Watching Lorin Maazel in this the latest instalment of his Philharmonia Mahler cycle was a puzzling and unsettling experience. He was there and yet not there; he was controlled and yet not; he conducted from memory but with a curious detachment. How very strange that music he has loved and lived with all his long … [Read More]
Edward Seckerson
Reviews, Blogs, Podcasts
Reviews, Podcasts and Blogs
Classical music, Opera and Musical Theatre reviews
Monthly Archives: April 2011
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall
It must be hard comprehending death when you’ve barely begun living – but the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain has a corporate sixth sense about the subtext of music that never ceases to amaze. Their latest programme reflected on the impermanence of life through two works from the beginning and end of the last … [Read More]
Tagged with: judith weir, mahler, national youth orchestra of great britain, vasily petrenko
Posted in Reviews
Posted in Reviews
Rimsky-Korsakov “The Tsar’s Bride”, Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera’s first ever staging of Rimsky-Korsakov’s rich and surprising opera The Tsar’s Bride sees history repeating itself in unsettling ways. The poster-coloured prelude has no sooner run its course – one of the composer’s most exhilarating lyric themes in uplifting reprise with sumptuous horns in bracing canon – when the curtain rises not … [Read More]
Tagged with: ekaterina gubanova, mark elder, rimsky-korsakov, royal opera house, the tsar's bride
Posted in Reviews
Posted in Reviews
Elizabeth Llewellyn, Simon Lepper, St. John’s, Smith Square
The first thing you notice about Elizabeth Llewellyn’s voice is the bloom – a plushy, covered quality that extends pretty much throughout the range and only hardens under pressure at the top. The slightly chilly St. John’s acoustic took some of the warmth out of it but the impression one took away was that this … [Read More]
Operashots, Royal Opera Linbury Studio Theatre
Whether by design or accident this latest “double” in the Royal Opera’s Operashots project hit us with the most compelling of juxtapositions. Both composers – Stewart Copeland and Oscar winner Anne Dudley – hailed latterly from the movies but by no means exclusively so: she was a founder member of Art of Noise, he was … [Read More]
Tagged with: anne dudley, linbury theatre, operashots, royal opera, stewart copeland, terry jones
Posted in Reviews
Posted in Reviews
London Symphony Orchestra, Jarvi, Barbican Hall
The Scandinavians were coming: Nielsen and Grieg had tall tales to tell and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto had promised the über-virtuosic Julia Fischer. But the German never arrived, an accident in her kitchen resulting in an eleventh hour call for a replacement. That call was answered in true “local hero” fashion by the London Symphony Orchestra’s … [Read More]
Tagged with: grieg, krstjan jarvi, london symphony orchestra, nielsen, roman simovic, sibelius
Posted in Reviews
Posted in Reviews
Gregory “Piccard in Space”, Queen Elizabeth Hall
It’s a preposterous story – the stuff of which operas (or the latest Wallace and Gromit) are made: Belgian physicist Auguste Piccard, determined to prove Einstein’s Einstein’s theory of relativity, takes to the skies in a balloon-powered capsule and becomes the first man to reach the stratosphere. Cue the man with the moogs, the … [Read More]
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