Mendelssohn
stephen.walsh
If the thought of the annual trek to Hay-on-Wye for the literary festival in May fills you with as much gloom as it does me (and I don’t have to go as far as most of our readers), you might do worse than sample the town’s chamber music festival this weekend as a healthy change or at least a soothing antidote.This is a new event crystallised out of an existing occasional series of concerts featuring the Fitzwilliam Quartet. And though it’s unlikely to spawn chamber music on every street corner of this small border town, in the way that bookshops once exploded out of Richard Booth’s original Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Retrospectives are difficult in dance, and for Pina Bausch's brand of Tanztheater, even more difficult. A great deal of her oeuvre's impact derives from the special atmosphere of her Wuppertal company, whose dancers were devoted to her and to each other, in many cases staying for their whole careers. After Bausch died in 2009, the first thought was that the company would have to wind down too, but after the great, supposedly final, tour of 2012, minds changed and now Tanztheater Wuppertal is back at Sadler's for the third time in as many years, this time with two pieces never before performed Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When the curtain came down on Liverpool’s year in the limelight as European Capital of Culture, back in 2008, there may have been some who thought that the party was over. Things in the city’s arts world were never going to the same, however, and much has changed since 2008, mostly for the better. But there is one institution which, though it’s been through some major changes in its lifetime, is a constant on the Liverpool scene.The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is celebrating its 175th birthday. Philharmonic Hall has been refurbished and building work continues to provide a new performance Read more ...
David Nice
As I sat, engaged and occasionally charmed but not always as impressed as I’d been told I would be, through violinist-animateur Richard Tognetti’s lightish seven-course taster menu of string music with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it was worth bearing two things in mind. One was that this happened to be merely the official zenith of a truly enlightened three-part project; on Monday, parts of the programme had been played first to educate all ages and later to grab a young audience in more relaxed mode as part of the OAE’s pioneering Night Shift series. The other qualification Read more ...
graham.rickson
Barry: The Importance of Being Earnest Soloists, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Thomas Adès (NMC)I missed the live performances of this work; being allergic to Wilde as a dramatist, I wasn't in any hurry to assimilate The Importance of Being Earnest as contemporary opera. But this is a superb live recording – edgy, brilliantly sung and boasting electrifying playing from Thomas Adès' Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. And while I didn't laugh out loud, I was beguiled and entertained by Gerald Barry's ruthless deconstruction of Wilde's original. Which could probably form the basis Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Stratford-upon-Avon calling. The City of London Sinfonia has embarked on a series of three Bard-based October concerts in London to commemorate the 450th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death. The first of the three stopping-off points last night was Southwark Cathedral, in some ways a logical starting-place, since the building proudly asserts its credentials as the parish church nearest to the Globe Theatre. The main work of the evening was Mendelssohn's charming and graceful incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, presented semi-staged, which occupied the whole of a delightful Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss was born in Munich 150 years ago today. Christian Thielemann is celebrating the fact by conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in the juiciest of all-Strauss operatic potpourris, a festive concert to be held in the city’s glorious Semperoper. What wouldn’t I give to hear Anja Harteros, alongside Anne Schwanewilms the loveliest of Strauss sopranos, and chaste nymph Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel in a peerless operatic epilogue? In fact the Dresden Music Festival, my host, ended yesterday and seems to function as a separate entity with its own period-instrument orchestra. I Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history), but the partnership of Titania and Oberon themselves. Regal, fickle, fast, flighty, and dangerous, these two are equals as lovers and as rulers: it is their quarrel that starts the story and their smouldering reunion that brings it to a happy conclusion.So you need two good principals for a really perfect Dream – ideally with more than a hint of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The moment when Alfred Brendel shuffled on stage during the Verbier Festival’s 20th Anniversary Concert not to play, but to turn pages for long-time colleague Emmanuel Ax, expressed everything that is so special, so extraordinary about this festival. Walking off together, arms around each other’s shoulders, these were not just international soloists, they were two great old men and two even greater musicians. Verbier has made a lot of good friends during its 20-year history – a mere blink of the eye, as classical festivals go – and in this birthday year it was no surprise that they might just Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I'd love to see the stats on the last time a Prom was this packed for an afternoon organ recital. Were it not for the fact that organist Cameron Carpenter was sporting spandex trousers encrusted in silver glitter, a wife beater and Mohawk, you could have been mistaken for thinking we were back in the organ glory days of the early 19th century. Even the programme harked backward, offering as it did big, bloated Romantic transcriptions, arrangements and improvisations (pretty much everything in fact except the urtext).Scratch that. We did get two pieces of unadulterated Bach, the Toccata Read more ...
geoff brown
For the general public, getting to see the Mansion House in the City of London is almost as easy a task as becoming a dentist who specialises in hen’s teeth. But that was not the only reason for coming along to last night’s Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s concert conducted by Edward Gardner. For this City of London Festival programme contained a most teasing prospect. Alina Ibragimova, the most questing and lively young violinist of our time, was actually going to play a repertoire concerto.Left to her own devices, this 26-year-old firecracker would probably be happier unleashing a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Cafés, ballets, it’s all the same to the mighty petty bullyboys of the London Olympics, who have not only devised two of the most revolting mascots in Olympic history (the one-eyed slugs Wenlock and Mandeville) but also employed teams of apparatchiks in your name and mine to compel artists and small businesses not to infringe their entirely dubious copyright in the Olympic motto. David Bintley came out much the better of a last-minute squabble a fortnight ago about his new ballet’s name - he had to truncate it to Faster, from his original “Faster, Higher, Stronger”, so that LOCOG could keep Read more ...