Strauss
David Nice
Had you been at John Wilson's Respighi spectacular on Friday, or heard it on BBC Radio 3/watched it on BBC Four, you might have perceived last night's journey up and down Richard Strauss's Bavarian alp as an extension of Albert Hall possibilities, complete with vast orchestra, offstage bands and full-blaze organ. While Wilson skilfully ran the gamut from ferocious blazes to the subtlest watercolour sketches, Edward Gardner encouraged the London Philharmonic Orchestra to go deep beneath the surface of Eine Alpensinfonie and takes its time in the long lines admiring the wonder of nature. Read more ...
David Nice
Can the 1916 Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal added to a revised version of a 1912 opera-within-a-play setting the backstage shenanigans to music ever fail? Yes, alas. It fell horribly flat last night despite some radiant singing. The love story of deserted Ariadne finally being persuaded by young Bacchus in the opera proper is harder to make live and breathe, but it has in the past - notably and most movingly at Garsington in 2023 - and again it didn't achieve anything like its full humanity here, despite so many glorious sounds from stage and pit, fully backed by the supportive Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss, who conducted this orchestra and programme to an audience of 7000 in the Royal Albert Hall on 19 October 1947 aged 83, would have shared our mixed feelings about the curious phenomenon that is Santtu-Matias Rouvali, the now-80-year-old Philharmonia's Principal Conductor. Not for Strauss Santtu's expansive, sometimes sluggish approach to his most popular symphonic-poem calling card, Don Juan. And in the 1940s he was quicker, too, with his mostly tongue-in-cheek, brilliantly worked saga of 24 hours in the life of the Strauss family, Symphonia Domestica. But he would have Read more ...
David Nice
If you find endless riches in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's words and Richard Strauss's score for their "Comedy for Music", as I do, you'll be very happy to catch Bruno Ravella's deliciously staged fantasy again. This was my third time. It had a difficult birth at Garsington during the Covid era - no touching for the 32-year-old Marschallin and her 17-year-old lover Octavian in the opening bedroom scene - then went to Dublin, where Irish National Opera had assembled a remarkable cast with three Irish leading ladies. A fourth, Niamh O'Sullivan, is central in making this Garsington revival a glowing Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Lise Davidsen: Live at the Met Lise Davidsen (soprano) James Baillieu (piano) (Decca)
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This really is Lise Davidsen’s moment. At the time of writing, the singer often described “greatest dramatic soprano in the world” has just performed the opening night of a run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera as Isolde. She made her house debut in 2019 (as Lisa in The Queen of Spades) and has been frequently welcomed back: this is her ninth different role in a house which she is starting to call it her second home. The current production of Read more ...
Graham Rickson
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Stravinsky: Late Works Cappella Amsterdam, Nord Nederlands Orkest/Daniel Reuss (Pentatone)In 1952, his 70th year, Stravinsky had a compositional crisis. After completing his biggest piece – The Rake’s Progress – he felt unable to compose and didn’t know what to do. The route to a solution was laid out by Robert Craft, the young American conductor who had been helping Stravinsky with the English pronunciation of The Rake’s libretto. Craft led him to the serial music of the avant-garde – composers like Webern and Boulez – and this Read more ...
David Nice
Conducting the staple Viennese fare of New Year's Day is no easy task. Quite apart from the basic essential panache - so drearily missing from Austrian Franz Welser-Möst's 2023 shot in Vienna itself, abundantly present this year from live wire Yannick Nézet-Séguin - there has to be the right space for the upbeat to the waltz, freedom in the melodies, energy but not mania in the fast polkas. 27-year-old Tom Fetherstonhaugh, best known as the founder of the enterprising Fantasia Orchestra, has the style in spades, and conveyed it to a clearly impressed National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, Read more ...
David Nice
A Salome without the head of John the Baptist is nothing new: several directors have perversely decided they could do without in recent productions. In concert, the illusion needs the charismatic force of a great soprano and conductor. We got that at the Proms 11 years ago with Nina Stemme and Donald Runnicles. Now Asmik Grigorian, even more the ideal as the obsessive teenage princess, crowns the end of a season that has been a total triumph for Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.I've never bought the line that Richard Strauss's incredible 1905 psychodrama to most of Oscar Wilde's text Read more ...
David Nice
You could plan an entire concert season around the theme of “late style”, its paradoxes and variations. For this one-off, many of us expected a concentrated mesh of Edward Said’s only-connect observations with a well-balanced musical programme, something along the lines of the recent 90-minute cloud tapestry the City of London Sinfonia wove with atmospheric scientist Simon Clark (Rachel Halliburton, whom I accompanied, loved it, as did I).That was to underestimate the latest collaboration with the London Review of Books, involving four very fine actors voicing not just Said’s chosen literary Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s finally face the elephant in the room: the most popular Viennese operetta, packed with hit numbers, no longer works on the stage as a whole. The central party, yes, never more high-energy delight than here, with a cast of 13 and 10 instrumentalists on stage. As for the rest, not even the likes of Richard Jones, Harry Kupfer and Christopher Alden have won a total victory. Davey Kelleher comes closer, but the high jinks can still be wearing in the outer acts.For its touring farce, Irish National Opera has dropped the "Die" from the title of Johann Strauss II's smash hit, allowing the Read more ...
David Nice
In one sense it was a New Year’s Day “nearly”, just stopping short of giving us the already great Irish lyric-dramatic soprano Jennifer Davis in the music of the man she was born to sing, Richard Strauss. Berlin will witness her Arabella shortly, but the one Bavarian intruder in the otherwise all-Viennese carnival yesterday afternoon, the Moonlight Music from Capriccio, stopped before the Countess’s final scene.Yet that slice of heaven still served as a breath from another planet in a glittering programme: did the audience realise it was getting one of the world's best horn players, Alec Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two splendid pieces of orchestral virtuosity began and finished the second Saturday concert by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds at the Bridgewater Hall. It was given the title of “Mischief and Magic”, an apt summary.For mischief we had Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, perhaps the most perfect of his orchestral tone poems in that it not only tells a story but is beautifully shaped and balanced as an extended classical rondo.The episodes were given their folklore-based descriptions by Strauss (“Through the market he rides”, “Dressed as a priest he oozes unction”, “ Read more ...