Julia Fischer, Martin Helmchen, Queen Elizabeth Hall
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…