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Independent podcast: Vasily Petrenko - Shostakovich

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:15:24 +0100

These two hugely contrasting symphonies come from the opposite ends of Shostakovich's life and career.

Frederick Delius: How a great British musical myth was born

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:01 +0100

Image management isn't such a recent phenomenon after all. In John Bridcut's new documentary about Frederick Delius, marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, an extraordinary history emerges, revealing the degree to which the composer's chief champion manipulated his reputation to make him appear more "British" than he really was. That champion was none other than the celebrated conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.

Independent podcast: Beethovenfest Bonn

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:06:09 +0100

In Bonn, civic pride has a name, and that name is Beethoven.

Independent podcast - Will Todd

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:36:00 +0100

Composer/Pianist Will Todd has been playing the piano since he was three and composing since he was seven. In his own words: "If I had free choice about how I would spend my musical time I'd run a Jazz club in a cathedral with gigs on Friday and Saturday nights, vibrant eccumenical and cross faith worship on Sundays and big choral concerts as often as possible - featuring the best professionals alongside community and youth choirs."

Live Transmission: Scanner and Heritage Orchestra rework Joy Division, Dome, Brighton

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:17:56 +0100

Finally! Thirty-two years to the day that the Joy Division singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen comes an event celebrating his musical legacy rather than wallowing in the myth and melodrama of his demise.

The Cunning Little Vixen, Glyndebourne Festival, Glyndebourne, East Sussex

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:17:26 +0100

It might be deduced that the only thing worse than working with children and animals would be working with children as animals. But Leoš Janáček was unfazed by the old Hollywood adage and his cartoon-strip derived opera The Cunning Little Vixen was spirited from page to stage with uncynical conviction and, it has to be said, no end of technical hazards.

Falstaff, Royal Opera House, London The Sixteen, Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Untroubled by heartburn or hangover, happy as a honeymooner in his wine-stained bedsheets, Verdi's last great operatic hero smiles serenely over a dozen grease-spattered room-service trolleys. Of the many types of love celebrated in Falstaff – from the nudging camaraderie of rogues to the fluttering cadences of female friendship, the vertigo of first love and the sturdy affection of marriage – none is as pass-ionate or as nuanced as that of Sir John for his stomach. Raconteur, philosopher and adventurer, he is a man made misty-eyed by the memory of a single salted anchovy.

Magdalena Kozena/Mitsuko Uchida, Wigmore Hall, London

Sat, 19 May 2012 10:35:37 +0100

It's extraordinary how the symbiosis of spirit and rightness of timbre between an artist and a composer can turn a recital around. The Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena is not a natural recitalist tending to overwork and over-illustrate texts with a physical manner and overactive hands better suited to the stage.

Album: Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Dennis Russell DaviesLutoslawski/Bartók: Musique, Funèbre (ECM New Series)

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:29 +0100

Bringing together three Bartók suites with the funeral music composed in his memory by his admirer Witold Lutoslawski, Dennis Russell Davies here offers convincing confirmation of the former's influence on the latter.

Album: James Rhodes, Jimmy: Live in Brighton (Signum Classics)

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:06 +0100

With his wild hair and stubble, James Rhodes is the Russell Brand of the piano, though he could cut back on the swearing in his laddish but informative introductions highlighting Beethoven's “interiority”, Chopin's adolescent crushes etc.

Album: Mark Padmore, Britten/Finzi (Harmonia Mundi)

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:05 +0100

Mark Padmore's talents are diversely challenged here on two Benjamin Britten song-cycles, requiring him to capture the voices of poets from different eras.

Independent Podcast: Royal Choral Society 140th Anniversary

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:34:04 +0100

The Royal Choral Society is 140 years young and joins the ranks of the most venerable choral societies in the land - among them Halifax, Huddersfield, and Hereford. What is it about our love of communal singing that has raised the tradition of the great British Choral Society to such dizzy heights?

Lars Vogt, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London / Janine Jansen Residency, Wigmore Hall, London (4/5, 5/5)

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:23:18 +0100

It’s a welcome new trend that pianists should begin their recitals with a Haydn sonata. Still regarded in some quarters as the humble forerunner to Mozart, Haydn not only created the sonata form, but carried out experiments in it which still sound daring today.

Verdi Falstaff, Royal Opera House

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:25:21 +0100

Where there’s Falstaff there’s food. And Robert Carsen’s new staging of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece plays like an ode to gastronomical excess.

