Strauss
Graham Rickson
Sibelius: Finlandia, The Swan of Tuonela, En Saga, The Oceanides BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Thomas Søndergård (Linn)Earlier releases in Thomas Søndergård’s ongoing Sibelius cycle were marred by indifferent engineering, so it’s nice to report that this collection of tone poems and incidental music boasts excellent sound, with impressive playing from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. This En Saga has plenty of energy, Søndergård never letting the tension flag. He even manages to make Finlandia seem freshly-minted, the evergreen Big Tune preceded by a dark, glowering opening. Best of all Read more ...
David Nice
"When the new god approaches, we surrender, struck dumb". Especially if, for the singer of those words, popular entertainer Zerbinetta, the “new god” takes the shape of same-sex love. Director and designer Antony McDonald locates the real “mystery of transformation” with which Richard Strauss’s house-poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal was so infatuated in the coup de foudre between the not-so-fickle coloratura soprano and another woman as the (usually teenage and putatively male) Composer. That, along with everything else in this stylish, beautifully sung and finely acted production, has an Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Much as I love Strauss’s Ariadne in its final form, I have a sneaking nostalgia for the original version (attached to Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme), which had Zerbinetta and her companions popping up after the final love duet and gently letting out some of its gas. Even in Alan Privett’s sparkling new production for Longborough, the too protracted revised ending threatens to die on its feet, and is kept alive only by the fine singing of the two principals, Helena Dix and Jonathan Stoughton, neither of them exactly sprightly actors, and by superb orchestral Read more ...
David Nice
Like the comedies of Mozart – the genius the artistic milieu depicted in Capriccio seems to be waiting for, if its original 1770s setting is observed – the more conversational operas of Richard Strauss depend far more than one often realises on conducting that sets a stylish, buoyant pace. Without it, and even more more rehearsal time than Garsington allows, musical heaven remains just out of reach. This was still a classy performance, always well co-ordinated between stage and pit, strongly cast and handsomely conceived, an elegant entertainment about the nature of opera and its sister arts Read more ...
David Nice
If Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto for Richard Strauss in their joint "comedy for music" is the apogee of elaborately referenced dialogue and stage directions in opera, Richard Jones's realisation - for all that it throws out much of the original rulebook - may well be the most rigorously detailed production on the operatic stage today. Seeing it live a second time after its dizzying 2014 premiere as resurrected by his trusted movement director Sarah Fahie leaves me reeling with surprise, admiration and perplexity for how much more there's still to discover in its symmetries and ambiguities Read more ...
David Nice
Let's face it, Robert "Cabinet of Dr Caligari" Wiene's 1926 film loosely based on Strauss and Hofmannsthal's 1911 "comedy for music" is a mostly inartistic ramble. Historically, though, it proves fascinating. The composer mostly left it to Otto Singer and Carl Alwin to cut and paste large chunks of his opera, adding four old pieces and one new one - a major contribution to the art of through-composed scoring for silent film (Shostakovich's wholly original New Babylon music came three years later). Strauss's "house poet" saw the chance to shed new light on fascinating characters and to Read more ...
David Nice
When you have 21 women to present in song, but only a couple among the 14 poets and none to represent them out of the 15 composers idolising or giving them a voice, you need two strong defenders of their sex at the helm. Lucy Crowe and Anna Tilbrook are no shrinking violets – the soprano no longer a light lyric, the pianist supportive only in the best sense, full of flexible power and forceful middle-to-lower-range sonorities for the voice to coast above.Certainly there were colour and variety enough from both to create worlds in miniature throughout a well-proportioned programme with quite a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Matthias Goerne has an exceptional ability to sustain evenness and legato through a vocal line. His breath control and his tone production are things to be marvelled at. He is able to function at impossibly slow tempi, and to make an audience hold its collective breath in admiration. The problem comes when he performs a recital programme which sets out to prove that point. Again and again. All evening.I was probably in a minority, because this Wigmore Hall recital, with the 23-year old South Korean-born pianist Seong-Jin Cho, was loudly applauded at the end of each half. But I found the Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Hans Abrahamsen String Quartets No. 1-4 Arditti String Quartet (Winter & Winter)The opening section of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s 2012 String Quartet No. 4 is subtitled “light and airy”, and, aptly, the four strings produce extraordinary, airy sonorities: a sequence of euphonious, ethereal whistles which suggest distant wind. At certain points, the music becomes elusive to the point of invisibility, moving imperceptibly into a faster, featherlight “dance of light”, the mood revisited in Abrahamsen's shimmering finale. The technique is ingenious, the craft immaculate, though neither Read more ...
David Nice
Former Royal Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Charles Dutoit has been exposed, to little surprise from musicians, as something of a roué whose apparent refusal to take "no" for an answer has rubbed up against the new #MeToo world. So his place in last night's concert was taken by Venezuelan Rafael Payare, not yet 40. Unfortunately it seems certain Dutoit would have captured the élan vital of Richard Strauss's Don Juan better than Payare - an accomplished soundsmith, on this evidence, but fatally uninterested in the operatic drama of Strauss's tone poems, or for that matter the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
"The Show must go on". So say the posters dotted around Glasgow and Edinburgh for Scottish Opera's production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. Except on Thursday, it didn’t. A fire at a nearby Glasgow nightclub which ravaged several city centre buildings caused the Theatre Royal to become so filled with smoke that the opening night’s performance had to be cancelled. Opening instead on Saturday, director and designer Antony McDonald’s new production, co-produced by Scottish Opera and Opera Holland Park, is witty and slick, with an unfussy stage design that nods to the period but has a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Rapture, ecstasy, ardour, and a few cheeky fumbles in the bushes – Louise Alder and James Baillieu’s Wigmore recital promised “Chants d’amour” and delivered amply, giving us love in all its bewildering, technicolour variety. From the heady eroticism of Bizet to the lazy, summer affections of Faure, the light, youthful lusts of Mozart to Strauss and Liszt’s mature desire, it was a programme calculated to stir both loins and ears.Alder’s star, very much in the ascendant in 2017 thanks to her exquisite Sophie in WNO’s Rosenkavalier, a scene-stealing Marzelline in the Proms Fidelio, as well as Read more ...