Reviews
Inside Reviews
London Sinfonietta/Masson/Bailey, Royal Festival Hall, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Thursday, 22 May 2008
The build-up was impressive. "A revolution in the way that we are being asked to listen, which is wonderfully freeing," promised Marshall Marcus, Southbank's head of music. And so a capacity audience settled down to meditate its way through the British premiere of Prometeo by the late Luigi Nono.
Romeo et Juliette, Grand Theatre, Leeds (Rated 3/ 5 )
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
The programme's cover image – Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull grinning like a toothy glitterball – is disconcerting: had Opera North changed its mind? Was it Hamlet rather than Gounod's Roméo et Juliette we were about to see? Would the company's latest Shakespeare show, directed by John Fulljames, turn out to be more bling than breathtaking? In fact, the set and lighting designers, Johan Engels and Bruno Poet, have worked miracles.
L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Glyndebourne Festival, Glyndebourne (Rated 4/ 5 )
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Chilling ploys in pursuit of power
Matthew Schellhorn, Wigmore Hall, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Monday, 19 May 2008
Messiaen was far from being the pioneer of notated birdsong. Matthew Schellhorn has devised a programme to illustrate the long tradition in which he stood, and as keeper of the flame Schellhorn's playing of Messiaen carries his tutor Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen's enthusiastic approval and by playing a Fazioli (the Ferrari of the piano world), he clearly meant business.
Album: Martinu, Violin Concerto No 2/ Serenada/Toccata – Faust/Belohlavek et al(Harmonia Mundi)
Sunday, 18 May 2008
Martinu's spicy orchestration and melodic voice are vividly realised in this engaged performance of the Second Violin Concerto from Isabelle Faust, Jiri Belohlavek and the Prague Philharmonia. Imagine Dvorak rewritten by Gershwin and Poulenc, and you'll have an idea of the balance of sentimental tradition and sharp-suited modernity.
Album: Monteverdi, Primo e Nono – La Venexiana/Cavina (Glossa)
Sunday, 18 May 2008
La Venexiana's beautifully produced survey of Monteverdi's madrigals concludes with the composer's first and last sets. Published in 1587, the first book of madrigals reveals poised suspensions in "Baci soavi e cari", piping bird-like effects in "Fumia la pastorella", and contained sophistication in "Se nel partir da voi".
Falstaff, Theatre Royal, Glasgow (Rated 4/ 5 )
Friday, 16 May 2008
With a dive from the high springboard, the conductor Peter Robinson launched Verdi's final opera into brisk motion. He kept the momentum to the end. The orchestra loved it, the singers kept up, most of the time, even in the complex ensembles; the cross-rhythmed nonet that ends Act I scrambled and elbowed, like people pushing and shoving through a doorway.
Preview: Southbank Sinfonia/Allen/Matthews, Cadogan Hall, London
Thursday, 15 May 2008
A glowing example for young singers
LSO/Boulez, Barbican, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
A concert of two distinct halves: the emotionally challenged versus the emotionally charged. What are we now to make of Schoenberg's pretentious psychodrama Die glückliche Hand? I guess existentialism was once sexy, or dangerous, or both. How interesting that this piece now sounds so much of its time, while Bartok's one-act music drama Duke Bluebeard's Castle speaks as directly, as movingly, to us today as it did then.
You Write The Reviews: Ensemble 360; Upper Chapel, Sheffield (Rated 4/ 5 )
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Eleven international musicians, brimming body and soul with passion, vitality and virtuosity, whose performances never cease to amaze? It's Ensemble 360, an unusual, joyful mix of string quintet, wind quartet (with horn), and piano, where individuals shine as soloists, as parts of stunning combinations and as members of the full ensemble with its round, powerful sound.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Grand Theatre, Leeds (Rated 4/ 5 )
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream follows Macbeth as the second of three Shakespeare-based productions that Opera North is presenting this spring. The idea is that each will be staged on a basic set designed by Johan Engels, but it seems that only the floor is common to the first two.
Album: Debussy, Nuit d'étoiles – Xavier de Maistre (RCA Red Seal)
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Somewhere in this lovely recital there's a more interesting disc waiting to be heard. Exquisite as harpist Xavier de Maistre's tone and technique are, it is impossible to listen to his arrangements of Debussy's "Mélodies" and "Préludes" without thinking that had Debussy wanted to write them for the harp, he would have done so.
Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra/Bolton, Cadogan Hall, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Friday, 9 May 2008
Mozart's music sat well in the Cadogan Hall, particularly performed by the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra. Founded in 1841, this is one of Austria's oldest orchestras. It plays at the full strength of a symphony orchestra, but for this short tour of the UK, numbers were reduced to the proportions of a chamber orchestra.
