BREAKING NEWS: Classical Music

A game changer: as RPS Conductors programme enters a new phase, I chat to founder Alice Farnham & an early participant, Charlotte Corderoy

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 08:37:30 +0000

Alice Farnham with members of the Royal Northern Sinfonia and members of the RPS Women Conductors programme at the Glasshouse including Charlotte Corderoy

In 2014, conductor Alice Farnham formed the Women Conductors programme, initially at Morley College; she joined forces with the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) to create RPS Women Conductors in 2016, then in 2022, in partnership with the Royal Northern Sinfonia (RNS), a new high-level course was established in Gateshead at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music.

Now the programme is taking a new step and in June 2025 under the new name of RPS Conductors welcomed applications from any conductors at a sufficiently high level who can articulate how – through their lived experience, background or personal characteristics – they have encountered barriers to progress or limited access to an experience like this, and why it would therefore be transformative to their prospects.

This issue of women conductors far from resolved, however. In January 2025, 86% of conductors represented by UK artist managers were male, and 87% of titled conducting roles at UK orchestras were held by men. Addressing this remains a priority for RPS Conductors, and the opportunities presented remain primarily for women, trans and non-binary conductors.

Alice Farnham (Photo: Catherine Ashmore)

I recently spoke to conductor Alice Farnham, about the programme from its early founding to the present day, and I also chatted to conductor Charlotte Corderoy who was part of that first intake, when the first course was run in Gateshead with the RNS.

In 2013, Marin Alsop conducted the Last Night of the Proms, the first woman to do so. This led to discussion both inside and outside classical music about why there were not more women conductors, why women were not coming through the system, or choosing not to study postgraduate conducting. Alice Farnham was aware that, despite encouragement, her own progress as a conductor had not been without difficulties. Plenty of women were simply not putting themselves in the position in the first place.

This was what might be termed Alice's 'lightbulb moment' and for the 2014/2015 season she formed the Women Conductors programme (WoCo) at Morley College and then in 2016 WoCo moved under the auspices of the RPS, which means that the next cohort (that of 2026) will celebrate ten years of WoCo at the RPS. Within five years, things were shifting and more women were coming through as conductors, which had the advantage of encouraging more women to consider the idea. Through programmes in the UK, Australia and elsewhere, Alice has now taught over 500 women. Not all of these choose to become conductors, but many do.

Beginning in 2022, the collaboration with RNS created a high-level course aimed at women in the middle of their training. It was not simply aimed at young women, but also older women who for various reasons had either not considered taking up conducting or who had been discouraged. The course encouraged them to take up conducting later, though Alice acknowledges that it is harder taking up new things later. But they wanted to encourage women who are brilliant musicians and have so much to offer. It is harder also, in an industry which seems fascinated by youth and young conductors. WoCo has had various women, at different stages of their career, take up the challenge and Alice is very proud of what they have achieved.

When I spoke to Charlotte Corderory she was in rehearsals for Le Nozze di Figaro at Glyndebourne where she is assisting Riccardo Minasi on Mariame Clément's new staging. Charlotte took part in the programme's pilot scheme in 2021, just out of the pandemic but still in a time of social distancing, and a few of the conductors on that pilot scheme were extended into the official first year of the programme.

Charlotte Corderoy

For Charlotte, the programme was a game changer, she had not done any formal training and this was her first time in front of professional musicians. As she points out, this is something young conductors might not experience until high pressure situations such as auditions or masterclasses. The programme not only enabled her to work with professional players but with mentors such as Alice Farnham and get feedback which was delivered in a productive way. There was also the chance to explore new repertoire and work alongside other conductors who were at a similar point in their careers. That is was an all-female course meant that there were other women conductors in the room, there was camaraderie and a sense of the shared experience of being a female conductor, so you were encouraged and a safe space created.

There were six women on that pilot scheme, all were different, at different stages of their career. The majority were studying or had just completed their studies, but Charlotte had not started studying conducting. The programme took place the Summer before she went to the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) and it was a brilliant warm up. She found the experience fantastic, identifying things she wanted or needed to work on, but also recognising the things she got right, bolstering her confidence and working against imposter syndrome which is rife. She feels that it is important to believe you are good at it. Going to the RAM can feel intimidating, and Charlotte had not been to the Junior Academy and her undergraduate years were not at the RAM as she did a music degree at Oxford which was not particular performance focussed.

