Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Christianne Stotijn

Troisième volet de l'intégrale des symphonies de Mahler par l'Orchestre National de Lille, sous la baguette de son jeune directeur musical, Alexandre Bloch. Retour sur une Symphonie n° 3 pleine de promesses.

The Seattle Symphony, under the outstanding leadership of guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, overcame the absence of their maestro and gave a worthy reading of the monumental work.

Paired with some overly serious Mahler, Eivind Buene's melodrama Blue Mountain did not quite convince, its ironic self-awareness getting in the way of itself.

Thomas Adès conducts three pieces on the subject of death, concluding with his own Totentanz. Despite the lugubrious subject matter there was a great sense of joy in the music making.

Full of melodic treasures hidden for ages, Anton Rubinstein's The Demon answers the most demanding expectations.

Con el Auferstehen hizo su aparición el otro gran protagonista de la noche: el Coro Nacional de España.

The Seattle Symphony concludes its fourth season with music director Ludovic Morlot with an intimately detailed account of the most epic of Mahler's symphonies. 

Two seasons after his Met Opera debut, Thomas Adès is back at Lincoln Center making his conducting debut at the New York Philharmonic, including his own tremendous orchestral work, Totentanz.

On home ground, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra played sensationally in Daniele Gatti’s intensely theatrical and impossibly beautiful Mahler 3.

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. 

Daniel Harding and the London Symphony Orchestra again paired Schubert with a late Romantic, this time Richard Wagner, and the second act of Tristan und Isolde. The orchestra were on a form it would be hard to match.

Wednesday night’s concert saw the London Symphony Orchestra with principal guest conductor Daniel Harding in what seemed a slightly odd programme, pairing Schubert’s Fifth with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.

In one of several (pretty outrageous) notes to conductors in the score of his Roméo et Juliette, Berlioz states that “the average listener has no imagination” and, as a result of this, the sixth movement of the work should be cut in 99 per cent of performances.

Thankfully, when it comes to classical music, programmes around the theme of death tend to make highly energetic evenings. The eighth Prom of this year was no exception, as Thomas Adès led the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the world première of his new work Totentanz, but not after performances of two similarly themed works: Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and Lutoslawski’s Cello Concerto.

Although Mendelssohn and Elgar lived in different eras and composed in very different styles, a common thread runs through their works featured in Hong Kong Philharmonic’s performance on Saturday – all of them draw their inspiration from the British Isles.As well-heeled youngsters in the 19th century were wont to do, Mendelssohn embarked on a tour of Europe as part of his education.

Dichterliebe is a Lieder programme staple but performances of Schumann’s anti-song cycle, the Op. 39 Liederkreis, are much harder to come by. The latter work fascinates me more, with its themes, in the twelve Eichendorff poems carefully selected by Schumann, of broken, alienated subjects longing for that from which they are cut off, namely love, nature, and some guarantee of existential wellbeing.

Amsterdam Sinfonietta offered a program with three Russians and a French composer, and, perhaps more interestingly, featured three works orchestrated by other composers.

When Mahler wrote his Third Symphony, you couldn’t accuse him of lack of ambition. As well as making his usual demands for vast orchestral forces, Mahler intended to encapsulate the whole of creation within a single musical work. The result is a six-movement work that is gigantic in scale, especially the first movement, which takes over 40 minutes on its own.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Scorned womanhood has no better archetype than Euripides's Medea. And you're unlikely to see a more powerful or affecting Medea than Nadja Michael's performance in Cherubini's opera Médée, in the first production of the new season at La Monnaie in Brussels (De Munt, if you're a Flemish speaker.)Like all good Greek tragedy, we all know the story.

Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra planned to visit Hungary. but the tour didn't come off for reasons beyond their control. But the programmes they chose remained for the two London concerts on 26th and 29th January at the Royal Festival Hall. Big, complex programmes, held together by their references to separate Austrian and Hungarian traditions.

The intimate setting of the Wigmore Hall provided the ideal platform for mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn’s sensitive performance of songs by Faure, Chausson and Schumann. Her voice flowed apparently effortlessly through this varied repertoire, connecting powerfully with the audience.