I don’t think anyone would dispute that programme building is a real art. The structure, the proportions, the way chosen pieces impact upon each other. You can be creative but you can also be capricious. I’m thinking…
It’s 1992 and Sam Mendes’ celebrated staging of Sondheim and Weidman’s Assassins is in rehearsal at the Donmar Warehouse. In the green room Stephen Sondheim sits reading a copy of Gramophone during the lunch break (yes, really),…
Susanna Mälkki’s thrilling sojourn in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was roundly welcomed by me in the June edition of Gramophone – and now on much more familiar ground she and the outstanding Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra work more conspicuous…
How inspired of OperaGlass Works’ founders Selina Cadell and Eliza Thompson to identify Wilton’s venerable Music Hall as the perfect environment in which to reimagine Britten’s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw. But the projected run of…
Sitting down last week to experience the music of Florence Price for the very first time reminded me yet again that there is nothing quite like the thrill of first-encounter – a moment by moment sense of…
This has been a fascinating experience. I chose to come to this music – exhumed as it is from nearly a century of neglect – as new music. That’s how I wanted to hear it for the…
I am not familiar with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony or indeed their conductor David Bernard but there are many issues here that make me wonder why they might have chosen such hotly contested repertoire for a…
Absence doesn’t make the heart grow any fonder of this performance. I heard (and saw) it live back in 2018 and it was in so many ways a mirror image of what the composer himself tried to…
We all love a drama, most especially one that stems from an unforeseen crisis. During this year’s foreshortened Prom season tenor Simon O’Neill, the eponymous hero of Glyndebourne’s Tristan und Isolde realised after act two that his…
This is very much in keeping with the impression I have always had of Robin Ticciati’s work: exhaustively prepared, immaculately turned, eminently musical. The sense of unfolding over the many, many pages of the introduction, a flower…