Independent podcast: Naxos 25th Anniversary

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:09:08 +0100

London Symphony Orchestra / Gergiev, Barbican Hall, London

Sun, 13 May 2012 16:03:01 +0100

One bar into this timely celebration of his work and the composer's identity could not be in doubt.

Kermit the Frog joins the chorus – in 'Caligula'

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

It's time to play the music, it's time to light the lights – Kermit the Frog is in appearing in a tale of dictatorship, violence and sexual depravity.

Einstein on the Beach, Barbican Theatre, London Carousel, Grand Theatre, Leeds Juan Diego Florez, Royal Albert HallLondon

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Listen, play, love, revere – and keep your trap shut!" Albert Einstein's words on Bach might equally apply to Robert Wilson and Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, which, along with glancing references to Carole King, The Beatles and "Mr Bojangles", is threaded through with shreds of Bach's E major Partita as played by a man with a shock of white hair, a bushy moustache, and the pink, protruding tongue of a happy Labrador.

Album: Dvorák, Piano Quartet/Piano Quintet – The Schubert Ensemble (Chandos)

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

On first listen, there is nothing radical about the Schubert's performance here.

Album: Simon Rattle, Berliner Philharmoniker Bruckner 9 – Four Movement Version (EMI Classics)

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:51 +0100

Few composers thought bigger, or longer, than Bruckner, who constantly revised his colossal works – in the case of this final symphony, spending nine years writing and still not completing it before his death, leading to a plethora of posthumous fourth movement “completions” over the past three decades.

Album: Sandrine Piau, Les Paladins, Jerome CorreasLe Triomphe de L'Amour (Naive)

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:13 +0100

In Le Triomphe de L'Amour, Sandrine Piau immerses herself in the buffeting waves of romance that pitched and yawed amongst the baroque French operas of such as Lully, Grétry, Rameau and Charpentier.

Album: Jeremy DenkLigeti/Beethoven (Nonesuch)

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:11 +0100

Ligeti's Piano Études are famously quixotic in pushing the player beyond their usual limits.

Glyndebourne - Singing for their supper

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:07 +0100

Glyndebourne, the original country house opera festival, has rolled out an intriguing publicity poster this year. It shows a flock of sheep, one of them another colour. "See opera differently," says the slogan. The picture evokes the opera house's South Downs setting, of course, but it can leave you wondering exactly who, or what, will be the black sheep of the Glyndebourne family.

Live opera in cinemas? No way, says ENO

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The artistic director of the English National Opera, John Berry, has startled counterparts by claiming the artform is harming itself by screening live performances at cinemas.

Spencer Myer, Wigmore Hall, London

Mon, 07 May 2012 08:33:09 +0100

As each new player joins the fray, one remembers the imbalance between the seven hundred pianists listed in the British Music Yearbook, and the thirty who make a decent living from concerts.

Noah Stewart: 'No one gave me the opportunity... I had to work for it'

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The American tenor Noah Stewart's first solo album has whooshed to No 1 in the classical charts, making Stewart the first black artist ever to top that category. Meanwhile he has been attracting attention in opera. He made his Covent Garden debut recently in Judith Weir's Miss Fortune; he sang Lieutenant Pinkerton in Puccini's Madama Butterfly at Opera North; and he is currently in Detroit, tackling The Pearl Fishers by Bizet. Later this month he starts his first UK tour.

Noah Stewart: 'No one gave me the opportunity... I had to work for it'

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The Flying Dutchman, Coliseum, London LSO/Eotvos, Barbican Hall, London

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Agreat deal of dreaming goes on in Wagner's operas. The composer himself had such an active subconscious that his wife, Cosima, noted no fewer than 421 of his dreams in her diaries. On the page and on the stage, his heroes and heroines dream of perfect love, perfect redemption, perfect oblivion, perfect music, perfect poetry. Peppered with symbols of repressed desire – miniature ships squeezed into bottles, their red sails flagging up an acquaintance with Jungian colour theory – Jonathan Kent's production of The Flying Dutchman opens with a dream and ends with a nightmare of splintered glass.

Album: Handel/Caldera, Carmelite Vespers 1709 – De Marchi (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Alessandro De Marchi's vivacious double-disc brings together music for the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel by Handel and the composer who succeeded him as favourite of Cardinal Ruspoli, Antonio Caldara.

