Shostakovich’s first and last symphonies make for intriguing bedfellows: the beginning and end of a tortuous journey, heavy with irony and an all-pervasive sense of doubt and desolation. And yet there is always, one feels, a ‘last…
I really thought I knew this work – every facet of it. But Kirill Petrenko has a way of hearing deep into textures and harmonies that is at times really quite startling. He gives us x-ray ears.…
During the period when I was Chief Classical Music and Opera critic of The Independent newspaper one thing was always sure to spike my blood pressure: interval banter. Of phrases most commonly overheard at the opera the…
Sunday 19th September 2021 3.00pm Crazy Coqs, Brasserie Zédel Comparing Notes brings stars of the West End and Broadway to Crazy Coqs. In a lively and informal mix of performance and conversation host Edward Seckerson will be getting…
Ravel may have lived most of his live in Paris but the Basque National Symphony Orchestra are bound to wear this particular badge with pride. And with that pride, of course, comes an added responsibility that the…
Surely here was an opportunity to stray a little from the well-trodden path and offer perhaps Mussorgsky’s startling original version of Night on the Bare Mountain instead of Rimsky-Korsakov’s popular sanitisation? And given the hugely imaginative title…
Some artists leave a legacy which far transcends the excellence of their work. We remember their performances as surely as we remember the stages of our own lives and development. We remember where we were, how we…
Sunday 29th August 2021 3.00pm Crazy Coqs, Brasserie Zédel Comparing Notes brings stars of the West End and Broadway to Crazy Coqs. In a lively and informal mix of performance and conversation host Edward Seckerson will be getting…
Music journalist Edward Seckerson reveals his must-have recording of Bernstein’s choral masterpiece, the Chichester Psalms. Leonard Bernstein’s exuberant Chichester Psalms was one of the composer’s many strong connections with the UK, commissioned for the 1965 Southern Cathedrals…
Out of the darkness, a voice (Géza Szilvay), a whispered invitation to enter the darkest recesses of Duke Bluebeard’s mind. That spoken introduction to Bartok’s operatic masterpiece – quiet and confidential – invokes solitude and nothing but…
