Edward Gardner fashioned a clear-sighted account of the Tippett, controlling the first movement’s gnarly energy and gentle sonorities with ease and allowed a natural unfolding of the music’s tension and release. If its contrapuntal busyness […]
Although The Rake’s Progress is ultimately a moral fable, Polly Graham’s production doesn’t take it with too much po-faced seriousness. Rather it plays up its mordant humour by presenting it as like a cabaret, with a quirky […]
Alongside considerable colour and exuberance, Jude Christian’s production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut for English Touring Opera poignantly, even sardonically, contrasts the life of luxury which the eponymous character could have had with Geronte in Paris with the […]
Every once in a while a disc comes along which is so pleasant – and such a pleasant surprise – it brings smile after smile. This disc of orchestral music from the unjustly neglected British […]
I wouldn’t have even bothered with this CD – Decca is far from the esteemed label it once was 20 years ago. But since the Chicago Symphony has just announced this conductor will replace Riccardo […]
George, the title character of Zemlinsky’s third opera (composed between 1903 and 1907, but not premiered until long after his death in 1980) is usually taken, in his eponymous dreaming and obsession with fairy tales, […]
The Italian Girl in London (1778) is one of the earlier operas by the prolific older contemporary of Mozart, Cimarosa. Although termed an intermezzo, as a comedy essentially it follows the same conventions of an opera buffa, and […]
Maurizio Pollini The magnificent Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini passed away on March 24 at age 82. Pollini was an aristocratic, refined pianist who excelled in playing Chopin, Brahms and of course, Beethoven. Yet he also […]
Many remember the name, in English, of Mozart and Da Ponte’s third operatic collaboration as ‘Women are like that’, with more than a whiff of apparent misogyny in it (the ending of the Italian tutte definitely denotes […]
There is a lot of wonderful music on this well-filled 2-CD set. (Each disc lasts more than 73 minutes.) It is all played with refinement and finesse by the Orchestre National de Lyon, led by […]
