With the truly great composers – and I count Schumann among them – there is that abiding sense of music being created in the playing of it. It is, in effect, like a stream of consciousness in which we, the listeners, are spookily complicit. With Schumann, though, the experience is that much more intense as … [Read More]
Edward Seckerson
Reviews, Blogs, Podcasts
Reviews, Podcasts and Blogs
Classical music, Opera and Musical Theatre reviews
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Risor Festival of Chamber Music at Wigmore Hall
Each year, Risor – a small fishing town on the south-eastern coast of Norway – hosts an internationally renowned festival of chamber music. This week some of its key players decamped to Wigmore Hall and naturally they brought a little piece of Norway with them. Violinist Henning Kraggerud and pianist Marc-André Hamerlin opened proceedings with … [Read More]
Tagged with: brahms, henning kraggerud, leif ove andsnes, measha brueggergosman, risor festival
Posted in Reviews
Posted in Reviews
LPO/ Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall
What a journey we took here from the muted half-lights of Stravinsky’s Scherzo Fantastique to the tumultuous bell-laden prophecy at the close of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. Vasily Petrenko was at the helm of the London Philharmonic taking time out from his Scousers to probe and reveal with his customary precision a repertoire that is so … [Read More]
Rainbow’s End
It’s a terrible old cliche that it takes a star to play a star – but in the case of Judy Garland there never has been and never will be a star big enough to fill her tiny red shoes. There is another way in, though, and during the course of Peter Quilter’s play with … [Read More]
Raskatov “A Dog’s Heart”, English National Opera
The premise is simple: can Professor Filipp Filippovich take a starving mongrel from the street and with a simple transplant of a man’s testicles and pituitary gland make him human? And if he can, what then? It’s a dog’s life, they say, but for whom? Mikhail Bulgarov’s unsettling novel comes from a long line of … [Read More]
Adriana sensitively exhumed
Kaufmann and Gheorghiu were not the only star attractions of this early and clearly expensive Christmas gift from the Royal Opera. Cilea’s Frenchified melodrama hasn’t been seen in the house since 1906 and the dusty wing space of Charles Edwards’ extraordinary set looked like it might actually have been excavated from the theatre as it … [Read More]
Tagged with: adriana lecouvreur, angela gheorghiu, cilea, david mcvicar, jonas kaufmann, mark elder, royal opera
Posted in Reviews
Posted in Reviews
Philharmonia Orchestra, Sokhiev, Royal Festival Hall
The trick with Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprés midi d’un faune is to make the whole piece sound as free as the celebrated flute solo which awakens it. Tugan Sokhiev almost brought it off. Here is a conductor of minimal gesture and absolute control who somehow manages to instil that sense of the improvisatory into all … [Read More]
Singin’ in the Rain, Royal Festival Hall
You couldn’t make it up: the water supply fails at the South Bank on the day they’re performing Singin’ in the Rain. I guess you call that a dry-run. At any rate it was the first ever concert performance of the original film score – as restored by the ever-resourceful John Wilson and delivered … [Read More]
Tagged with: adolph green, betty comden, john wilson, julian ovenden, kim criswell, singin' in the rain
Posted in Asides, Reviews
Posted in Asides, Reviews
Don Giovanni, English National Opera
In one respect at least Rufus Norris’ new ENO production of Don Giovanni might truthfully be described as electrifying. They are tinkering with the circuits before a single note has been sounded. “They” are the Don’s devilish alter egos; the object of their attention suggests a gigantic crown of thorns. Irreligious? Certainly. Sacrilegious? Perhaps. Sparks … [Read More]
Songs from a Hotel Bedroom, Linbury Studio
Where has this idea come from that Kurt Weill somehow lost his edge or worse yet sold out when he headed Stateside? Have the people who perpetrate this nonsense actually heard the Broadway shows? The diversity of subject matter, the individuality of the melodic style, the willingness to be easily assimilated and to embrace and … [Read More]
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