The magic usually descends quickly in a Mitsuko Uchida recital but the opening Bach of this rescheduled Festival Hall concert – a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Klavier – took a…
Death comes in many guises but in this ingeniously devised Philharmonia concert he most definitely did not have the last laugh. That was for Shostakovich and a curiously ticking time bomb of percussion which first surfaced in…
Even singular sensations grow older – yet A Chorus Line, which coined the phrase, seems ageless, so sure is it of its place in musical theatre history, so locked now into our theatrical consciousness. It is, no…
Hell hath no fury… and in Medea’s case comes so precipitously that even her children must be taken from the room whenever her demons threaten an unscheduled appearance. That is but one of many telling details that…
We begin where we will end – with Onegin and Tatyana closing the door on the life that was and the life that might have been. It’s one of the great “what ifs” of opera and Kasper…
So this is La Traviata laid bare, stripped of all superfluities (some chorus, all ballet, offstage reveries in the final scene), and played out “in secret”, as it were, behind closed curtains. Actually the director Peter Konwitschny…
Of all the heavyweight anniversaries being celebrated this year the name of Witold Lutoslawski will have been less at the forefront of peoples’ minds had the Philharmonia Orchestra and their Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor not chosen…
Period instruments demand absolute honesty from their players. Their sound is their personality – candid, quirky, eccentrically beautiful – but their soul is revealed in the spirit of the playing where beauty is not skin deep and…
The natural logic of this heady mix of first and second Viennese utterances was turned on its head with Webern’s early tone poem Im Sommerwind opening like a breathy premonition of the autumnal second song of Mahler’s…
Ancient myths reside in Harrison Birtwistle’s orchestral writing – and in The Minotaur, which I now believe to be the richest of all his stage works, it comes up through your body like the shifting of tectonic…