Baroque
Sophie Daneman, Apollo's Fire: Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, Wigmore HallWednesday, 01 December 2010
Visits from the pick of Europe’s Baroque orchestras – Concerto Köln, Europa Galante, Le Concert d’Astree, Les Musiciens du Louvre – are a blissfully frequent occurrence in London, an alternative and supplement to our own ever-growing roster of... Read more... |
Bostridge, Europa Galante, BarbicanSaturday, 30 October 2010
We have good days and we have bad days. Ian Bostridge, at last night’s concert at the Barbican, was not having one of his better ones. But time and CD releases wait for no man, and so he gamely ploughed through his programme of music written for... Read more... |
The English Concert, Alice Coote, Wigmore HallThursday, 28 October 2010
There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked... Read more... |
Radamisto, English National OperaFriday, 08 October 2010
If interior décor could shout, then last night’s music might have proved altogether incidental. The curtain rises to reveal a set gift-wrapped – ramparts, city walls and all – in the brightest of hot-pink damasks: a Nicky Haslam acid trip. Ladies... Read more... |
Salvator Rosa: Bandits, Wilderness and Magic, Dulwich Picture GalleryFriday, 01 October 2010
Mount Vesuvius blew its top in 1631, spewing molten lava into the sea and filling the air with ash clouds that reached as far as Constantinople. The eruption and accompanying earthquakes killed 3,000 people and caused widespread devastation, all of... Read more... |
The Bach Dynasty, Academy of Ancient Music, Wigmore HallFriday, 24 September 2010
No, not some crazy remake of an Eighties soap featuring various members of the Bach family (though I wouldn’t put it past certain channel programmers to come up with the idea), but the Academy of Ancient Music’s (AAM) new series of concerts, which... Read more... |
Niobe, Regina di Tebe, Royal OperaFriday, 24 September 2010
One after the other they came. Stunning aria after stunning aria. Affecting in their harmonies, infectious in their rhythms, arresting in their textures, vivid in their melodies. The Royal Opera had taken a mighty gamble with Agostino Steffani's 300... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: René Jacobs InterviewSunday, 05 September 2010
René Jacobs: singer, conductor, scholar, archivist, alchemist, teacher. In recent years he's been "rehabilitating" the Mozart operas for the Harmonia Mundi label, eradicating 19th-century retouchings and stylistic anomalies in order to restore these... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Christophe Rousset InterviewMonday, 05 July 2010
The apartment is shared with a Burmese cat named Hermione and two no less exquisite and venerable harpsichords. In the "library", lavishly bound scores attest to Rousset's archival spirit with his latest pride and joy laid out on the table - the... Read more... |
Ottone in Villa, Barbican HallSaturday, 22 May 2010
A beloved regular of concert hall, radio and recording, the music of Vivaldi has more or less failed to find its way into the contemporary opera house. If we are to believe his own claims, the composer died with over 90 operas to his credit – double... Read more... |
Madrigals and Scarlatti, Lufthansa Baroque FestivalMonday, 17 May 2010
"Is it music or just a bit weird?" Robert Hollingworth, director of Baroque vocal specialists I Fagiolini, was posing the question of Gesualdo, the infamous oddball composer of the late 16th century - a sort of musical Caravaggio - whose capricious... Read more... |
Platée, Opera du RhinFriday, 26 March 2010
French geography has a significant hand in the small but exuberantly formed opera and dance that comes out of that civilised country - scaled for the important theatres that lie far beyond Paris and which have a great deal to teach Britain about... Read more... |
