The moment of truth in any staging of Hansel and Gretel must be the Dream Pantomime which closes act one. This is the director’s moment, the moment where the entire premise of the production finds fulfillment in…
The tricky opening chord of Weber’s Der Freischutz Overture needed warming up – didn’t we all – but a quartet of horns quickly lent a dappled glow to the proceedings and the mercury began to rise. Weber’s…
In a programme note for the premiere of his 2nd Violin Concerto in 1943 Bohuslav Martinu wrote of the eternal tension between “absolute music” and music with an expressive purpose. But times and attitudes change and his…
These days Sir Roger Norrington tends to stop, look, and listen rather than get stuck in; it’s almost as if it is someone else’s performance and not his own that he is enjoying. While the hive of…
To ravish the senses or feed the soul? That is the question. And although Wagner posed it knowing full well that its significance would resonate through the ages – and no more so than now – he…
The heroics came fast and fervently with Andris Nelsons and the Philharmonia Orchestra emerging from suffocating pianissimi to rip out the exultant fanfares of Beethoven’s Leonora No.3 Overture as if already limbering up to take on Strauss’…
It’s an in-joke that composer Howard Goodall could hardly pass by – quoting that song in his and Stephen Clark’s musical adaptation of the much-loved novel and film LOVE STORY. But it’s the moment he chooses that…
It was extraordinary but not especially surprising how Gustav Mahler’s presence could loom so large in a concert containing not one single note of his music. His pointless “retouching” of the Beethoven symphonies and wholesale repression of…
Vladimir Jurowski must have had a sixth sense about this programme beginning as it did with Debussy’s Prelude Des Pas sur la neige (“Foosteps in the Snow”) and ending with the sound of sleigh bells ushering in…
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…