Her experience at the RAM was that it was wonderfully technique based, and the experience opened her mind to all sorts of questions including logistics and it was very people facing, working with a student orchestra which required a whole other skill set. Charlotte sees WoCo as a marvellous complement to this conservatoire training, the cherry on the cake being the incredibly high standard of orchestral playing from the RNS. The players in the RNS were encouraged to be very direct in rehearsal, and there were also tailored sessions done afterwards. And as everything was done live, it felt less like being criticised because any criticism could be productive, used as building blocks, putting things into practice the following day! It is the sort of thing that she feels any conductor would be pleased to experience.

She feels that the programme is helping to normalise the business. Charlotte never wanted the first thing people notice was that she was a woman. So, the programme serves a purpose, the more women that come through the programme, the more women can picture themselves in this position. She sees it as a process of making the discourse less about gender being talked about for the wrong reasons, putting things in the correct perspective.

Alice finds the relationship with RNS a very positive one and the orchestra is generous in its feedback to the conductors working with it on the programme. Whilst the orchestral members provide feedback to the conductors, the orchestra gets a lot out of it too as they are able to think about the act of conducting and have constructive conversations with the conductors. When Alice is coaching masterclasses on the programme she aims to be hands off, so that she is not effectively taking over; something that is very much a danger in conducting masterclasses. Alice feels that the RNS has so much to offer, giving the women on the programme a fantastic learning opportunity and she wishes that other orchestras were in the same position.

Ever since founding WoCo, Alice was often asked 'what was the ultimate goal?' and she has always answered, until we do not need the programme any more. This is now being reflected in way the 2026 cohort, WoCo is adjusting its parameters, and being called the RPS Conductors programme.

Whilst the stats are still not brilliant, there are lots of women coming through and Alice quotes to me figures that demonstrate quite how much progress has been made. But as she points out, this sort of career takes time, and the test will be to see what is happening in ten years when the young women coming through are holding positions. After all, conducting careers are not made in a few years, but in decades!

For the 2026 cohort, Alice explains that the programme will be aimed not just at women but anyone whose lived experience is difficult, so that the programme addresses a wider range of inequalities. They are also open to people whose careers have chosen an unusual path or who have financial difficulties, after all as Alice points out choosing to study conducting does not come cheap.

For further information about the RPS Conductors Programme, see the website, along with information about the current application procedure.

Charlotte is assisting Riccardo Minasi at Glyndebourne on Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro - 29 June to 21 August 2025, further details
Charlotte will be conducting all four of Rachmaninov's Piano Concertos in one concert with pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, Boris Giltburg, Ryan Wang and Junyan Chen and the Philharmonia Orchestra at Bold Tendencies in Peckham - 13 September 2025, further details
Alice will be conducting Donizetti's The Elixir of Love with English Touring Opera, on tour from 27 September - 22 November 2025, further details
Charlotte is conducting some performances of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann at Lyon Opera - 16 Dec 2025 to 5 Jan 2026, further details

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Nightafternight playlist

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 22:02:25 +0000

New and recent released of interest. Schoenberg, String Quartets Nos. 1–4; Webern Quartet, with Yui Futaeda (Etcetera) Corelli, Concerto Grossi Op. 6; Georg Kallweit and Mayumi Hirasaki leading the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (Pentatone) Tania León, Horizons, Raíces (Origins), Stride, Pasajes; Karina Canellakis, Edward Gardner, and Dmitri Slobodeniouk conducting London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) Ginastera, String Quartets; Miro Quartet (Pentatone) Liza Lim, A Sutured World, Annunciation Triptych II: Mary / Transcendence After Trauma, The Compass; Edward Gardner, Franck Ollu, and Christoph Poppen conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony, with Nicholas Altstaedt, Carin Levine, William Barton (BR Klassik, out July 25) Jürg Frey, Out of Chorales, Polyphonie der Wörter, Shadow and Echo and Jade, Landscape of Echoes, Blue Bird’s Tune, Because I could not stop for Death; EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (Neu) Hannah Kendall, Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2, shouting forever into the receiver, Where is the chariot of fire?, Tuxedo: Crown; Sun King, when flesh is pressed against the dark, Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water, Even sweetness can catch the throat; Vimbayi Kaziboni conducting the Ensemble Modern, Wavefield Ensemble, loadbang, Jonathan Bloxham conducting the Hallé Orchestra, Anne Denholm-Blair, Jonathan Morton, Louise McMonagle (NMC) Koechlin, Symphony No. 1, Au loin, 3 Mélodies; Patricia Petibon, Ariane Matiakh conducting the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen (Capriccio)

Ensemble. A Cogently-argued Performance

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Mike Wheeler hears music by Mozart, Orlando Gibbons, David Bednall and Cecilia McDowall

New kid on the block, New London Harmonia brings two premiered by Welsh composer Charlie Barber to its final concert of the season

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 11:44:57 +0000

Charlie Barber at the premiere of his The Fall of the House of Usher with the National Youth Wind Orchestra of Wales in 2012

Welsh composer Charlie Barber, who celebrated his 75th birthday last year [see Ty Cerdd's birthday profile] is something of a musical chameleon, working in film, dance, the stage and concert platform. Recent work has included the 2013 music-theatre piece Michelangelo Drawing Blood, whilst his film projects include music for Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (2006), a surrealist classic of early cinema; Salomé (2009), the 1923 film starring Nazimova; and a new score for Jean Epstein’s 1928 film The Fall of the House of Usher.

