Nothing follows Mahler 6 and surely nothing should precede it. Nothing. Even a piece as compelling as James MacMillan’s Viola Concerto here receiving its World Premiere under the extraordinary fingers of its dedicatee Lawrence Power. There’s only…
Exactly what constitutes “the End of Time” in Olivier Messiaen’s extraordinary Quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet? Not surely “the end of days” but rather the end of measured time; music unfettered, music of the spheres,…
During the momentous last century – so richly contextualised in the South Bank’s The Rest is Noise festival – there were two points at which factions within the musical establishment sought to step back, take stock, and…
It’s one of theatre’s great ironies that turning Volaire’s bitter satire Candide into a musical proved every bit as taxing and fraught with disaster as the journey to a better life endured by the novella’s principal characters.…
Out of the mouths of babes… the wise child that is Simon McBurney takes his cue from the “three young boys steeped in ancient learning” – a description he takes literally by transforming them into little old…
“Love and pain is like peace and war – you want one you have the have the other.” It’s a line that pretty much sums up From Here to Eternity. The title of James Jones’ novel and…
For the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s second residency at the Barbican Centre Riccardo Chailly pulled focus on an entirely new sounding Brahms. Gone were all those bad performance practices, bad habits, from the early 20th century, gone was…
Lucretia is quite literally pulled from the earth like a living artefact – and to the earth she will return. But when we arrive at the contentious final moments of Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia and…
It started so thrillingly, director Stefan Herheim pulling off a theatrical coup which simultaneously fleshed out the opera’s back story whilst casting us body and soul into the gloriously opulent world of French opera-ballet. But as Verdi’s…
Britten’s innate theatricality shines through every single bar of his War Requiem. Atmosphere, drama, suspense, and high emotionalism is to a greater or lesser degree written into the piece (something which the naysayers always latch on to).…
