Wilfrid Jones is a music student and choral scholar at New College, Oxford. He directs Floreat Cantus, a London-based chamber choir, and sings in various professional church choirs in Oxford.
Osmo Vänskä strode onto the stage to great applause, paused for the slightest of moments and then lunged at the orchestra with his baton. The gesture was sudden and lacked clarity, and as a result, the first note of the Prom wasn’t together in the strings.
I would say a little over three quarters of the seats in the Royal Albert Hall were full for Prom 33, featuring Juanjo Mena, the BBC Philharmonic and several northern choirs, and that whilst I’ve seen the arena busier than it was, it was still fairly tightly packed.
After fifteen years of trying to persuade us that Byrd’s lesser-known works are just as worth listening to as the famous ones, I felt that the Cardinall’s Musick could have come up with a more exciting programme of his celebration of Easter.
Having arrived earlier than I anticipated for this evening’s production of Puccini’s La Bohème by OperaUpClose, I took the opportunity to read through the libretto, helpfully provided in the form of a thin volume available for purchase. When I organise concerts, I often provide texts so that unclear diction is better understood, but this evening I didn’t look at the libretto once.
Last night brought Mark Padmore (tenor) and Paul Lewis (piano) to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford for a recital of Schubert’s Winterreise, Schubert’s setting of a text by the short-lived lyric poet Wilhelm Müller. The poems focus on a ‘wanderer’ whose only friend is his shadow, having been rejected by his sweetheart in favour of a new lover.
It has suddenly become bitterly cold in Oxford, so scuttling the hundred yards or so from where I live to the Sheldonian Theatre, along with having to rush my dinner, saw me in a foul mood at eight o’clock this evening when Ben Holder strode onto stage to conduct New Chamber Opera in Orpheus in the Underworld, Offenbach’s comic operetta in two acts.
