19th century
edward.seckerson
For the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s second residency at the Barbican Centre Riccardo Chailly pulled focus on an entirely new sounding Brahms. Gone were all those bad performance practices, bad habits, from the early 20th century, gone was the lingering romanticism, the willful soupiness, and in with a vengeance came a classical rigour, a lean and hungry vitality. Like so much of what we have come to expect of Chailly the first of this four concert series with its attendant side events brought a total re-evaluation of the composer: no longer the conservative romantic, the polar opposite of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Everything has happened so quickly,” Katherine Glendenning mused as the new series of The Paradise shot off the block. She'd been en voyage for a year, losing a father and gaining a husband, but now Katherine was back. Moray’s melancholy sojourn on coffee and cognac in Paris – “thoroughly French in every way,” he found it, with less originality than we might have expected – had been suddenly cut short too, and he was hot-footing it back to the waiting arms of Denise. The dramatic rapiers were drawn. More immediately worrying was that business at the Paradise was down, badly down. Not Read more ...
David Nice
First fanfare had to be for the Royal Opera House’s main gambit in Verdi bicentenary year, staging its first ever Sicilian Vespers 158 years after the Paris premiere. Any of Verdi’s operas from Rigoletto onwards deserves the red carpet treatment, and this unwieldy epic, with its opportunistic grafting of a melodramatic plot on to the Palermitans’ massacre of the French in 1282, has more than enough vintage music to be worthy of anyone’s close attention. What’s more, Antonio Pappano is surely the best opera-house music director in the world to reveal its colours and beauties, and he rose to a Read more ...
judith.flanders
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes, of course, it’s even better to be both. And Birmingham Royal Ballet, in their all-too-brief London season, have been both lucky and good. Lucky, because they have Peter Wright’s little jewel of a production to dance; and good because, well, they’re good in it.The first night cast of Jenna Roberts (right, in a previous performance, as the Lilac Fairy), now happily settled back at full health after a long injury break, and Iain Mackay (below left) is as sleek and smooth and elegant as the production. Roberts’s Aurora is gracious Read more ...
mark.kidel
Neil Bartlett, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Dickens adaptations of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, knows how to make gripping theatre out of a complex work of fiction. His Great Expectations rattles through the twists and turns of Pip’s coming of age with a pace that rarely lets up, so much so at times, that there is perhaps not enough space for reflection and the emotional complexity of Dickens’s mature doesn't fully come through.Bartlett has a command of storytelling through the transformation of everyday objects, the surprise and mood-changing potential of light and Read more ...
judith.flanders
The opening night of the autumn season brings a gala first night, Carlos Acosta’s staging of Petipa’s Hispano-Russo-Austro-Hungarische castanet-fest, Don Quixote, with starry leads (Marianela Nuñez and Acosta himself), a very obviously expensive new production courtesy of West End musical designer Tim Hatley (Shrek and Spamalot), and an amped-up re-orchestrated score from conductor Martin Yates.Acosta (pictured below by Johan Persson) has previously mounted shows of his own – Tocororo, A Cuban Tale was the most prominent – but Don Q is his first outing in the classical repertoire, and for the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
“Lighting design”. Are there two more terrifying words to find in a concert booklet? Since I last went to a normal concert, it seems that the lunacy that is the tradition of bathing audience and stage in as much light as possible as if we were some kind of site of forensic investigation or a harvest of hash has been replaced - at least for symphonic dramas like Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette - by its twin pole of idiocy: lighting design (capital L, capital D). Last night, this meant traffic-light signalling helpfully reminding us when to feel sad (blue) or happy (orange).Of all the works to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Right at the start of the boom around 20 years ago, a Hollywood mogul is said to have told one of his people to get some more work out of that Jane Austen. She seemed like a good source of romantic comedies. Regrettably for all, there were only ever six titles from this promising scriptwriter, and those have been done and done again by film and particularly television. Only Northanger Abbey has not provoked producers into serial adaptation, and that’s presumably because the story of poor Catherine Morland’s hyperactive imagination turns out to be not as Gothic as a horror filmmaker would wish Read more ...
David Nice
So we glide between seasons from one communicative diva giving her all in a vast space to another casting spells in intimate surroundings. While Joyce DiDonato, not perhaps one of the world’s great voices but certainly a great performer, was captivating the Proms multitudes on Saturday night, the Wigmore Hall’s concert year sidled in with Bryn Terfel and Simon Keenlyside, no low-key singers. But then nor is Anne Schwanewilms, the finest of Strauss sopranos onstage and the most nuanced of Lieder singers, here on a flying visit – and airborne it was - for a BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert.Lieder Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not because I lament the annual end of a love-hate relationship with the Albert Hall that the last few days of Proms feel rather melancholy. A bittersweetness lies rather in the drawing-in of evenings, however hot it is, so late night Schubert for one and then two pianos seemed like an appropriately introspective way of saying farewell this year.Imogen Cooper – why on earth she’s not a dame is a big mystery, though perhaps not if you look at the honours set-up – can always be relied upon to draw you in to the light-fading of late Schubert. Sure enough, after the startling summons Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese orchestra bearing the composer’s name. Calleja’s growing legions of fans were much in evidence, of course, more Maltese than Italian flags, but what can they have made of the music stand which came between them and their hero? Five arias, one of which he will have sung a zillion times, and still – despite the presence of TV cameras – the music was Read more ...
David Nice
May I be permitted a rude, opinionated intermezzo between reflections on Vasily Petrenko’s two Oslo Philharmonic Proms, and before Marin Alsop steps up to great expectations for the Last Night? Here’s another Russian in trouble, not for keeping mum on what ought to be said about Putin’s steps too far (Gergiev and Netrebko), but for talking inflammatory nonsense about women conductors – as opposed to harmless nonsense about conductors in general (the violinist who likes to be known as Kennedy, who we can only hope was also speaking nonsense about a possibly fraudulent vote for MP Glenda Read more ...