On 12 July 2025, London-based orchestra, New London Harmonia, conductor Oi Ching Chan, will be giving the premiere of Barber's Ground Work and the London premiere of his Shut Up and Dance, along with Mussorgsky’s Night On Bare Mountain and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade in a programme at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street.

Barber's 2019 orchestral piece Ground Work revisits some of the composer's favourite musical haunts, notably the 17th century form of ‘ground bass’, together with the medieval musical technique of ‘isorhythm’. Shut Up and Dance was premiered in 1994 by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales with conductor Grant Llewellyn at St David’s Hall, Cardiff. The title comes from New York nightclub, and the work works in various strands from non-European ideas as well as ‘popular’ dance music; African and Brazilian rhythms glide past Indonesian gamelan with the whole supported by African drumming.

Founded in 2024 under the artistic direction of Oi Ching Chang, New London Harmonia brings together musicians who play at or near a professional level, with a mission to bring professional-level skills, deep musical knowledge, and an unmatched energy to classical music.

Further details of the concert from the New London Harmonia website.

Adès, Leith, Marsey: Orchestral Works album review – an impressive collection marks a productive association

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 10:21:52 +0000

Hallé Orchestra/Adès
(Hallé)
This brings together new works of his own and by composers he admires that Thomas Adès has conducted at Bridgewater Hall during his residency with the Hallé

Since 2023 Thomas Adès has been artist-in-residence with the Hallé Orchestra. He has featured as composer, conductor and pianist in his appearances with the orchestra, and all his concerts have included new or nearly new works, both his own and by composers he admires. As the residency comes to an end, this collection brings together pieces he has conducted in Manchester; there are four by Adès himself, alongside William Marsey’s Man With Limp Wrist and Oliver Leith’s Cartoon Sun.

Of the four pieces by Adès, only one is substantial. Aquifer, which he wrote last year for Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a densely packed 17-minute movement, which contains enough ideas to power a symphony at least twice as long, before being brought to a halt by the most common-or-garden of cadences. Tower – for Frank Gehry is a fanfare, and both Shanty and Dawn, composed during lockdown in 2020, are pieces that work wonders with repeated phrases. Marsey’s musical narrative, in eight “scenes”, is a strangely evocative succession of musical ghosts, inspired by paintings by Salman Toor, while Leith’s wacky processional, punctuated by enormous climaxes, leaves an exhilarating impression.

Shostakovich: Preludes & Fugues Op 87 album review – Avdeeva brings a light touch in an accomplished performance

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 09:44:21 +0000

Yulianna Avdeeva
(Pentatone)
It’s fascinating to compare this nuanced set with the performance by the Soviet pianist who inspired Shostakovich in 1950

Shostakovich composed his 24 Preludes and Fugues in 1950 and 1951, between his Ninth and Tenth Symphonies. As a judge in the first International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig in 1950, he had been hugely impressed by the playing of the Soviet pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva in The Well-Tempered Clavier. On his return to Moscow he began composing a series of preludes and fugues for Nikolayeva, consciously modelling them on Bach, though ordering them according to the circle of fifths rather than chromatically as Bach does, and larding them with references not only to his model but to his own works. He completed the set in all the major and minor keys the following year and Nikolayeva gave the premiere in Leningrad in 1952. She went on to make no less than four recordings of it, including one for Hyperion in 1990 that has become the benchmark version.

Comparing Nikolayeva’s performances with those by Yulianna Avdeeva on her new set is fascinating. Avdeeva, who won the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2010, takes a lighter approach, less forthright, and perhaps not digging as deeply into the barely disguised tragedy of the E minor Prelude as Nikolayeva does, but equally dazzling in the exuberant display of the A minor. She finds exactly the right mood of delicate insouciance for the F sharp minor prelude, too, and for the mysterious halting fugue that follows.

