thu 12/12/2024

OAE

Gilchrist, Bevan, OAE, Devine, QEH

Of all the epithets you could pin on that roast beef of Old England, William Boyce, “gamechanger” is one of the more unlikely. Like any good 18th-century Englishman, this composer followed the widespread Italianate model of the late Baroque, infused...

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A silver rose for Glyndebourne's 80th

Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 “comedy for music” about love, money and masquerading in a putative 18th-century Vienna, is a repertoire staple around the world. Continental houses throw it together without a...

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Classical CDs Weekly: Ramon Humet, Mozart, Ronald Stevenson

Ramon Humet – Niwa - Chamber Works London Sinfonietta/Nicholas Collon (Neu Records)Ramon Humet's Four Zen Gardens opens this arresting compilation; nine short movements for three percussionists. A solitary rainstick adds a splash of aqueous colour...

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Christmas Oratorio, Trinity College Choir, OAE, Layton, St John's Smith Square

Not every Yuletide fixture need be commercial and routine. Certainly St John’s annual Christmas Festival packs them in, but why wouldn’t it when the voices for the last two events, backed up by no less than the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment...

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Fantasio, OAE, Elder, Royal Festival Hall

Readers who recall the 1872 Paris premiere of Offenbach’s Fantasio have had 141 years to wonder when its British debut would arrive. The long wait ended yesterday when Opera Rara, that valiant and necessary company dedicated to dusting off neglected...

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Prom 47: Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Alsop

In a couple of weeks Marin Alsop will become the first woman ever to conduct the Last Night of the Proms. Yesterday's programme of 19th century works by Brahms and Schumann, on the fifth of the eight Saturday nights of the season, thus had its Proms...

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Hippolyte et Aricie, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 at the age of 50. It was his first opera and his greatest. In its five acts, its visits to the woods of Diana, the groves of Venus, the fires of Pluto and the domestic meltdown in the house...

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Falstaff, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

In this revival of Richard Jones's 2009 production, the action has been very effectively shifted to post-war Windsor with Sir John Falstaff (Laurent Naouri) as down-at-heel gentry maintaining delusions of superiority, rubbing up against an ascendant...

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Schiff, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Queen Elizabeth Hall

You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the...

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Henri Oguike & OAE, Queen Elizabeth Hall / Richard Alston Dance Company, Touring

Music is the food of dance - music as either an emotional language to speak back to, or an environment to set a mood or find associations in. The former is highly demanding, and Henri Oguike and Richard Alston are two who are clinging to the...

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Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Rattle, Royal Festival Hall

Period instruments demand absolute honesty from their players. Their sound is their personality - candid, quirky, eccentrically beautiful - but their soul is revealed in the spirit of the playing, where beauty is not skin deep and the expressiveness...

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Q&A Special: Conductor Sir Simon Rattle

Sir Simon Rattle (b. 1955) and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (est. 1986) have been together from the beginning. Founded by period-instrument musicians eager to run their own affairs rather than play obediently for conductor-managers like...

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