When Franz Lehar’s Merry Widow premiered in Vienna in 1905 it was an instant hit. Its catchy score had men whistling it in the street. Women of all ages and class, swayed to the Merry Widow Waltz imagining themselves in the arms of the Merry Widow’s dashing romantic lead, Danilo. Audiences also loved the central character,…
Tag: Music
Opera Holland Park enters new waters with Wagner’s ‘Flying Dutchman’
This season Opera Holland Park has had a first stab at Wagner with The Flying Dutchman, this work being a doable two and a half hours as opposed to the usual four. The legend of a Dutch sea-captain, condemned to sail the ocean forever, until he finds the love of a good, faithful, woman, was…
Communicating Without Words, a Family Speciality
Great performances of chamber trios and quartets often rely on the special relationships of players who communicate without words. But brothers and sisters have a natural advantage, having learned music from childhood together. Body language, discreet nods and the composer’s own “dialogue” work best among groups of siblings. The Pascal Trio (father and two sons)…
Roman Rabinovich plays Goldberg Variations in a live stream at Wigmore Hall
The Goldberg Variations has done more to widen the circle of appreciation for classical music than perhaps any other musical work. It certainly gets the youth vote, and one can see why. Regarded as the holy grail for professional pianists, it’s been interpreted by many young, world-class, artists, often male, but not exclusively so –…
‘The Rite of Spring’ in Strasbourg. Interview with conductor, Aziz Shokhakimov.
The Rite of Spring is probably the most exciting piece of orchestral music ever to have been written. Composed by Igor Stravinsky, and conceived originally as a ballet score, it first hit the stage in Paris in 1913 with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company. A riot famously erupted that first night at the Champs- Elysées theatre where…
Playing Debussy on his Blüthner was a ‘head-spinning experience’
French pianist François Dumont has still not quite recovered from ‘the excitement, the anxiety’ of playing “Clair de Lune” on Debussy’s own Blüthner piano in a remote French museum. Dumont is one of the select few pianists ever allowed to touch the instrument, now fully restored and in mint condition. It was his credibility as…
ENO orchestra accompanies NOS young artists to stardom at Sinfonia Smith Square
Have you ever wondered how opera stars are made? One tends to think of a simplistic scenario, one in which opera stars are born with a god-given voice, which, eventually, projects them to fame. But life is not a TV competition. For most young artists, there is a process, and it can be lengthy, lonely…
Martha and Marios duo – a match made at the Barbican
To the Barbican Centre I went last week to see Martha Argerich perform Beethoven’s Concerto no. 2 in B flat major with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra. On the program also, Samuel-Coleridge Taylor ‘s Ballade in A minor and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4 in F minor. Outside the Barbican auditorium a long queue snaked around the pillars of…
Pianist Joanna Kacperek produces a captivating album with ‘Variations’
With ‘Variations’, pianist, Joanna Kacperek, has chosen to focus on the humble variation. Like many other composers before them and since, Beethoven, Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, composed many variations. On this album, Kacperek artfully displays the creative possibilities of these variations, which were a way of exploring a theme for these composers,…
Bywater’s staging of Britten’s Turn of the Screw lifts the opera to new heights
Benjamin Britten’s opera, The Turn of the Screw, is a psychological thriller based on Henry James’s novella of the same title. In the world of opera, psychological thrillers are thin on the ground and for good reason – it is hard to express narrative ambiguity or uncertainty in musical theatre. Isabella Bywater’s production at English National Opera…
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