Whether by design or accident this latest “double” in the Royal Opera’s Operashots project hit us with the most compelling of juxtapositions. Both composers – Stewart Copeland and Oscar winner Anne Dudley – hailed latterly from the…
The Scandinavians were coming: Nielsen and Grieg had tall tales to tell and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto had promised the über-virtuosic Julia Fischer. But the German never arrived, an accident in her kitchen resulting in an eleventh hour…
It’s a preposterous story – the stuff of which operas (or the latest Wallace and Gromit) are made: Belgian physicist Auguste Piccard, determined to prove Einstein’s Einstein’s theory of relativity, takes to the skies in a balloon-powered…
How to describe Murray Perahia’s qualities? Elegance, fluency, modesty, clarity – and an abiding sense of the poetic. In the final piece of Schumann’s Kinderszenen “Der Dichter spricht” – “the poet speaks” – Perahia’s own inner voice…
The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra brought Strauss – oodles of it – for this Shell Classics International at the Royal Festival Hall; and as they signed off with one of those signature Rosenkavalier waltzes, all swooning strings…
Human Frailty wears a latex mask and a dog-collar – a plaything of his cruel masters, Time, Fortune, and Love. Eye and mouth holes are crudely cut out of the mask as if perhaps to conceal horrific…
Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Rachmaninov didn’t: he knew. Or rather he was convinced that they all tolled for him. His splendid choral symphony The Bells is full of ominous premonition with even the “Silver…
Send in the clowns. Or at least that was Vladimir Jurowski’s musical thinking in bringing together the mighty foursome of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Haydn, and Shostakovich and seeing just how far their capricious natures might take us. The…
The Orchestra of the Academia Nazionale Di Santa Cecilia, Rome, brought a little something home grown on this their fleeting UK tour. While their counterparts at the Royal Opera in London were tracing out the ethereal opening…
David McVicar’s darkly primitivist Aida was a necessary antidote to the whole tedious tradition of sub-De Mille spectacle in this piece. The cleverest thing about his staging – and I cannot for the life of me work…