A celebration of composer, soloist and orchestral excellence in an eclectic, if slightly eccentric, gala opening program to launch the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's 2018 season.
Two works of personal victory, written at virtually the same point in history and against a backdrop of suffering, made up this very successful concert conducted by Sir Andrew Davis.
David Pountney's new production of Die Walkürefor the Lyric Opera of Chicago incisively charts the tectonic shift of control over the future from Wotan to Brünnhilde.
Outstanding solos, orchestral discipline and novelties in musical arrangement made for another quality symphonic experience from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
In spite of some questionable staging, Lyric Opera of Chicago opened its Ring cycle on a strong note with a stellar cast, notably featuring Eric Owens’ role debut as Wotan.
A varied concert of new music by Anthony Payne, Max Bruch's 1st Violin Concerto with Ray Chen, a Tchaikovsky rarity and a rousing early work by Vaughan Williams
The interpretation was crowned by the most rapt rendition of the last movement imaginable, all yearningly luminescent and full of spellbinding nobility of tone from the orchestra.
Bringing out the unabashed colour and detail of the score, Andrew Davis delivered a superb reading in the pit, tightly coherent and with exemplary attentiveness to articulation.
A successful concert hall Rake's Progress at the Edinburgh International Festival with an impressively strong cast of singers, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Conservatoire Voices under Sir Andrew Davis.
Amber Wagner sings Elisabeth with a deepened command and an access to a horizon of sound that make it seem as though her throat had found six more inches of release. It’s a phenomenal performance.
The Met's holiday special, Hänsel und Gretel, is a treat not only for young children but for adults with its sophisticated music, excellent singing ensemble and orchestra playing, as well as its witty production.
Late in the opera, in the calm that settles after a vaudeville of ballet dancers and Italian singers, Fleming’s poise pervades the Countess’s closing rumination over love and the nature of art. It’s a concert piece nestled in Capriccio’s narrative bustle, and to hear Fleming sing it is to be reminded of her talents as a communicator in music within and beyond the opera stage.
This production's consistent visual beauty forms the setting for this Don’s musical approach. It is a testament to this ensemble that Mariusz Kwiecień can’t steal the show in spite of his utterly commanding physical and vocal presence as the Don.
Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius tells the story of a pious man’s death, his travels through Purgatory and finally being accepted into Heaven. It is perhaps not the most dramatic of tales, but one filled with a sense of redemption and intense spirituality.
What is perhaps even more remarkable than the unabashed grandeur of the new Parsifal at the Lyric Opera of Chicago is the degree to which its spectacle draws on the images and genres of 20th-century media technologies including popular music.
The silence at the end of the concert said it all. To have plunged the attention of the entire Royal Albert Hall into utter silence for a whole minute after the music has finished was an impressive feat. Such was the audience response to Mark Padmore’s closing walk down the back of the stage, as Captain Vere.
It’s so good to hear Tippett’s ravishing opera, The Midsummer Marriage, performed in full at the Proms, particularly in Britten’s centenary year. Tippet’s work is like an antidote to Britten’s drier, more literal operatic style – so overflowing with warmth, colour and hope.
You can view Britten’s Billy Budd as an opera about the failure of words. When the angelic sailor Billy is falsely accused by his superior office Claggart, his stammer prevents him from defending himself and he lashes out, fatally.
RSNO concerts begin, for me and around 100 others, with the pre-concert talk. I'm especially glad of these when new to a work, such as Mendelssohn’s 1846 Elijah. A talk by those who have prepared the music for us adds something to even the most extensive “presearch”.
Friday night’s BBC SO concert certainly drew in a large crowd, despite the presence of two unfamiliar works: a new one by Jonathan Lloyd and Tippett’s Fourth Symphony from 1977. The addition of the ever-popular pianist Stephen Hough to the lineup, playing the one of the most challenging concertos in the repertoire, Brahms’ First, must have helped the numbers.
On Friday, a new co-production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opened at the Lyric. The only comedy among Wagner’s mature music dramas, its sound is very much like that of the better-known tragedies – brassy, overfull, with a core of strings teetering at vibrato’s edge.
Canada has been taking an active role to build concert programs featuring its own musical talents. One proponent organization of this is the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Led by a team of dedicated administrative individuals, volunteers and musicians, the TSO provides an indispensable platform to showcase our Canadian talents to the community at large.
In Francisco Negrin’s production of Massenet’s Werther, currently at the Lyric Opera, the opera’s first scene appears through a semi-transparent screen upon which an image of a row of houses is projected. Then the screen rises, and we enter fully into the dream.
Between acts, and between shows, the stage at Chicago’s Civic Opera House is usually blocked from view by a solid mural painted with baroque figures in gold – perhaps the gaudiest feature of an already fussily ornate hall. The gilt-painted screen was up, however, for Elektra, the first show of the Lyric Opera’s new season (along with Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, which runs concurrently).
The history of British music reads rather like the old joke about buses: there was no composer of note in the two hundred years after Purcell, and then three came along at once. Whilst Elgar and Vaughan Williams have become household names, the third composer who came along at the end of the nineteenth century has been relegated to the dusty shelves of musical history.
The gist of Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’ opera-within-an-opera, is this: a demanding patron insists on having his entertainment for a given evening – a burlesque act and an opera – combined into one work, greatly upsetting the archetypal “serious artist” composer of the opera.