The Istanbul Music Festival 2025 closes with a splendidly performed Rossini Petite Messe Solennelle

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 22:14:25 +0000

Istanbul Music Festival [4] – Rossini: Claudia Pavone (soprano), Tamar Ugrekhelidze (mezzo-soprano), Juan Francisco Gatell (tenor), Nahuel Di Pierro (bass-baritone), Slovak Philharmonic Chorus (chorusmaster: Jan Rozehnal), Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra / Carlo Tenan (conductor), Atatürk Cultural Centre, Istanbul, 26.6.2025. (GT) Rossini – Petite Messe Solennelle To close the Istanbul Music Festival with a choral masterpiece ... Read more

Blossom Music Festival – 3 July to 7 September

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The Cleveland Orchestra’s Blossom Music Festival 2025 The Cleveland Orchestra is gearing up for a summer music festival that will feature favorite conductors leading a lineup of popular classics. Of particular interest is the return of Elim Chan, who made a strong impression in her previous appearances in Cleveland, conducting dramatic and insightful performances of ... Read more

Eight Paris Concert Halls Most Classical Fans Never Think Of

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You’ve heard of several of them — the Musée d’Orsay, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Les Invalides — but probably had no idea that they host high-level classical concerts. Others probably aren’t on your radar yet, like Bal Blomet and La Scala Paris. – Bachtrack

Neuroscience Researcher On Music As Medicine:

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 17:31:00 +0000

“We now have ample evidence that music can help treat a variety of injuries and diseases, including both mental and physical disorders. And I think the very best case is Parkinson’s disease.”

In Polished Simplicity, ‘Ring’ Cycle Reflects Heroic Performances

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 17:30:38 +0000

VIENNA – The Vienna State Opera staging, seen June 20-28, was a mesmerizing musical journey with impassioned, high-volume conducting from Philippe Jordan and a gifted cast. Tenor Andreas Schager sang both Siegmund and Siegfried.

The post In Polished Simplicity, ‘Ring’ Cycle Reflects Heroic Performances first appeared on Classical Voice North America.

Band Accused Of Being AI After Racking Up 500k Spotify Plays

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 16:44:00 +0000

An account on X has emerged claiming to represent The Velvet Sundown. This account asserts that the band is not at all AI-generated, sharing in their account bio “Yes, We Are A Real Band & We Never Use AI.” – PCGamer

Why The Music Industry Seems Better-Defended Against AI

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 16:15:00 +0000

As in other creative industries, AI music tools are poised to hollow out the workaday middle of the market. Even new engineering tools have their downsides. – The Verge

Warner Creates $1+ Billion Fund To Buy Rights To Music Catalogs

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 15:15:00 +0000

Warner Music Group and private investment giant Bain Capital are launching a $1.2 billion joint venture to acquire “legendary” music catalogs across both recorded music and music publishing. – Music Business Worldwide

A Major Work

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

A P Virag discusses the deep reflectiveness and powerful energy of Allan Rae's Sonata for Alto Flute and Piano

A quartet of concerts ended a marvellous, fulfilling and enjoyable Aldeburgh Festival

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 06:39:30 +0000

Daniel Kidane: Aloud - Nathan Amaral, Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra, Kirill Karabits - Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Thea Musgrave: Rorate coeli, Britten: A.M.D.G., Palestrina: Rorate coeli, Daniel Kidane: The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash, Schoenberg: Friede auf Erden, Poulenc: Figure humaine; BBC Singers, Owain Park; Snape Maltings

Britten: Winter Words, Imogen Holst: Weathers, Little think’st at thou, poore flower, Four Songs, Daniel Kidane: Songs of Illumination; Britten: Folksong arrangements; Nick Pritchard, Ian Tindale; Jubilee Hall

Britten: Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Daniel Kidane: Aloud, Reinhold Glière: The Zaporozhy Cossacks, Shostakovich: Symphony No.9; Nathan Amaral, Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra, Kirill Karabits; Snape Maltings

Britten: Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge, Elgar: Quintet in A minor for piano and string quartet; Allan Clayton, Antonio Pappano, London Symphony Orchestra principals: Benjamin Gilmore /Julián Gil Rodríguez (violins), Elvind Ringstad (viola), David Cohen (cello); Snape Maltings

Berlioz: Overture to Le corsaire; Boulez: Mémoriale, Debussy: Images’, Book II, orch. Colin Matthews, Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique; London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano; Snape Maltings
Reviewed by Tony Cooper: 26-29 June 2025

From the BBC Singers in Britten & Schoenberg, to the RCM Symphony Orchestra on top form, a brace of terrific tenors, plus Berlioz & Boulez from the LSO

A marvellous person! A marvellous composer! When BBC’s Tom Service asked the revered Scottish composer, Thea Musgrave (now in her 97th year) her view of being a woman composer, she replied: ‘Yes, I am a woman; I am a composer, too. But rarely at the same time.’ She admits that pursuing music can be a difficult career and her advice to young composers: ‘Don't do it, unless you need to. And if you do, enjoy every minute of it.’ [see Robert's 90th birthday interview with her].

