Stravinsky
Orchestre National de France, Gatti, Royal Albert HallWednesday, 08 September 2010
It was one of those moments that every conductor (and orchestra) dreads: “The Procession of the Sage” from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is in rip-roaring full cry, percussion grinding and scratching, high trumpet screeching – but Daniele Gatti,... Read more... |
Stravinsky, The Rake's Progress, GlyndebourneMonday, 09 August 2010
Thirty-five years on and this is still as much David Hockney’s Rake as it is Stravinsky’s or W H Auden’s. How rarely it is that what we see chimes so completely and utterly with what we hear. The limited palette of colours, the precisely etched... Read more... |
London Sinfonietta, Atherton, BBC Singers, Royal Albert HallThursday, 05 August 2010
The Tenebrae service of Maundy Thursday sees Satan's removal men take over holy duties. Crosses are veiled, lights are extinguished, songs of wailing erupt. Stravinsky's Threni (receiving its Proms debut last night) is a setting of these wails - the... Read more... |
Coco Chanel & Igor StravinskyMonday, 02 August 2010
She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant Belle Epoque drawing room. Music swirls, eyes swivel. And no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel,... Read more... |
MacMillan premiere, Repin, LSO, Gergiev, Barbican HallThursday, 13 May 2010
"There is not one idea," wrote that intemperate critic Eduard Hanslick about Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, "that does not get its neck broken by the speed with which the next lands on its head." Rather a compliment, I've always thought, and... Read more... |
BBCSO, Bĕlohlávek, Barbican HallSunday, 18 April 2010
It needs saying yet again, until the message gets through: Bohuslav Martinů is one of the great symphonic masters of the 20th century, and his fellow Czech, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra Jiři Bĕlohlávek, once more proves the right... Read more... |
London Symphony Orchestra, Adams, Barbican HallFriday, 12 March 2010
Adams began with two Debussy preludes swept by a different kind of wind in Colin Matthews's ingenious, luminous orchestrations. Well, windswept was the idea, but there was no more elemental scouring here than by all accounts there had been in the... Read more... |
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Marc Minkowski, BarbicanMonday, 08 March 2010
It always repays to push a world-class orchestra beyond their comfort zone. The BBC Symphony's sound emerged from the refashioning hands of period specialist Marc Minkowski like a naked body from a cold shower: convulsively invigorated and... Read more... |
Vienna Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel, BarbicanThursday, 04 March 2010
Shuffling about the podium like a cha-cha-chaing Jack Lemmon, slam-dunking his first beats, kicking out his heels for second beats, épéeing the trombone entries like a toy toreador, it wasn't hard to see why Lorin Maazel gets such a regular critical... Read more... |
Richard Alston Dance Company, Sadler's Wells and touringWednesday, 03 March 2010
Tim Henman - brilliant and unfairly treated, or... not? Even when John McEnroe passionately enumerates Henman’s qualities, do you both nod hopefully and realistically shake your head? Because, yes, our lad may be a rare craftsman of the grass court... Read more... |
Duke Bluebeard's Castle/Rite of Spring, ENOSaturday, 07 November 2009
There are horrors in the world so vile that few of us want to think about them. None more so than such cases as Josef Fritzl - or Jaycee Lee Dugard, or Arcedio Alvarez, or Raymond Gouardo, or Wolfgang Priklopil, or Marc Dutroux... but you get the... Read more... |
Agon/ Sphinx/ Limen, Royal BalletThursday, 05 November 2009
Extraordinary lives dancers lead at Covent Garden - in a single day rushing between studios to rehearse the tortured, introspective Mayerling, the pristine classicism of The Sleeping Beauty, the off-centre acrobatics of Balanchine’s Agon and the... Read more... |