Einstein on the Beach, Barbican Theatre, London

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:19:14 +0100

Philip Glass's gargantuan minimalist classic Einstein on the Beach – though he hates the term 'minimalist' – premiered in Avignon, and has taken 36 years to reach the London stage.

Album: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Archive Recordings of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Albion)

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:33 +0100

As with many period recordings, there's a hurdle to be overcome with these Fifties recordings of Vaughan Williams works – most notably, the thinness of the sound and the unusual instrumental balance that initially distracts from Alexander Young's noble English tenor.

Album: Piers Hellawell, Airs, Waters (Delphian)

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:31 +0100

The impressive range of Piers Hellawell's work is displayed on this collection of six compositions, five of which are premiere recordings.

Album: John Eliot Gardiner, Monteverdi Choir, Bach Motets (Soli Deo Gloria)

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:15 +0100

Taking a detour from their monumental multi-volume presentation of the entire Bach cantatas, John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir here turn their attention to the six Bach motets, which offer the same compelling attractions of fugue and counterpoint as the composer's keyboard works, applied to the more emotive wonders of the human voice, with its varieties of phrasing, elision, etc.

Opera of the Week: La Bohème, Royal Opera House, London

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Not just another revival of a venerable old staging but its 25th showing in the 50th year of director John Copley's work at the Royal Opera House. Julia Trevelyan Oman's grandly designed Bohème is what used to pass for social realism at the opera.

La Boheme, Royal Opera House, London

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:12:31 +0100

Not just another revival of a venerable old staging but its 25th showing in the 50th year of director John Copley's work at the Royal Opera House. They served up a cake and a vintage cast for the occasion - and the snow fell once more on the Latin Quarter swelling the Christmas Eve crowds at Cafe Momus.

Wagner, The Flying Dutchman, English National Opera

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 12:12:55 +0100

The front curtain at the London Coliseum is a rare sight these days and suggested that we might for once be about to experience Wagner’s celebrated Overture without “illustration”.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Barbican Hall, London Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Barbican Hall, London OperaShots, Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, London

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Two megaphones, 40 dinner plates, a doorbell, a starter gun and the frenzied acceleration of a speech at the Nuremberg Rallies. Gerald Barry's operatic adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest was never going to be twee.

Album: Beethoven et al, Diabelli Variations – Andreas Staier (Harmonia Mundi)

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

In 1819, Anton Diabelli invited 50 composers to contribute a variation to a composite volume that was to be a snapshot of Viennese musical life.

Stuart Skelton: One man, two tenors

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

A great, blond bear of an Australian, with a voice of unparalleled beauty and strength, Stuart Skelton has made his career playing the man who is loved too little, too late or not at all.

Album: Ravi Shankar, Symphony (LPO)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:57 +0100

It's not uncommon for Western composers like Tavener to bring Eastern influences into their work, but much rarer for an Indian classicist to operate in the Western tradition, as Ravi Shankar does here in his Symphony, which follows the classical four-movement structure but incorporates sitar (played by Shankar's daughter Anoushka) and raga scales into the orchestration.

Album: Handel-Caldara, Carmelite Vespers 1709 (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:56 +0100

Despite the linkage suggested by the hyphen, Handel and Caldara never worked together; rather, the latter replaced the former as composer to Cardinal Ruspoli in Rome.

Album: Inon Barnatan, Darknesse (Visible Avie)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:36 +0100

On Darknesse Visible, the Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan offers a compelling programme of pieces inspired by poems, their interpretations occupying the netherworld between light and dark.

The legendary, and tragic, voice of a generation at war

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:28 +0100

Could any British singer ever have been better loved than Kathleen Ferrier? It seems unlikely. The great contralto's centenary falls this year; and 2013 will be the 60th anniversary of her death from breast cancer at the age of only 41. By the time she died, she was said to be the second most popular woman in the country after the then recently crowned Queen.

Conductor in hospital after fall

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The world-famous conductor Kurt Masur is recovering in hospital in Paris after he fell off a podium during a concert.

Independent Podcast - Isabelle Faust

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:44:07 +0100

Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival Hall

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:47:37 +0100

Schubert’s last three sonatas, like Beethoven’s final three, make a massive valedictory statement, but in a very different way.

Music wars: In the mood

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Four years ago a pile of Second World War Pyral discs turned up mysteriously in a junk shop in Lyons. They came from the archive of the notorious Nazi-controlled Radio Paris. The premises of Radio Paris had been torched during the liberation of the city and no one knows how these discs had escaped the conflagration or why they had turned up in Lyons more than 60 years later.