I think it’s fair to say that Musgrave has enjoyed every minute of her chosen profession and most probably influenced other composers along the way: Judith Weir, for one, who acknowledges Musgrave as a significant influence on her own compositional style while Musgrave, in turn, acknowledges the influence of such luminous composers as Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Berg in her early development.

I always enjoy Musgrave’s work and it was in 1964 when I first encountered her music when the 1964 Norfolk & Norwich Triennial Festival commissioned The Five Ages of Man, a cantata she wrote for soprano, chorus and orchestra, premièred by the Norwich Philharmonic Orchestra and the Norwich Philharmonic Chorus in St Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, conducted by Charles Mackerras. The text comes from Hesiod’s Works and Ways, a Greek version of the story of the decline and fall of man.

However, getting up to date, in January last year I enjoyed a rare and captivating production by Oper Leipzig of Mary, Queen of Scots [see Tony's review], the first of four operas Musgrave wrote focusing on historical figures - the others being Harriet, the Woman Called Moses (1985), Simón Bolívar (1995) and Pontalba (2003).

Thea Musgrave: Rorate Coeli - BBC Singers, Owain Park - Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

Now reunited with Musgrave at Aldeburgh, I thoroughly enjoyed Rorate coeli, the opening work in the BBC Singers’ concert at Snape Maltings Concert Hall, conducted by Owain Park - Thursday 26 June. I was truly soaking up the atmosphere, intensity and poignancy of the piece as much as I did with Mary, Queen of Scots. Musgrave ended with an exultant, jubilant and dramatic setting of the ‘Gloria’ while Palestrina’s setting of the same work, heard in the same programme, was equally as dramatic offering an extended ‘Alleluia’ to bring the work to a thoughtful and dignified close.

First performed by the Thomas Tallis Society Choir in St Alfege Church, Greenwich (designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor) Musgrave’s Rorate coeli - written in 1973 in response to a commission from the National Federation of Music Societies of Great Britain (now known as Making Music) - comprises a setting of two interleaved poems by the well-known Scottish poet, William Dunbar (written circa 1500): one speaks of the Nativity; the other, the Resurrection.

The programme continued apace with a rare outing of Britten’s A.M.D.G. - settings of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins written in the summer of 1939 while the composer was resident in the United States of America. The title A.M.D.G. relates to the pious inscription Ad majoram Dei gloria / For the greater glory of God, often placed at the head of a piece of work. With Britten’s intricate and flowing score coupled with Hopkins’ text it was a match made in heaven!

The second half of the programme was punctuated by Daniel Kidane’s The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash, a short seven-minute work commissioned by the Huddersfield Choral Society, set to a text by Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, written during the world pandemic reminding one of that dark, dismal and desperate time.

The work also featured a piano (played by Richard Peace, a well-known organist and conductor with a strong association with the Royal Choral Society) adding so much pleasure to a serene and sensitive work especially the bars written in the higher register keys emulating the sweetness and purity of birdsong highlighting Nature in its infinite and all-consuming glory carrying on with life with no regard to the misery of Man!

The concert continued with Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden (‘Peace on Earth’), premièred in 1911 and based on a poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer exploring the themes of peace and reconciliation. Boy O boy, don’t we need to ponder this philosophy right now! The work’s most notable for being one of Schoenberg’s last compositions written in the late romantic tonal style foreshadowing his later atonal works.

The concert lovingly concluded with a rewarding performance of Poulenc’s Figure humaine, a cantata he wrote for double-mixed choir composed in 1943 using texts from Paul Éluard including his famous poem ‘Liberté’ written during the Nazi occupation of France. In 1945, the Royal Air Force scattered thousands of copies of the poem over the occupied country as a morale-boosting exercise. The work premièred in London in English by the BBC in 1945 and was first performed in French in 1946 in Brussels followed by Paris on 22 May 1947. Vive la France!

A couple of concerts on Friday 27 June were simply smashing. The music of Imogen Holst was paramount in Nick Pritchard’s morning recital held in Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall while the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra held court in Snape Maltings Concert Hall for the evening concert.

Ian Tindale, Nick Pritchard - Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

This was Pritchard’s second visit to Aldeburgh Festival as last year he delivered a memorable performance in the title-role of Britten’s cantata, Saint Nicholas, in Snape Maltings with the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Jessica Cottis [see Tony's review]. He also joined soprano Gweneth Ann Rand and pianist Allyson Devenish to perform a Messiaen song cycle in the same festival.

