les Violons du Roy. In practice it actually turned out to be Les Violons du Roy with Magdalena Kožená, which (barring a few die-hard fans of the Czech mezzo) was surely preferable for all concerned.Even on a good day Kožená’s voice has a thinness to it. At its best this can translate to agile coloratura, but it’s the vocal opposite of an iceberg – there’s really nothing anchoring it beneath the surface – and the minute any kind of strain or illness threatens it can quickly go adrift. Sounding ragged and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It's a considerable irony that a musician as dedicated and as serious as pianist/conductor Christian Zacharias should suddenly, at the age of 63, gain bragging rights on Youtube (see next page). There wasn't really that much he could do about it. It happened last October. A mobile phone went off as he was directing a Haydn concerto from the keyboard in Sweden. You can see his silent but intense frustration as he stops playing. “Don't answer,” he says. He waits until the loud noise of the moble phone stops, and gets back to playing. Accidents happen, and "Haydn Killed by Cell Phone" has now Read more ...
David Benedict
The great Marilyn Horne used to joke that she was going to release an album entitled “Chestnuts for Chest Nuts”. She never did, but that leaves the door wide open for Sonia Prina whose dark, thrillingly low sound marks her out as the real deal, a genuine contralto. But the excitement of Prina in performance isn’t just about her extraordinary skill at using her unusual range. Throughout this frankly dazzling recital of music Handel wrote for the superstar castrato Senesino, she wasn’t merely singing in front of the eight-strong Ensemble Claudiana, she was truly making music with them.Recently 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 ...
David Nice
Nothing tests small-hall acoustics better than that most exuberant of holies, the Sanctus from Bach’s B minor Mass. After one of the year’s big disappointments, the blowsy sound coming from chamber ensembles in the Barbican/Guildhall School’s new Milton Court – a surprise miscalculation from Arup acousticians - it seemed imperative to get back to Kings Place’s Hall One, which feels bigger but is some 200 seats smaller (420 to Milton Court’s 608). And oh, the clarion cries of the 32 young Cambridge choral singers! The piercing but never ear-splitting beauty of perhaps the greatest Read more ...
David Benedict
There’s a reason why many people think Handel and, particularly his Messiah, is dull. Relatively easy to play, his music is incredibly difficult to perform well. Take this Temple Winter Festival outing with choral expert David Hill conducting the immensely skilled BBC Singers who can, and largely do, sing everything; four soloists all banishing grandiose, wobbly vibrato from days of yore; and the accomplished St James’s Baroque. There was nothing wrong with the performance... Unless, that is, you wanted the intensity, passion and, yes, the drama that Handel wrote.Scale is the key factor in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Georgians are in our marrow, and two of them in particular. The dawn of the age gave us Handel, who came over from Hanover with George I. Then at the sunset came the ever-exalted Jane Austen, who dedicated Emma in mock deference to the bloated Prince Regent. And in between there are all those elegant terraces in dark-brown brick, desirable survivors of the Industrial Revolution and the Luftwaffe.As this entertaining exhibition argues, the Georgian age is also the crucible to which the British owe much of their identity. It was in the pre-Victorian century that the middle classes, which Read more ...
David Nice
There’s a scene in Mozart’s most metaphysical opera which Ingmar Bergman, creator of what is still the richest of all Magic Flutes, describes as “at the outermost limit of life”. Hero Tamino seems to have reached a point of no return and no going forward. “When will this darkness end?”, he asks, and voices reply, “Soon, soon or never”.We must believe the extremity in that rite of passage. But not only are the vital choral responses unmysterious and perfunctory in this new ENO production; Complicite director Simon McBurney has it that the page of a giant video-projected picture book has Read more ...