Marking the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is touring the composer’s piano music. Over the course of three hours with two intermissions this recital was ravishing. Bavouzet has recorded Ravel’s music twice – […]
It was with Mahler and the Philharmonia that the Royal Opera’s new music director first made a mark with London audiences. His Puccini may or may not be considered wholly idiomatic but Jakub Hrůša is […]
Two rare one-Act operas featuring stories of jealous, murderous lust, offer some fascinating juxtapositions – Der Wald (premiered 1902), Ethel Smyth’s second opera, but a late essay in Wagnerian Romanticism if more sensational (and written in German); and […]
It’s been quite a year for Mark-Anthony Turnage, with the widely acclaimed premiere of Festen at the Royal Opera House, and now the premiere of another opera, The Railway Children, his first work for Glyndebourne. Festen adapted a 1990s Danish film, […]
Since 2024, when Jaap van Zweden ended his tenure as music director, the New York Philharmonic has been in a transitional period and will remain so until 2026, when Gustavo Dudamel assumes the directorship. With […]
Some works emerge after an explosion of creative intensity in a matter of weeks; others sit and brood for some time before seeing the light of day. In part, Britten’s violin concerto was a reaction […]
For his second program in his season as the Philharmonic’s Music and Artistic Director Designate, Gustavo Dudamel showcased two Symphonies separated by nearly two centuries. Beethoven’s Fifth was masterfully performed, but it was John Corigliano’s […]
André Campra was an important figure in the development of French opera between the death of Lully (1687) and Rameau’s first example, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) not least by pioneering the form of the opéra-ballet in L’Europe galante. Such works […]
Like almost all of his musical contemporaries, Salieri has remained so much in the shadow of Mozart, that it’s easy to forget how precocious he also was in composition. La locandiera (1773) is his ninth […]
To close its season this year, If Opera presented this intimate, but still dramatic, pairing of two 17th century vocal works, sacred and secular side by side. Carissimi’s Historia Jonae is one of a series […]
