London’s South Bank Centre is following up 2025’s series of multimedia events with a further sequence entitled ‘Multitudes’. While inclusivity and genre-bending can sometimes amount to little more than an excuse for ceding art music […]
As part of the Southbank Centre’s ‘Multitudes’ festival, pairing music with works in other art forms, this concert brought together Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-symphonie with a new film animation by 1927 Studios. One would have thought that Messiaen’s […]
In Jack Furness’s new production of The Flying Dutchman for Welsh National Opera, Senta becomes the drama’s focus, even before she is born. Her mother’s difficult labour pains are choreographed as the backdrop to the musical drama of the Overture, […]
Advance publicity promised not only ‘Sibelius in the raw’ but also ‘one of modern Finland’s most original young voices’. One wonders whether Lotta Wennäkoski was flattered or put out by that description. An established figure […]
This statement opera, playing for 2 hours 40 minutes including a single intermission in its present incarnation, grew out of a more modest Mahagonny-Songspiel lasting little longer than tonight’s interval. The bigger stage work is by no means […]
A short homily from the conductor, required to explain that the interval had moved from that advertised in the printed programme, served also to introduce the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915‑40). A Martinů student (and […]
A clever if geographically suspect marketing conceit unites two concerts in the LPO’s ongoing season. This was the first: four 20th-century pieces from central and eastern Europe which, to continue the pop analogy, have made […]
The RPO is going from strength to strength these days and there was no mistaking the enthusiasm of players and audience despite the customary noises off: bronchial intrusions, mobile phone calls, the occasional whir of […]
Mostly with Mahler the old problem is stood on its ahead. Performances, even those of the unfinished Tenth, have become so frequent than it can be difficult to recapture the excitement they once engendered. Tweaked […]
The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players’ winter ‘mini season’ opened with a thoroughly charming performance of H.M.S. Pinafore, the fourth of the duo’s fourteen collaborations and their first breakthrough hit. This is the first Pinafore staged under Artistic […]