Well-dressed, suave-looking and attentive, Pritchard took to the stage of Jubilee Hall together with his accompanist, Ian Tindale, to a large round of applause. They met at the Royal College of Music in 2012 (Britten’s alma mater) and have been together since. How lovely!

And how lovely their programme, too, featuring three works by Imogen Holst - Weathers, Little think’st at thou, poore flower and Four Songs - so eloquently sung by Pritchard while in Britten’s song-cycle Winter Words (set to eight poems by Thomas Hardy), Pritchard’s renderings of ‘Midnight on the Great Western’ (the music line harbouring a train travelling on bumpy and uneven racks), ‘The choirmaster’s burial’ (featuring the hymn tune ‘Mount Ephraim’) and ‘The little old table’ (creaky, uneven and weathered over generations) were so admirably sung with Pritchard majestically capturing the essence and beauty of Britten’s gentle and tender writing coupled with Hardy’s sensitive and inspiring writing.

Daniel Kidane’s Songs of Illumination (written in 2018 and set to a text by William Blake) more than illuminated the proceedings of this wonderful song recital while Britten’s folksong arrangements of such classics as ‘The Ploughboy’, ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ and ‘Sally in our alley’ were regally sung and ‘acted’ by Pritchard in a most relaxed and casual manner to the utter delight of a full and admiring house. They loved him and, indeed, loved him even more when he encored ‘The Salley Gardens’ set to a text (tearing at the heart strings!) by William Butler Yeats.

Conducted by Kirill Karabits, the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra got off to a brilliant start to their programme with a strong and authoritative performance of Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes while Daniel Kidane’s violin concerto Aloud, written for German-born violinist, Julia Fischer, premièred in March 2024 at the Royal Festival Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner, followed.

As a former violinist, Kidane harboured the idea of writing something lively and energetic for his chosen instrument for some time therefore his rhythmic, percussive and vigorously written violin concerto, vigorously played, too, by Brazilian-born violinist, Nathan Amaral, who delivered the goods in no uncertain manner offering an impeccable and gifted performance. Over the course of its composition, Kidane became troubled by world events particularly the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine - countries with which he has family ties. The composer’s half Russian and his partner is Ukrainian.

A veiled form of the old Ukrainian Cossack folksong ‘Black Crow’ is appropriately incorporated within the work. It’s heard in the opening bars thereby becoming the ‘kernel’ of the piece carrying the message of the struggle for life as well as an energetic musical opposition to the scourge, pity and wastefulness of war.

Interestingly, the song speaks of a crow circling over an injured Cossack. He calls out to the bird: ‘Why are you circling over me? Your prey will always elude you. Black crow, I’m not yours. I’m not ready to die.’ And that fighting spirit and energy is clearly represented in the piece. The folksong is not only touching but it’s fierce, too, reminding one that the suffering of ordinary people is often drowned by political rhetoric.

Interestingly, Kidane doesn’t refer to it as a ‘violin concerto’ commenting that it’s more of a dialogue between orchestra and violinist coming together at times or coinciding in different realms or strata. Apropos how the violin and orchestra interact, I think it’s fair to say that at some points they complement each while often they’re heard battling and arguing between and against themselves.

In an adventurous piece of programming, Kidane’s violin concerto was followed by Reinhold Glière’s The Zaporozhy Cossacks, a symphonic poem celebrated for its depiction of Ukrainian national themes. In fact, the work’s a well-known three-act comic opera with spoken dialogue composed by Semen Hulak-Artemovsky while its orchestration was revised by Glière (born Kiev, 1874) and Heorhiy Maiboroda in 1921.

Dating from 1675, the story relates to the Ukrainian Cossacks rejecting the Ottoman Sultan’s demands for tribute thus becoming a simple matter of the Ukrainians resisting foreign intervention and oppression. Food for thought! Therefore, a strong scenario was well complemented by Glière’s strong and forceful writing offering the spirited (and so talented) young bloods of the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra (so well led by ‘whoever’) an opportunity to show off. And that’s what they did with every section of the orchestra having a say in the matter in what turned out to be a truly memorable and, indeed, an energetic performance that gained favour with the audience.

If Glière’s work, therefore, was ‘all guns blazing’ the same could be said of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.9 in E flat major, premièred on 3 November 1945 in Leningrad by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky, marking the end of a lovely day trip to the Suffolk coast by members of the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra. I hope they found time for fish-and-chips out of the paper!