Album: Mozart/Strauss/Lanner, Walzer Revolution – Concensus Musicus Wien/Harnoncourt (Sony)

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:26 +0100

Nikolaus Harnoncourt and CMW offer a history of the waltz and other dances in music from Mozart to Johann Strauss and his contemporary Joseph Lanner.

The Sinking of the Titanic, Barbican Hall, London / Jakob Lenz, Hampstead Theatre, London / Don Giovanni, Heaven, London

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:08 +0100

For busy music-lovers, it was a hell of a week: drowned, deranged and damned. First stop, The Sinking of the Titanic. Half-lullaby, half-lament, Gavin Bryars's orchestral piece was first heard in the 1970s. In its current 70-minute form – a loop of Edwardian hymnody etched with the crackle of wax cylinders – it unfolds beneath a diptych of moving images based on archive footage, created by Bill Morrisson and Laurie Olinder. Smiles spread across the moustachioed faces of the First Class passengers on screen. Babies are held up to the camera like trophies, straw boaters thrown in a silent hurrah, while Bryars and his musicians play sotto voce, as meticulous as undertakers.

La fille du regiment, Royal Opera House

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:22:35 +0100

Given that Ann Widdecombe spent her prime promoting Victorian attitudes to abortion and homosexuality, you could argue she has some atoning to do, and her self-reinvention certainly makes a start.

Album: Lesley Garret, A North Country Lass (Music Infinity)

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:44 +0100

We're more used to hearing folk ballads sung with a finger in the ear these days, but there's a possibility that their origins were more akin to the demure, precisely enunciated delivery adopted by Lesley Garrett on this collection.

Album: The Hilliard Ensemble, Carlo Gesualdo: Quinto Libro di Madrigali (ECM New Series)

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:24 +0100

The quartet turn to the fifth book of Gesualdo's madrigals, an orgy of ecstatic grief and weeping wrought in angelic interlaced harmonies, as in "S'io non miro non moro": "I die if I do not look, but live not when I look – thus I am dead, but not bereft of life."

Album: Robin Gibb & RJ Gibb, The Titanic Requiem (Rhino)

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:20 +0100

If this is to be Robin Gibb's final contribution to music, it's a fittingly noble undertaking; and, as a collaboration with his son, an apt passing-on of the baton.

An inventive addition to the Proms: Wallace promises a grand day out

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

He invented a pair of Techno Trousers, the Knit-o-Matic and the Snoozatron. Now the multi-talented Wallace is turning his hand to composing, with a new commission for this year's Proms.

Il Divo, Royal Albert Hall, London

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:29:06 +0100

"I know I'll collect so many phone numbers from all these beautiful ladies," claims Carlos Marín, the diminutive, gleaming Spanish baritone. A section of "beautiful ladies" at the front hold up cards with their phone numbers on. It's cruise-ship entertainment from Simon Cowell's operatic pop quartet, which he formed in 2004, presumably under lab conditions. His experiment has spawned five staggeringly successful albums (the latest being last year's Wicked Game) and sold over 26 million records

Jakob Lenz, ENO/Hampstead Theatre, London

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:20:59 +0100

The poet Jakob Lenz (1751-1792) flashed like a shooting-star through the literary firmament, notable less for his output that for his bewitching personal charisma.

La Scala chief's anger over lack of state funding for the arts

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The artistic director of La Scala has warned that the celebrated opera house is "dangerously close" to privatisation, as public funding for the arts continues to dry up.

Staatskapelle Berlin/ Barenboim, Royal Festival Hall

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:44:54 +0100

The furtive opening bars of Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto No. 24 were shrouded in a mellowness of tone that made them welcoming rather than darkly unsettling and as the well upholstered sound of the venerable Staatskapelle Berlin took hold we were cast back into an era of sound and style that was altogether “other”. And then - final confirmation - the piano entered.

Don Giovanni, Heaven, Villiers St, London

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:41:21 +0100

Between Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the Don Juan of myth yawns a gap: despite his list of claimed successes, none of the attempted seductions we see comes off.

International Conductors’ Academy of the Allianz Cultural Foundation, Royal Festival Hall

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:41:25 +0100

A showcase for three young conductors, a malfunction at the printers, and for the first time in my experience no programmes for the audience and the prospect of blind-tasting their talents.

