Janáček
BBC Proms: Schiff, Hallé, ElderFriday, 22 July 2011
It was partly as penance for having missed the previous evening's Czech festival that I arena-prommed for last night's Moravian finale, to be happily strafed by the nine extra trumpets of Janáček's Sinfonietta. I hadn't quite expected to be so on... Read more... |
First Night of the 2011 PromsSaturday, 16 July 2011
Here we are again. Marvel as you enter at the aptly gaudy lighting of Albert's colosseum, but know that unless your place is with the Prommers towards the front of the arena, the musicians will often sound as if they're in another galaxy - maybe one... Read more... |
Why Ticciati will be great for GlyndebourneFriday, 08 July 2011
Robin the boy wonder, as he was somewhat patronisingly dubbed during his prodigious rise to conducting stardom, will make a bracing Batman for Glyndebourne Festival Opera when he takes over from current music director Vladimir Jurowski in January... Read more... |
From the House of the Dead, Opera NorthFriday, 06 May 2011
Janáček’s stark Prelude is a stunner: there’s no conventional beginning, no conventional thematic development; it simply starts, as if a light switch has been flicked on, and the baleful opening theme is distorted, repeated, squeezed until it leads... Read more... |
National Youth Orchestra/Kristjan Järvi, Leeds Town HallSunday, 09 January 2011
A glance at the programme hinted at the identity of the orchestra: you don’t perform Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite and Janáček’s Sinfonietta in the same evening unless you’ve industrial quantities of brass and percussion to spare. This was riveting... Read more... |
Sir Charles Mackerras Memorial Concert, Royal Festival HallFriday, 05 November 2010
In the last year of his life he was, as a colleague noted when we learned of Charles Mackerras’s death, the wise old gamekeeper in the spring forest of Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. No wonder Mackerras, we were told last night by his conductor... Read more... |
Classical CDs Round-Up 13Saturday, 23 October 2010
This month’s releases include two contrasted crossover discs, one in tribute to Armenian Orthodox church music, the other by, er, Phil Collins-era Genesis. There’s an Elgar oratorio, and a disc of choral music inspired by the untimely death of a... Read more... |
Mutter, LSO, Sir Colin Davis, BarbicanMonday, 11 October 2010
It didn't help that the London Symphony Chorus sounded rough and hectoring rather than earthily ecstatic - and I'm not sure how well they had been coached in the Czech-language mass settings. Heroic tenor Simon O'Neill, Sir Colin's last-minute... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Soprano Amanda RoocroftTuesday, 21 September 2010
Amanda Roocroft was a star from the moment she graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music. At 25, Sir Georg Solti asked her to sing Pamina at the Salzburg Festival. She declined. It was too soon. Where would there be left to go? "Hurry... Read more... |
The Makropulos Case, English National OperaTuesday, 21 September 2010
Opera spends so much of its time killing off female protagonists that it's refreshing to come back to The Makropulos Case. In it Janáček, in one of his many moments of generosity, imagines what might happen if you allowed a woman not just to live... Read more... |
Vogt, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Gardiner, Royal Albert HallMonday, 30 August 2010
Short of rolling around the podium like a delirious pig in a mudbath, Sir John Eliot Gardiner couldn't have hidden his enjoyment of the warm, plush sounds and well-upholstered vibrato of this wonderfully old-fashioned orchestra, the Czech... Read more... |
Ivana Gavrić, Wigmore HallThursday, 15 July 2010
There are some recitals where you think only about the abstracted music - the harmonic arguments, the structural cleverness, the textural ingenuity - and there are others where you are forced to confront the presence of a set of living,... Read more... |