The symphony was nominated for the Stalin Prize in 1946 but did not win. By order of Glavrepertkom (the central censorship board) the work was banned on 14 February 1948 in Shostakovich’s second denunciation by Stalin together with some of his other works. It was totally removed from the list in the summer of 1955 by the totalitarian Russian state. Things have only marginally approved, I feel.

When Britten became President of the Norfolk & Norwich Music Club in the spring of 1951, now branded Norwich Chamber Music currently thriving under the artistic direction of Richard Wigmore, he remained in that position until shortly before his death in 1976.

Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge - Allan Clayton, Antonio Pappano, members of LSO - Aldeburgh Festival (Photo: Britten Pears Arts)

To mark the occasion of his appointment, he accompanied Peter Pears in a song recital at the Assembly House, Norwich, on 27 October 1951 in a programme which included the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo which he wrote in 1940 for Pears who singled it out as one of the greatest works that Britten had written for him. This salutary performance became my first introduction to this most satisfying, thoughtful and most loving work greatly influenced, of course, by the Italian painter and poet, Michelangelo. I never tire of it.

Therefore, I found it so exciting and refreshing hearing the sonnets once more so thoughtfully sung by the ‘man-of-the-moment’ Allan Clayton accompanied by Antonio Pappano on piano, stamping the penultimate day of Aldeburgh Festival’s 76th edition in Snape Maltings Concert Hall (Saturday 28 June) with sonnets XXX ‘Veggio co' bei vostri occhi un dolce lume’ (‘I see through your lovely eyes a sweet light’) and XXXVIII ‘Rendete agli occhi miei, o fonte o fiume’ (‘Give back to my eyes, o fountains and rivers’) catching and keeping my attention.

If Britten’s Seven Sonnets speaks of beauty and love the companion piece in the programme, Vaughan Williams’ song cycle, On Wenlock Edge, composed in 1909 to six poems from AE Housman’s 1896 collection, A Shropshire Lad, speaks of sadness and loss. Premièred in London’s Aeolian Hall on 15 November 1909, the performers numbered Gervase Elwes (tenor), Frederick Kiddle (piano) and the Schwiller String Quartet.

On this occasion, the performers were Allan Clayton with Antonio Pappano at the keyboard in league with four principal players from the London Symphony Orchestra: Benjamin Gilmore / Julián Gil Rodríguez (violins), Elvind Ringstad (viola) and David Cohen (cello).

Clayton was exemplary in his performance truly capturing, I feel, the wisdom and s

Thomas Pitfield: Orchestral Music

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 05:20:00 +0000

A discerning approach to this distinguished recording requires an appreciation that Thomas Pitfield (1903–1999) was a true polymath - a composer, poet, artist, and craftsman of notable versatility. His musical language reveals the influence of Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Percy Grainger, yet always retains an individual character. Unhesitant in his engagement with folk song, Pitfield resourcefully integrates it into a classical context, yielding compositions distinguished by appealing melodies, sophisticated harmonic treatment, and a sensitivity to instrumental technique.

I am beholden to the excellent liner notes provided by the recorderist John Turner, who is a trustee of the Pitfield Trust.

This is not the forum to discuss the differences between a ‘Symphony’ and a ‘Sinfonietta,’ save to say the latter is not necessarily “light weight.” One need think of eponymous works by Britten, Janáček and Moeran to realise that there are examples with considerable depth of feeling and technical prowess. Despite Pitfield’s Sinfonietta (1946) opening with a sense of grandeur, the music alternates between light and reflective moods. Though seemingly structured in five distinct movements, the liner notes suggest it falls somewhere between a suite and a set of variations. There seems (to this listener) little in the way of formal or thematic balance normally expected from a symphony. The movements include a surprisingly involved Polka, a heart-breaking Pavane and a lively, but quite serious Jig. The Sinfonietta is concluded with a long Finale, which bounces along with some backward glances towards more troubling matters. Whatever the formal impediments are, it is enjoyable and satisfying from the first note to the last. It deserves its place in the large catalogue of rarely (sadly) played British Symphonic Music.

The Fantasia on an Old Staffordshire Tune for violin and orchestra (1950) was first heard at a concert given during the 1951 Festival of Britain, by the Halle Orchestra under John Barbirolli. The Daily News (10 August 1951, p.4) reports on the “interesting” new work and how it “impressed one as an earnest piece of writing, attractive above all in its quieter moments.” Up to a point I agree with the critic. There are moments when one is reminded of the pastoral “magic” of RVW’s The Lark Ascending, or Julius Harrison’s Bredon Hill. Yet, the faster passages are intriguing and provide a thoughtful contrast to the opening and closing “sections” which contain the heart and soul of this Fantasia. The finale, Andante contemplativo, opens with a cadenza, that nods to an Ascending Lark. The overall impact is one of warmth tempered by introspection. The “Old Tune” is based on The Little Room, a melody that Pitfield had found in that county. He late revisited it in his Bucolics.