Roberto Alagna, Barbican Hall, London (Rated 2/ 5 )
Thursday, 8 May 2008
It was plucky, not to say defiant, of Roberto Alagna to include the treacherous "Celeste Aida" in his Viva Verdi recital. This was, after all, the aria that precipitated his famous walk-out from La Scala, Milan, in December 2006, when elements in the audience showed their disapproval in the traditional manner. But if he sang it there as he did here, then I can't say I blame them.
Simon Boccanegra, Royal Opera House, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
When does a revival of Simon Boccanegra effectively turn into a new production? When the staging, the sets and costumes were conceived for Verdi's first version of 1857, and revised, as was the opera, for the definitive later version of 1881. Verdi's revision was one of the most startling instances of creative transformation in the history of the genre. The addition of the great Council Chamber Scene became the palpitating heart of the drama.
Britten Sinfonia / Suzuki, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
One sensed a certain puzzlement among the Queen Elizabeth Hall audience after the first item in this Britten Sinfonia concert: the late Stravinsky arrangement of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor from Book 1 of "The 48" sounded so radical as scarcely to resemble Bach at all.
London Sinfonietta/ Adès, Royal Festival Hall, London
LSO/Colin Davies, Barbican, London
Heiner Goebbels, University of Westminster, London
Sunday, 4 May 2008
Thomas Adès and Tal Rosner illustrate the creation myth with charm, colour, and liberal use of musical references, but even quoting The Coventry Carol cannot save James MacMillan's violent St John Passion
St John Passion: LSO/Davis, Barbican, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Friday, 2 May 2008
Contemporary settings of Christ's Passion have not yet shown the durability of Bach's. Krzystof Penderecki caused a stir four decades ago with his St Luke Passion, mixing avant-garde style into traditional forms, but where is it now? James MacMillan has delivered a St John Passion that stirred its premiere audience to a standing ovation, and seems made of sturdier stuff. True, its composer also made his name with a fusion of old and new ways, in formats that became sometimes predictable, but here the music showed a freshly thought quality to underpin its typical intensity of utterance.
LPO / Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall, London (Rated 3/ 5 )
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
Vladimir Jurowski's reading of the Verdi Requiem was made for singing – meaning that every phrase, every tempo, every gesture was mindful of how it might be sung. How often we hear the opening of this piece, with its hushed, awed repetitions of "Requiem aeternam", sound static. Jurowski moved it along – there was rhythm in the words, there was fluidity. Jurowski is a classicist at heart and this Requiem was memorable more for the musicality of the direction than the spirituality of the message.
You write the reviews: Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
At this wonderful concert, a packed Royal Festival Hall was treated to a slide-rule performance of a programme that could have been a run-of-the-mill outing for well-tried orchestral standards. Instead, we were witness to an exemplary interpretation of Mendelssohn's Fourth Symphony, in which Christoph von Dohnyáni conducted the sublime Philharmonia through a sure-footed and delightfully witty reading with a lightness of touch exemplified by his economical gestures. The tempi were brisk, which could have wrong- footed the woodwind, but they were more than equal to the task.
Album: Bruckner, Symphony No 3 - Norrington/Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR (Hänssler Classic)
Sunday, 27 April 2008
Hailed by some critics as superlative, derided as folly by others, Sir Roger Norrington's series of Mahler Symphonies with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra provoked some passionate notices.
Album: Schubert, Quartettsatz/Der Tod und das Mädchen – Jerusalem Quartet (Harmonia Mundi)
Sunday, 27 April 2008
After two searing recordings of Shostakovich, and a balmy, tender disc of Dvorak, the Jerusalem Quartet have turned to one of the most famous and widely recorded quartets in the repertoire and one of the shortest.
LSO/Gergiev, Barbican, London (Rated 2/ 5 )
Wednesday, 23 April 2008
No doubt it is salutary for a critic, used to a privileged centre seat, to suffer occasionally the pains of ordinary punters in the side-stalls of an acoustic quagmire such as the Barbican Hall. But how could one appraise the playing of the London Symphony Orchestra from a stall down to the left of the platform, when one's view was filled by the serried backs of the first violins?
You write the reviews: La Resurrezione, St George's Church, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
Monday, 21 April 2008
Wow. What an opera. I say opera, but in fact La Resurrezione is an oratorio by Handel and is part of the 31st London Handel Festival. I've been assiduously attending operas/oratorios for 15 years and this is the first I've heard of this work, which is being performed at various places at least three times in 2008-9. Maybe that's because it was written in 1708, but I wish that I'd heard it earlier. Why wait for its tricentenary to perform this masterpiece? That's the marvellous thing about opera. You think you know the great works and along comes a lesser known one that knocks your socks off. Other examples are Mozart's Mitridate, his best opera in my opinion, and Landi's Il Sant' Alessio, performed at the Barbican last year by an all-male cast.
The Minotaur, Royal Opera House, London
A Night at the Chinese Opera, Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Sunday, 20 April 2008
Harrison Birtwistle's baleful operatic treatment of a Greek myth assaults the senses with its violence and terrible beauty, in contrast to the delicate wit of a Judith Weir revival
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