Music to snooze by for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee
14 February 2012 12:00 AM
The plans for the river pageant are an embarrassment
The Tales of Hoffmann, English National Opera
13 February 2012 10:40 AM
Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is a long and convoluted work which usually comes over as an implausible amalgam of Faust and Coppelia.
Richard Goode, Royal Festival Hall
13 February 2012 10:37 AM
The American pianist Richard Goode doesn’t give many recitals, but his uniquely personal vision ensures that each one is special.
West End Girl, King's Head, Islington, London Chorzelski / Apekisheva, Wigmore Hall, London
Dream Hunter, Wilton's Music Hall, London
12 February 2012 12:00 AM
A cleverly updated version of Puccini's Wild West opera sees a lovelorn innocent fall prey to a feckless drug dealer
Album: Berio, Orchestral Realisations – Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra / Gardner (Chandos)
12 February 2012 12:00 AM
In a joyfully discombobulating programme, Luciano Berio's mischief-making orchestration of Mahler's "Six Early Songs" uses the Mahlerian paintbox in an almost anti-Mahlerian, jaunty fashion. "Rendering" applies a Stravinskian spritz of lemon juice to Schubert's delicate symphonic sketches.
La Boheme, Old Vic Tunnels, South London
10 February 2012 10:00 AM
I’ve reviewed opera in some unlikely places – a telephone box, the stairways of a derelict town hall, the kitchen department of Wembley IKEA – but the labyrinth of tunnels under Waterloo made the unlikeliest venue yet.
Album: Sascha Goetzel, Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra, Music from the Machine Age: Bartók, Holst, Prokofiev, Ravel, Schulhoff (Onyx)
10 February 2012 12:00 AM
These five pieces ably summarise the ferment of creativity unleashed in the aftermath of the First World War, from Bartók's outrageous ballet suite The Miraculous Mandarin, with its theme of prostitution and murder, and its grotesque dances to Prokofiev's Scythian Suite, a whirling-dervish concatenation of evil gods, monsters, sacrifice and violence.
Album: Yundi, The Red Piano (EMI Classical)
10 February 2012 12:00 AM
An instructive contrast with Music from the Machine Age: while the change in European culture was diversely reflected by composers, upheavals in Chinese culture seem to have inspired the most mawkish of music, notably the "Yellow River Concerto" based on a 1939 cantata by Xian Xinghai, itself based on traditional folk melodies, and recast during the Cultural Revolution by composers apparently determined to smother it in syrup.
Album: The Choir of the Temple Church, A Festival of Psalms (Signum Classics)
10 February 2012 12:00 AM
Taking as its theme the use of psalms in choral music, this anthology links the liturgies of Jewish and Christian traditions, represented respectively by Leonard Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms" and various European strains from Byrd and Allegri to Purcell and Parry.
The Tales of Hoffmann is fantasy stuff
10 February 2012 12:00 AM
The German author E T A Hoffmann's imagination underpins some of the world's most popular and enduring operas, ballets, and even piano music. Yet few of the adaptations bear much resemblance to his originals. Indeed, the writer's absence from his own legacy is so striking that Richard Jones, the director of English National Opera's new production of The Tales of Hoffmann, has apparently recommended to his lead tenor, Barry Banks, that he need not read the tales by Hoffmann on which the opera is based.
Fear and loathing in London: The Death of Klinghoffer is staged in the capital for the first time
09 February 2012 12:00 AM
It's a major risk for English National Opera, says Jessica Duchen.
Marc-André Hamelin, Wigmore Hall
08 February 2012 11:54 AM
There is really very little that Marc-André Hamelin can’t or won’t do on or with a piano and he did most of it in this characteristically supersonic recital - including one wholesale assault on the Wigmore Steinway’s bottom octave with his fists.
Crouch End Festival Chorus/ Temple, Barbican
07 February 2012 10:50 AM
There are choral societies and there are choral societies – and Crouch End Festival Chorus is one of the more interesting.
London Philharmonic Orchestra / Nézet-Séguin, Royal Festival Hall, London
05 February 2012 12:47 PM
Bruckner’s unfinished final symphony - the 9th - poses many questions, none more perplexing than what might have been in terms of its absent finale.
Norma, Grand Theatre, Leeds
Wagner Dream, Barbican Hall, London
05 February 2012 12:00 AM
Bellini's best-known opera enjoys high drama and distinguished singing
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