Baroque
Orlando, La Nuova Musica, SJSS review - Handel painted in primary coloursFriday, 02 February 2018
The advertising for La Nuova Musica’s Orlando billed it as “Handel’s most psychologically complex opera”. Whether or not you agree (and there are plenty of heavyweight rivals – Alcina, Giulio Cesare and Agrippina just for starters) there’s also the... Read more... |
Kožená, LSO, Rattle, Barbican Hall review – springing surprises from Schubert and RameauFriday, 12 January 2018
Cheers and huzzahs greeted the arrival of Sir Simon Rattle on the Barbican stage last night before the London Symphony Orchestra had even played a note. The 10-day festivities to open his tenure as principal conductor evidently worked a treat. The... Read more... |
Orpheus Caledonius, Brighton Early Music Festival review - a thrilling meeting of musical clansSaturday, 28 October 2017
In 1725 a collection of some 50 songs was published by one William Thomson. You might not know his name, or even the names of the songs, but given the first bar of most I’m betting you could hum them from beginning to end. The work? Orpheus... Read more... |
Prom 73 review: The Well-Tempered Clavier - Book 1, Schiff - glorious solo voyage across Bach's universeFriday, 08 September 2017
Amazingly, last night Sir András Schiff scored a Proms first with his performance of Book One of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Never before has even half of the sublime and seminal “48” taken the Royal Albert Hall stage in unmutilated form... Read more... |
OAE, Christie, St John's Smith SquareWednesday, 05 July 2017
William Christie chose a suitably light and breezy programme for this warm summer evening’s concert at St. John’s Smith Square. The concert was titled “Bach goes to Paris”, with works chosen to highlight the connections between the German master and... Read more... |
Radamisto, Guildhall School, Milton CourtTuesday, 06 June 2017
''…after various Accidents, it comes to pass that he recovers both Her and his Kingdom”. Handel's Radamisto may be a tale of warring kingdoms, noble self-sacrifice and mature, wedded love, but it’s also a fairly daft piece of dramatic belief-... Read more... |
Hipermestra / La Traviata, GlyndebourneMonday, 22 May 2017
A Saudi princess in her white wedding dress digs her own grave as men pile up stones to hurl at her head — next, an Isis fighter is stabbing a knife at her neck to decapitate her. Ah, the fate of the heroine of the average baroque ... Read more... |
Ariodante, The English Concert, Bicket, BarbicanWednesday, 17 May 2017
To hear The English Concert playing Handel is to arrive in technicolour Oz after a lifetime of black and white baroque in Kansas. We’re not short on period bands in the UK, but few bring this music into anything like the kind of focus that Harry... Read more... |
L'Incoronazione di Poppea, EBS, Gardiner, Colston Hall, BristolTuesday, 09 May 2017
Whatever musicologists may tell us about the patchy authenticity of Monteverdi’s last two operas, they unquestionably make a pair. Il ritorno di Ulisse is all about fidelity and ends with a love duet between the reunited husband and wife. L’... Read more... |
Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, EBS, Gardiner, Colston Hall, BristolThursday, 13 April 2017
“Never give one concert if you can give a hundred” might stand as a motto for the conductor who once hauled his choir and orchestra round the world performing all 200 or so of Bach’s cantatas. And mathematically Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s latest... Read more... |
Ormisda, St George's Hanover SquareWednesday, 29 March 2017
The annual London Handel Festival is dutifully working its way through every one of Handel’s operas in a cycle that will eventually take us from Alcina to Xerxes before, presumably, starting all over again. But each year, alongside these headliners... Read more... |
Andreas Scholl, Accademia Bizantina, BarbicanThursday, 16 March 2017
Marian devotions have given us some of sacred music’s most striking works, from graceful Ave Marias to anguished settings of the Stabat Mater. Andreas Scholl and musicologist Bernardo Ticci have recently gone in search of some less familiar ones –... Read more... |
