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).…
The first words we hear don’t belong to Fidelio at all, the first music does, but not at all where you expect to find it. If you’ve read your programme (and who does before the show begins?)…
Applause for the conductor – even if it is Andris Nelsons – is just about the last thing we need to hear when Richard Strauss is about to fling down the brutal chords which spell out the…
From Mozart’s pen to Mitsuko Uchida’s fingers and one last time for Sir Colin Davis – Mozart’s wistful Rondo in A minor. If ever music crossed thresholds this not so little Rondo with its lilting Siciliana-like melody…
As it came to pass, Marin Alsop’s nationality was rather more of a factor than her gender on this historic Last Night of the Proms – but her deft put-down of remarks made only the week before…
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias…
The Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra made quite a splash with their Tchaikovsky symphony series under Mariss Jansons back in the 1980s. The watchwords then were freshness and articulation, a re-establishment of Tchaikovsky’s innate classicism – and so it…