contemporary classical
Judith Weir, Bath FestivalSunday, 06 June 2010
In general, I’m no particular fan of composers talking in public about their own music. My family suggests that this is because I’m hoping to get the job of talking about it myself. But the real reason is that, on the whole, composers don’t tell the... Read more... |
After Life, BarbicanSunday, 16 May 2010
"We need to inform you officially. Mr Walter, you died yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss." It comes as no great surprise to learn that Michel van der Aa’s opera After Life is based on a Japanese film. The Borgesian hyper-real scenario, the no-place... Read more... |
Powder Her Face, RO, Linbury Studio TheatreThursday, 29 April 2010
Let's get straight to the fellatio, shall we. The blow job - and its Polaroid rendition - that led to the 1960s divorce trial of the dissolute Duchess of Argyll forms the centrepiece aria (an aria that "begins with words and ends with humming") in... Read more... |
Elegy for Young Lovers, ENO, Young VicSunday, 25 April 2010
We all know what you get when you find yourself snowed in with your family up a mountain: thunderous carpets, corridors of blood, redrum and a head in the snow. Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers isn't quite as murderously single-minded as... Read more... |
English National Opera, 2010-11 SeasonTuesday, 20 April 2010
English National Opera’s 2010-11 season includes 10 new productions, including ENO premieres of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Handel’s Radamisto. There will be two new contemporary operas for the main stage: the world premiere of a new opera by... Read more... |
The Seckerson Tapes: Fiona ShawMonday, 19 April 2010
Fiona Shaw talks about the not inconsiderable demands of juggling Restoration comedy with German Expressionism. It almost doesn’t bear thinking about. Between shows at the National Theatre, where she’s been delighting audiences with her rollocking... Read more... |
Varèse 360°, SouthbankSunday, 18 April 2010
For those of you who think that classical music ends with Mahler - or Brahms just to be on the safe side - that the musical experimentation of the past 60 years was some sort of grim continental joke, an extended whoopee cushion of a musical period... Read more... |
Wolfgang Rihm Day, BarbicanSaturday, 13 March 2010
It's hard to miss German composer Wolfgang Rihm. He has an enormous head. There it is, bulging from his giant frame, a big, friendly grin slapped onto it while he wanders around the Barbican on his celebratory day, none of it going to waste. Listen... Read more... |
Kaija Saariaho's Émilie, Opéra de LyonTuesday, 09 March 2010
The new millennium shimmered into earshot with a musical masterpiece from a female Finn. Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin (2000) appeared to open up an enticing new operatic sound world, less dogmatic, more instinctive, colourful and intense, very... Read more... |
Philip Glass: Satyagraha, ENO/ LSO, Alsop, BarbicanThursday, 25 February 2010
It has always been a cornerstone of my personal philosophy that beauty and insight can be found in the very lowest of common denominators. That Big Brother, Friends, Love It magazine or Paris Hilton provide revelations about life that are of as much... Read more... |
London Sinfonietta, George Benjamin, QEHMonday, 08 February 2010
To find a single completely successful piece in a contemporary music programme is rare enough. The sieve of time has yet to separate the wheat from the chaff. But to find complete satisfaction in all five pieces programmed, and for all five pieces... Read more... |
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Oliver Knussen, Wigmore HallMonday, 25 January 2010
Had a dastardly dirty bomb gone off in the Wigmore Hall last night and turned us all to dust, the contemporary British classical music scene would, in one fell swoop, have been wiped off the map. No more Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr,... Read more... |
