Charles Dutoit à la tête de l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande et de la Zürcher Sing-Akademie aura illuminé les noirceurs du « War Requiem » de Britten d’un art abouti des transitions et des ambiances. Portés par sa baguette, les artistes sur la scène du Victoria Hall auront permis un voyage serein dans des terres qui pourtant regorgent de chausse-trappes.
Entre l'imaginaire de Pedro Calderon, celui de Lewis Caroll ou encore de Jonathan Swift, cette nouvelle production signée Stefan Herheiminvite à la réflexion sur la frontière entre folie et sommeil, illusion et réalité, amour et raison.
After nearly two decades away from the Covent Garden stage, it was time Britten's Billy Budd came home, in a new production from Madrid by Deborah Warner.
Glistening performances by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and combined forces under Thomas Adès bring to life Stravinsky’s Perséphone, with fiery premières of works by Adès himself and Gerald Barry.
Affecting Britten, distinctive Elias and popular Elgar, with a curio of arranged Purcell thrown in, from Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
Purists look away. Translating Müller’s poetry from its sublime German to work well in English was always going to be a difficult task, but Spence’s infectious enthusiasm carried it off.
Mozart's messy monster of an opera gets a brutalist tidy-up at Garsington, but the determinedly straightforward reading only makes this work's innate problems more obvious.
“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.
Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic present Elgar's Dream of Gerontius as a well crafted gem of the English choral tradition, but fall short of a dramatic outpouring of human emotion and religious fervour.
Toby Spence and Sarah Connolly make splendid soulful companions and conductor Peter Oundjian brings a resonant depth to Elgar's period-piece in a fine end to the RSNO's season.
Die Fledermaus is as quintessentially Viennese as zithers and Schnitzel. In John Wilson, the Philharmonia and a fine ensemble cast, we should have had all the ingredients for a memorable matinée performance, but a few elements meant the fizz went rather flat.
My mother always told me not to sit too close in the theatre, and after seeing this revival of Martin Kusej’s modern realization of Stravinksy’s The Rake’s Progress at the Theater an der Wien, I think I know what she was talking about.Act I begins innocuously enough in a sparse apartment, unfurnished apart from a mattress and a television.
The newly built and unconventionally imposing Coventry Cathedral, built next to the ruins of the original medieval building destroyed in the Second World War, played host to the first performance of Britten’s War Requiem in 1962.
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”.
The Salle Pleyel’s programmatic dichotomy between “memory” and “creation” continually seeks to promote the more established names in classical music, whilst also shedding light on lesser-known repertoires from all musical epochs.
It’s pretty luxurious to be able to stumble out of your front door at ten to six, wander five minutes round the corner to your friendly local cinema, be greeted with a glass of sparkling wine, and then watch a high-definition live screening of a top contemporary opera production at the Met.
It’s been a busy couple of months for Berlioz’s Requiem in London. First there was Sir Colin Davis’s June performance at St. Paul’s, with the reinforced London Symphony Orchestra’s brass bands arrayed around the dome.
The late-night Proms usually offer something very different from the regular programme, be it chamber music, jazz, or choral music. Thursday evening’s Prom was no exception to this, featuring the music of the somewhat forgotten Ivor Novello, sometimes considered the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the early 20th Century.
Before the concert began, Yannick Nézet-Séguin gave a short introductory speech that, in effect, would have the Royal Festival Hall consecrated for the evening as a place of worship.
Thomas Adès' music has a rawness that only comes across heard live. This seems particularly true when he conducts it himself. Gone are the smooth contours of recordings and other conductors, replaced by a focus on infectious rhythm and sometimes brutal colours. His lyrical tendencies therefore become all the more powerful.Tevot is the perfect example.
The classical world came off lightly in the recent New Year Honours list, with the Royal Opera House’s knighted Antonio Pappano the only winner. He has much to celebrate, more so after directing last night’s concert performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with authoritative ease and good cheer, supported by a fine array of soloists.
Young man spurns the love of a good woman. Time passes. Man realises the error of his ways, but it is too late. It's not exactly the most taxing of plot lines, but in Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin turned it into a masterpiece.
Perhaps visions of the royal princes in battle dress influenced last night’s programme. Or perhaps it was merely felt that Beethoven’s Eroica symphony requires a suitably epic companion. Either way, the result was a rare performance of Britten’s enormous Battle of Heroes, written to honour the members of the International Brigade who died in the Spanish Civil war.
“Off with their heads!” I vividly recall being terrorized as a preschooler hearing Walt Disney’s sadistic, loud-mouthed Queen of Hearts thunder these signature lines. I have since learned that decapitation as capital punishment is not exclusive to the fictional Queen of Hearts of Lewis Carroll and Walt Disney, but rather grim historical reality.
For a long period, Charles Gounod's Faust was one of the most frequently performed operas, its popularity due to a lusciously romantic score which contains a series of showstopping set-piece arias, many of which have found their way into popular culture (to give just one example, the Jewel Song in Act III has a starring role in the Tintin story The Castafiore Emerald).