Lesley Garrett: 'I lost my voice in the middle of an opera; I thought my career was over'

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

I was shunned by the opera world when I began appearing in musicals There is still a powerful snobbery in the opera hierarchy and because I decided to do a musical or two, such as Carousel and The Sound of Music, all the doors suddenly closed to the opera houses, which surprised me. I believe their thinking is that once a singer departed from the prescribed operatic route, they become contaminated.

Carmen, King's Head, Islington, London Peter and the Wolf, Royal Festival Hall, London

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

A bouncer at the opera? It must be rough around here. And now there's a woman singing on the tables, and a fight is breaking out. Either Islington is not as genteel as it thinks, or OperaUpClose are at it again, knocking the stuffing out of the repertory. It's the latter, of course, and this time the company is picking the meat off the bones of Bizet's Carmen: that stony-faced chap on the door of the King's Head, so obliging to encumbered customers, is law-abiding Don José, as unimpressed by the table-top temptress as he is keen to keep his job.

Album: Dmitri Shostakovich, The Soviet Experience – Pacifica Quartet (Cedille Records)

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

In the second instalment of their recording of all 15 Shostakovich string quartets, the American Pacifica again leaven the mix with another, contemporary, Russian composer, this time Prokofiev, whose thoughtful String Quartet No 2 is added to Shostakovich's Quartets 1-4, the first of these written when the composer was 32.

Album: Elias String Quartet, Haydn: String Quartet in E flat; Schumann: String Quartet in A minor (Wigmore Hall Live)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:38 +0100

This latest release from the Elias String Quartet pairs the last of Haydn's six String Quartets with the first of Schumann's, written as a deliberate shift of his priorities from piano to strings.

Album: Daniele Gatti, Orchestre National De France (Sony Classical)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:35 +0100

Daniele Gatti enters wholeheartedly into the enchantments of Debussy here, with striking results: rarely can a faun have been so breathtakingly glimpsed through sun-dappled foliage, or a dialogue between wind and sea been quite this animé et tumultueux, to use the composer's own direction.

Album: Eric Whitacre, Water Night (Decca)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:09 +0100

Water Night demonstrates the wider compositional abilities of American choral wunderkind Eric Whitacre, incorporating orchestral pieces alongside choral favourites such as "Her Sacred Spirit Soars".

The star conductor of the symphony of 385,000

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:03 +0100

It's a balmy night in downtown Caracas and, backstage at the Teatro Teresa Carreno, a hexagonal concrete confection that is South America's second-largest concert hall, the conductor Gustavo Dudamel is grabbing a last-minute look at an orchestral score. "Which one is it tonight?" he quips, with his trademark dimpled grin. "I am losing count..."

Royal Opera House makes its debut in Abu Dhabi

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

First, it was Harrods and then Manchester City football club – now the Gulf is buying culture. Last week, the Royal Opera House (ROH) made its debut in the Gulf, in the culturally thirsty region of the UAE. I decided to pack my bags and head off to the Arab premiere of Beloved Friend at the Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi, as part of the Abu Dhabi Festival.

Cultural Life: Gavin Bryars, composer

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Music: In the car I'm listening to Tom Waits's 'Bad as Me' (I'm releasing an album of his songs with Opera North Projects), Carla Bley's 'Carla's Christmas Carols' (unseasonably) – especially her gospel version of "O Holy Night" – and my daughter's Count Basie albums (with virtuosic rhythm guitarist Freddie Green). Late at night, the jazz pianist Tony Genge, as well as Michael Chance singing "Erbaum dicht" from the St Matthew Passion.

Independent podcast: Anthony Whitworth-Jones and Garsington Opera

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:59:10 +0100

Stile Antico, Wigmore Hall

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:47:30 +0100

If you want proof of the extent to which ‘early music’ is now enshrined in our culture, look no further than the packed Wigmore Hall on Easter Sunday, where the a cappella group Stile Antico were singing Renaissance motets which not so long ago would have drawn a small cohort of sandalled beardies and flower-maidens.

St Matthew Passion, St George’s, Hanover Square

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:19:35 +0100

Passions are running high among the oppressed populace, and a weak colonial administrator decides to appease the angry crowd by throwing them a celebrated rebel as a sacrifice.

Album: Massanet – Werther, Villazón/Koch/Pappano/Royal Opera House (Deutsche Grammophon)

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

There is a moment in Act 1 where it seems as though Werther and Charlotte will be in love for ever.

Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Joshua Bell, Cadogan Hall, London Carole Cerasi, Foundling Museum, London

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The first London concert of Joshua Bell's tenure as director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields was a puzzle. The orchestra has been so good for so long that it is in danger of being taken for granted. Having kept its head through the period instruments revolution, its sound is as clear and true as it was 30 years ago, its phrasing a little sharper and crisper. In appointing a violinist known for his peerless technique and glossy tone as the successor to Sir Neville Marriner, ASMF is making a statement. But in a programme that celebrated both the pinnacle of ASMF's international fame under Marriner in the soundtrack to Milos Forman's film Amadeus and Bell's breakthrough as a teen virtuoso, it seemed he has more to learn from his orchestra than they do from him.

From under the arches to Royal Opera House: homeless get their big break

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

A mother and daughter folk duo, a hip-hop collective and a poetry group from Aldershot are to perform at the Royal Opera House in a show with a difference: every performer has lived rough on the streets. The show, With One Voice, also marks the first time the homeless have been officially recognised at the Olympics.

Album: Henry K Gorecki, Totus Tuus: Choral Music (Delphian)

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:52 +0100

Gorecki may not be a minimalist in the strict sense of the term, but his choral works, in these beautiful interpretations by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain under Mike Brewer, are all about deriving maximum impact from minimal material.

Album: Klaus Florian Vogt, Helden (Sony Classical)

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:02 +0100

German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt has the appeal of a period film star – the granite chin, the mane of shoulder-length hair and legs that probably look great in swashbuckler's tights – and there's a sunlit, youthful spirit to his delivery that's entirely suitable for the heroic roles anthologised on Helden: soaring, ambitious, morally certain, with little of the gravitas, doubt and compromise one detects in more mature tenors.

Anton Bruckner makes me lose the will to live

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin explore Bruckner's last three symphonies over three nights at the Royal Festival Hall, this month.

Album: Lara St. John, Marie-Pierre Langlamet, Bach Sonatas (Ancalagon)

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

J. S. Bach was a frequent recycler of his own work in different instrumental combinations; and he would surely have approved of these settings of his sonatas for violin and harp, the latter taking the harpsichord parts while the violin plays parts written for flute.

Parsifal, Mariinsky/Gergiev, Barbican

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:08:11 +0100

Wagner made very sure people would pay attention to the meaning of the opera he called his 'farewell to the world', by decreeing that it should only be performed, like a sacred ritual, in his theatre in Bayreuth. And though it was conceived as – and undoubtedly is – a paean to peace and reconciliation, it has sowed remarkable discord among the cognoscenti.

Riccardo Primo, Britten Theatre, London Life Is a Dream, Argyle Works, Birmingham Timberbrit, Bussey Building, London

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Four weeks after George II was crowned to the strains of Zadok the Priest, Handel delivered another compliment to his new king. Loosely based on Richard the Lionheart's swashbuckling rescue of Berengaria of Navarre from the evil clutches of Isaakios Komnenos, Riccardo Primo, Re d'Inghilterra tells us much about the 18th-century ideal of a modern monarchy. In real life, Richard and Berengaria's union was unhappy. But Riccardo Primo is not about Richard. It is about King George and his consort, Caroline. Born in the land of "freedom, virtue and gallantry", Richard/Riccardo is as merciful in victory as he is fearless in battle. Written for Francesca Cuzzoni, Berengaria/Costanza is afforded the most luxurious arias, though none advances more complex qualities than constancy and discretion.

Rigoletto, Royal Opera House, London

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 10:47:38 +0100

Distressed and decaying amidst crumbling masonry Michael Vale’s brutalist set tilts and turns towards catastrophe like some sort of post-modernist installation. The Court of Mantua is a world off its axis in David McVicar’s much-revived staging of Verdi’s Rigoletto and as this world fornicates its way to extinction it’s as if the roaring boys from McVicar’s recent Rakes Progress in Scotland are on an away-day from Glasgow.

Leif Ove Andsnes, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:31:24 +0100

As the leading pianist of his native Norway, Leif Ove Andsnes has traded very effectively on his easy manner and camera-friendly looks, and the Queen Elizabeth hall was predictably packed.

Album: Paul Hillier, Theatre of Voices, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Arvo Pärt: Creator Spiritus (Harmonia Mundi)

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:58 +0100

Yet another brilliant Arvo Pärt programme from Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, Creator Spiritus intersperses religious choral works from different eras of the composer's career with chamber-music pieces of comparable tone and piety, building to the climactic 26-minute "Stabat Mater".

