Mozart
Sebastian Scotney
I just don’t get it. Jon Batiste, deservedly, has a huge career as pianist, composer, inspirer. The prospect of his forthcoming extended residency in various formations at KOKO in London is an exciting one. But after several attempts to reach the opposite conclusion, I still have no clue why someone decided it was a good idea to “drop” Black Mozart – Batiste Piano Series Vol. 2.The narrative from Decca is that it is part of a series which started with Beethoven Blues, and which is set to continue with two more droppings, both of them albums inspired by Thelonious Monk, in just a couple of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Never have I had such a day,” sings the baffled Emperor Tito as he wearily forgives all and sundry for their conspiracies, treacheries, deceits, attempted murders – and, by the way, for trashing the Capitol long before Trumpian thugs had the same idea. At which point the Grange Festival audience, forgivably, laughs. Mozart’s farewell opera seria from 1791, La Clemenza di Tito presents such a high-minded tableau of imperial nobility and forbearance that we can lose sight of its closeness at some points to utter, Marriage of Figaro-level, farce. Tito’s breakneck shifts Read more ...
David Nice
If the Wigmore Hall sought perfection in its 125th Anniversary Festival, it found it in the two concerts I've attended this week - in the greater part of Lise Davidsen's and James Baillieu's Schubert cornucopia, and last night in the sublime Belcea Quartet's teaming up with similarly legendary viola player Tabea Zimmermann in two awe-inspiring string quintet masterpieces. Zimmermann held centre place in Mozart's G minor Quintet, telling from the start because Mozart has the first viola as the lower of the top three voices at the start, only to take the upper line with second viola and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Benvenuti a Napoli cries the huge corny poster of the blue bay and ominous Vesuvius that looms over Neil Irish’s sets for Così fan tutte. However, we’re no longer in the Enlightenment city of cynical male experiments in female psychology where Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera of 1790 first took place. Now, in the 1950s stage of post-1945 America’s forever wars, Naples-posted US Marines Guglielmo and Ferrando meet up with long-distance sweethearts Fiordiligi and Dorabella after a transatlantic flight. Elizabeth Karani’s multi-tasking Despina serves as runway signaller as the arriving passengers Read more ...
David Nice
A libertine who deserves punishment makes a good/bad start when a male director decides he really has tried to rape Donna Anna, and doesn't just enjoy post-coital badinage with her. Tom Creed thankfully begs to differ from, say, Kasper Holten – hard to believe that Don Giovanni is due for revival in the coming Royal Opera season – or Ole Anders Tandberg at the Royal Swedish Opera (toilets à la Bieito, whose ENO Giovanni was a horrible mess - there's only one, and only briefly, on the Lismore stage). The era of "she wanted it really" is over, and Creed's good folk are vocally the Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Louis Couperin: The Complete Works Jean Rondeau (harpsichord, organ and artistic direction) (Erato)
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Louis Couperin (1626-1661) was the first musically and historically significant member of the Couperin family, long overshadowed by his nephew François. Harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, this handsome box set’s driving force, contributes a useful pocket biography in which he compares Louis to Mozart. Aside from the fact that both composers died aged 35, Rondeau considers Louis to have been “a genius who brought a new style to light”. Read more ...
David Nice
As those of us who were there at what turned out to be his unofficial inaugural concert with the Irish Chamber Orchestra will know, Henning Kraggerud dances, and makes sure his fellow players can follow suit without self-consciousness. His theory is that Mozart must have danced a lot, too; his music certainly does, even as it sings. This programme drawn from Mozart's earlier compositions took us from a vital symphony by the 18-yearold genius to the middle movement of a violin sonata which, Kraggerud argues, ushered in a deeper vein given the 22-year-old's grief at the death of his mother Read more ...
David Nice
Star attractions for this revival of ENO/Improbable's Coney-Island-in-the-1950s Così were sopranos Lucy Crowe and Ailish Tynan, and conductor Dinis Sousa. All three excelled, but so did the other four principals. More fool me for having stayed away previously out of concern that the usual six characters in search of real feelings would be swamped by fairground business. Once or twice, perhaps, they did (start of the Act One finale especially) but the singing and acted projected perfectly from downstage and, let's face it, the "skills ensemble" of circus people were fun, a good idea as it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Whether there really was a poisonous professional rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, composer to the Imperial court in Vienna, seems less than likely, but the success of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, on both stage and screen, has convinced the world otherwise. In Shaffer’s view, we see a Salieri consumed with envy and jealous rage at the effortless brilliance of Mozart, who seemingly had access to a continual stream of divinely-inspired inspiration. Salieri, by contrast, would be remembered only as “the patron saint of mediocrities”.Sky Atlantic’s adaptation, written by Joe Barton, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Mozart’s unfinished C Minor mass lacks a canonical completion of the sort that Süssmayr so famously – and still contentiously – imposed on the Requiem. Even without its Agnus Dei and chunks of the Credo, however, the showpiece mass planned for the Salzburg abbey in 1783 remains a mighty and stirring piece whose choral and solo peaks more than match the later work. At St Martin’s, David Bates, his group La Nuova Musica, and the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, brought to it not just passages of period-sensitive refinement but a full-bodied, big-boned weight and depth of sound.
With almost 30 Read more ...
David Nice
One miracle of musical performance is that a work you’ve loved for years can be revealed as never before in an outstanding interpretation. That happened to me last week at the New Ross Piano Festival when 22-year-old pianist Magdalene Cho turned us upside down in Bach’s Sixth Partita. It happened again last night when Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra hit 1788 with one of the three symphonic masterpieces Mozart composed in a single summer, the 39th.Problematic, on the other hand, was the first-half Mozart, third of the four concertos he composed for his beloved horn virtuoso Joseph Read more ...
David Nice
35 years ago, persona-now-non-grata John Eliot Gardiner revealed how performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito allying period instruments with great voices could electrify in a new way. And here we were last night with Pablo Heras-Casado, a conductor as at home in Wagner at Bayreuth as he clearly is with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, stunning us with a consistently vigilant and alive Mozart Requiem.The programme was typically inventive. It started with the ultimate joyburst, Bach’s Singet dem Herrn – “singet" as in zing it – with Heras- Read more ...