Features

ENO podcast: L'amour de loin

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Michael Church: The beauty of Jeptha sung straight

Thursday, 25 June 2009

Erupting in ecstatic roars after three hours of white-hot passion, a packed Barbican audience rammed home a point which conductor Paul McCreesh (left) had made before he led his army onstage.

Edward Gardner: The man who rescued opera

Sunday, 21 June 2009

First, Edward Gardner picked up a baton; then he picked up the entire English National Opera. Ahead of the conductor's latest, circus-like performance, Michael Church hears how the charismatic young star has saved a national institution

Britten, the boy wonder

Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Music the composer wrote as a child can now be heard for the first time. It shows a precocious genius, says Lynne Walker

Michael Church: Ian Bostridge up a blind alley

Monday, 15 June 2009

It sounded a neat idea, as Ian Bostridge outlined it in the Guardian. The Threepenny Opera’s perennial relevance - particularly marked, as capitalist binge leads to universal bust - makes it worth looking at anew: singing Lieder with Dorothea Roschmann and Angelika Kirchschlager prompted him to wonder "how wonderful it would be" to hear them tackling Brecht-Weill

Observations: Opera's battle with air traffic

Friday, 12 June 2009

The rigours of country-house opera Garsington is like Glyndebourne must have been before it got so swish: with its history as the haunt of the Bloomsbury group, this Jacobean manor outside Oxford, with its lakes, statues and ornamental gardens, has a unique patina. Opera here was initially looked down on as a rich man's vanity project, but its policy of dusting off rarely-performed works has won it respect. But since the open-air stage is set in the courtyard, with the gardens acting as an extension, it takes a certain kind of performer to cope with the rigours, as soprano Orla Boylan notes: "No separate dressing rooms, we're all in these old bedrooms, it's really eccentric. Out on stage it can be cold. If it rains, we can get wet." What about the light aeroplanes which fly over? "I suspect people hire them to fly low. I once had one during a big aria. You just sing louder."

Michael Church: From flash opera to flatpack opera

Thursday, 11 June 2009

After singing waiters, and "flash opera" - a musical mob suddenly bursting into song in Waterloo station - supermarket opera is a relatively sedate concept; indeed, Glyndebourne’s go-ahead education department did one back in the Nineties. But Flatpack Opera takes the idea on interestingly, being not only set in a supermarket, but making that its subject.

English National Opera podcast: Madam Butterfly

Thursday, 11 June 2009

Free podcast download from the ENO

Michael Church: Lilya Zilberstein - Soviet pianism lives!

Tuesday, 9 June 2009

The Keyboard Charitable Trust is dedicated to a noble cause: helping gifted young pianists to build a career, at a time when their debut concerts - which 20 years ago used to be routinely reviewed - scarcely ever merit mention in the press. (Who he? Never heard of him. Tell us about someone we know?)

Observations: Haydn seekers' seventh heaven

Friday, 29 May 2009

That curious neurological condition known as musical synaesthesia, or hearing in colour, is more widespread that you might think. Russian composer Alexander Scriabine didn't so much suffer from it, as revel in it.