Album: The Knights, A Second of Silence (Ancalagon)

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:41 +0100

The starting point for this intriguing programme from young US ensemble The Knights is Morton Feldman's suggestion that part of the magic of Schubert is "that kind of hovering, as if you're in a register you've never heard".

Glyndeboure opera is a head in the race

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The new Glyndeboure opera, Gold Run, conducted by James Redwood, is about the Paralympic Games. It tells the story of the learning-disabled athletes inclusion and subsequent 12-year ban, which comes to an end at this year's Paralympic Games. With a 30-strong choir of learning-disabled artists and film footage - a centrepiece is a six-foot cardboard sculpture of learning-disabled opera singer and sportsman David Rushbrook, who performs in the show.

Independent podcast: Honens International Piano Competition

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:58:27 +0100

Riccardo Primo, London Handel Orchestra/Cummings, Britten Theatre

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 11:21:28 +0100

Handel's Riccardo Primo, aka Richard the Lionheart, may have been a hit on its first appearance in 1727 – not only because of press reports about backstage hair-pulling between the principals - but after eleven performances it was consigned to the vaults, where it remained until its first revival in 1964.

Vittorio Grigolo: Romantic hero who's proud to be a popera star

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Vittorio Grigolo, who blazed onto the Royal Opera House stage as Des Grieux in Manon in 2010, is a text book tenor; dark, handsome, charming, Italian, vulnerable, naive, and a bit taller than I'd hoped. He's fast becoming the tenor in residence of romantic roles at Covent Garden, singing the title role in Faust, Alfredo in La Traviata and later this week the Duke in Rigoletto.

Independent podcast: Joshua Bell - Academy of St. Martin in the Fields

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:18:19 +0100

Feinstein Ensemble/London Bach Singers, Purcell Room, London

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:19:55 +0100

‘Some people say Vivaldi wrote the same concerto five hundred times,’ said Steven Devine before starting his harpsichord recital in the Purcell Room. ‘And if that’s the case, you’re in for a pretty boring morning.’

St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra / Temirkanov, Barbican Hall, London

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 11:35:22 +0100

When you are arguably the greatest violinist in the world a four-year “time out” from the public arena can seem like an eternity.

The Rake's Progress, Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Reproduced in the programme for David McVicar's Scottish Opera production of The Rake's Progress, William Hogarth's paintings Before and After (1730-31) are a bromide to those inflamed by amatory desires. In the first image, a young man woos his sweetheart in a grassy grove, both figures carefully and fashionably dressed, their kiss-curls just so. In the second, the lovers are in a state of post-coital dishevelment, his breeches undone, her underwear discarded. Were this Watteau, their faces would be flushed with pleasure. Instead, both look lost, aghast, the young man's eyes gazing into an unknowable future.

Album: Ysaÿe, Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, opus 27 – Tai Murray (Harmonia Mundi)

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Eugène Ysaÿe's 1924 sonatas anticipate the memorial beauty of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Suites for Unaccompanied Violin by three years and the desolate fury of Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin by two decades.

Album: Karl Jenkins, The Peacemakers (EMI Classics)

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:04 +0000

I've enjoyed some of Karl Jenkins's work, but this is fairly unbearable: based on texts from "peacemakers", it ends up as an all-encompassing assemblage of white-hatted do-gooders rather than a coherent piece.

Album: John Cage, The Number Pieces 6 (Mode)

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:02 +0000

In a week replete with intriguing cross-pollinations of style and sound, this may be both the most deliberate, yet the loosest-sounding.

Champion of the Baroque: Sir Colin Davis speaks out

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Celebrating his 85th birthday later this year, Sir Colin Davis has been one of Britain's best-loved conductors for more than half a century. The death of his wife, Shamsi, in June 2010, was a severe blow to him; since then, his activities have slowed. "I don't have the energy I used to," he remarks. "After performing a big piece, one feels one should be put out to grass, like an old donkey."

Lang Lang/Philharmonia/Salonen, Royal Albert Hall

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:18:16 +0000

Is the Royal Albert Hall big enough to contain Lang Lang’s gigantic ego?

Circus Tricks, Tete a tete, Riverside Studios

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:13:46 +0000

Workshopping is all the rage in experimental opera at present, and Tete a tete - with a distinguished history of making magic with limited means – has workshopped Circus Tricks in a wide variety of contexts, with numerous transformations.