“Out of this wood do not desire to go!” Tytania orders Bottom. Glyndebourne's revival of Peter Hall's classic production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is eerily enchanting, weaving its spell right from the queasy double bass glissandos, which slither into Britten's score.
“If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.” There was certainly plenty of Shakespeare-inspired music on the bill for the London Philharmonic Orchestra's celebration of The Bard.
The Rape of Lucretia may be something of a problem piece, but Fiona Shaw's production is an excellent piece of ensemble theatre set around some very fine performances of music of rare beauty.
Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker thrill a packed Concertgebouw with Lachenmann’s startling Tableau, for orchestra and a grand and terrifying Mahler Second.
Triumphant Mahler from Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker, strong performances from Kate Royal and Magdalena Kožená, and total commitment and energy from the London Symphony Chorus and the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus.
The text of Das Paradies und die Peri may be unadulterated Victorian sentimentality, but Schumann's music cannot fail to bewitch in an evening with outstanding singing from Bernarda Fink and Mark Padmore and Simon Rattle leading the LSO on top form.
The Nash Ensemble toasted its golden anniversary with a selection of golden French repertoire – some of it more familiar in orchestral form – at its Wigmore Hall gala.
Daniel Harding and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra gave an oddly-staged, at times erractic, performance of the “Resurrection” Symphony that failed to completely encapulsate Mahler's vision.
Glyndebourne’s annual away day from Lewes to the heaving metropolis is always a highlight of the Proms season, but this year’s visit was more hotly anticipated than usual.
Britten's Spring Symphony and Ryan Wigglesworth's Locke's Theatre join with Rudolf Buchbinder's thrilling account of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody, all conducted, at short notice, by Brett Mitchell, Franz Welser-Möst's assistant.
The early 1950s were marked by the world premières of Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 7 (1952), Poulenc’s Piano Concerto (1950) as well as his Stabat Mater (1951). The most recent offering of The Rest is Noise series at the Southbank Centre encouraged us to place these pieces not just in the 1950s, but also in a wider political and cultural context.
Of the various themes that make up Britten’s Gloriana, written to celebrate the coronation in 1953 and being given a rare outing at Covent Garden to mark the work’s 60th anniversary and Britten’s 100th, the most effective by far is a sort of operatic expansion of Shakespeare’s line “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”.
Programming is one of Simon Rattle’s fortes, and this was clearly evident her. Both works on the programme, Brett Dean’s The Last Days of Socrates and Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time are large-scale oratorios dealing with difficult subject matter.
Although written many years before Rossini's The Barber of Seville, the story of The Marriage of Figaro is in fact the sequel to that of the later opera. This farcical masterpiece of the opera buffa style was the first of three operas Mozart worked on with the Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte and was a risky undertaking.
I've commented before about Die Zauberflöte that if you get the music right, the rest will follow. In the first night of the Royal Opera's latest revival of David MacVicar's 2003 production, Sir Colin Davis definitely got the music right.
