Bold local colours are pretty much a given for Petrushka with this orchestra and this conductor in this location. But the vividness and ‘authenticity’ (not a word I generally use) of the characterisation took even me a…
Anyone who thrilled (as I did) to Teodor Currentzis’ Tchaikovsky Pathetique will find distinct parallels here. The impulse, the imperative, of this Mahler 6 is extraordinary – a headlong ride to the abyss with every rhythm and…
After her previous forays into jazz and inde-pop to say nothing of her recent stint on Broadway as Nettie Fowler in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel it was almost inevitable that a Broadway album would be forthcoming from…
I’ve always been slightly puzzled as to why Simon Rattle (and subsequently Mark Elder) chose to anoint this particular show amongst Bernstein’s Broadway canon – not because I don’t love it as dearly as the others but…
Why does everything nowadays have to be marketed with an angle, a message? There are no more recital discs, just albums. That’s a way of connecting the classical and pop worlds – I see that. But do…
Eight unison horns dramatically announce Mahler’s pantheistic hymn to the natural world and if the opening bars of Adam Fischer’s refreshingly spontaneous account sounded a tad jaded to my ears it was almost certainly because I cannot…
It’s at this time of the year, with yet another Henry Wood Promenade season behind us, that the question perennially arises – where do those huge Proms audiences disappear to for the rest of the year? Do…
When you have been in the business for as long as I have it is especially gratifying to reacquaint oneself with an operatic work one has long admired but never seen staged. Samuel Barber’s Vanessa is such…
As if anyone needed reminding that Joyce DiDonato is nothing if not an intuitive stage animal, each of her recital projects are now carefully conceived as pieces of theatre in themselves, song choices shrewdly weighed and tested…
I recently spent two blissful hours at my local Curzon cinema watching a brilliant documentary entitled The Opera House. No prizes for guessing which opera house might regard itself as indomitably singular or indeed which might have…
