Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Il prigioniero

An unusual double bill pairing of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero opens at the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. 

Sir Antonio Pappano and the LSO offer a riveting account of Il prigioniero, an idiosyncratic 20th-century opera. 

Tony Pappano’s recipe for a concert programme: take a 20th century Italian one act opera, follow it with a romantic symphony chopped in half, then throw in a related German aria; play without a break. It may sound like a train wreck in the making, but the result was a triumph.

Alan Gilbert’s last few seasons at the New York Philharmonic have featured an opera in June. While previous efforts have featured elaborate staging, this year’s installment, Luigi Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, was performed in concert. For this particular work, which was written for radio broadcast, this seems only appropriate.

This was a concert contrasting two opposing faces of man. From the heights of genius, of life-affirming, triumphant joy, to the depths of cruelty, of hopeless, nihilistic despair, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra presented two musical visions of humanity in this first concert in their new series, entitled ‘“The still point of the turning world”: Music that defines an era’.