The late Lyric Waltz (1988) was originally scored for a variety of instrumental resources including recorder, cello and piano and for piano solo. It has a lovely wistful air, which reminds me of so many sympathetic pieces written for this medium.

This is followed by the undated (although Turner suggests that it is probably “late”) Bucolics: Folk song Studies. The collection is based on a series of six Scottish, English and Irish tunes that are skillfully developed. Highlights include the opening Comin’ through the rye, the bouncy Where are you going to, my Pretty Maid, the intense (already mentioned) My little room and the entertaining Carrion Crow, concerning a pistol shot, poorly aimed, which missed its intended mark - a crow - and instead struck and killed the farmer’s sow.

The story of the Concerto Lirico for violin and orchestra is not a happy one, at least initially. It was completed in 1958 and premiered by the BBC Northern Orchestra under George Hurst, who gave it a less than satisfactory performance. After the broadcast, Pitfield largely destroyed the manuscript, keeping only the slow movement, which had been dedicated to a colleague and friend, the pianist Albert Hardie. Fortunately, he had made a microfilm copy of the concerto and had forgotten about it. It was discovered by John Turner, Pitfield’s executor, when “clearing out his garden shed[!]” It was latterly typeset by Peter Mountain, giving the English music enthusiast a first-class concerto. There are many stylistic nods in this work, including E.J. Moeran and Gerald Finzi. This concerto stands as a timeless masterpiece, embodying the hallmarks of a composer who, as Rob Barnett has said “held true to his style” resisting the “contemporary tidal surge of dissonance.” The Concerto Lirico was previously issued on the Dutton Epoch label (CDLX7221) and reviewed by Mr Barnett here.

The final track on this disc presents the deeply felt Epitaph for string orchestra (1981). It is an adaptation of part of a cantata dedicated to the great Northumberland-born bass Owen Brannigan. Originally a setting of one of Pitfield’s own poems reflecting on the elders of a village resting beneath weathered, moss-covered gravestones, their inscriptions fading with time, it has been transformed into a deeply moving numbers that is on a par with so much English pastoral music. It is my favourite composition on this disc.

All the works are given committed performances by the Liepāja Symphony Orchestra under Paul Mann. The violin soloist, Emma McGrath, gives outstanding accounts of the two concerted pieces. I have already mentioned the liner notes which add value and interest to the package. The recording is splendid.

This is altogether a valuable exploration of Thomas Pitfield’s eminently approachable music. Hopefully, Toccata Classics will re-examine his extensive catalogue soon.

Track Listing:
Thomas Pitfield (1903-99)
Sinfonietta (1946)
Fantasia on an Old Staffordshire Tune for violin and orchestra (1950)
Lyric Waltz for string orchestra (1988)
Bucolics: Folk song Studies (undated)
Concerto Lirico for violin and orchestra (1958)
Epitaph for string orchestra (1981)
Emma McGrath (violin), Liepāja Symphony Orchestra/Paul Mann
rec. 14-17 January 2025 Great Amber Concert Hall, Liepāja, Latvia
Toccata Classics TOCC0765

With thanks to MusicWeb International where this review was first published.

Witty production enhances beautiful singing in Hamburg’s Le nozze di Figaro revival

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:52:43 +0000

Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro: Soloists and Chorus of the Staatsoper Hamburg. Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg / Nicholas Carter (conductor). Staatsoper Hamburg, 29.6.2025. (DM-D) The audience entered to a full-size projection of the title page of the score featuring Mozart’s handwritten words Le nozze di Figaro. As the lights dimmed and the orchestra started playing, in ... Read more

The charming island of Kiniliada hosts an unforgettable evening of Greek and Turkish music

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 22:46:24 +0000

Istanbul Music Festival [3] ‘Ada – The Island’: Çağlar Fidan (vocals, qanun, tambourine), Ezgi Köker (vocals, oud), NikoTeini (Asineth Fotini Kokkala [vocals, qanun, cello], Nikos Papageorgiou [vocals, lute, tambur]). Kiniliada Christos Greek Orthodox Monastery, Istanbul. 25.6.2025. (GT) One of the major features of the Istanbul Music Festival is using performance spaces in diverse locations, both ... Read more

Dissonance Of Threads Tangles A ‘Jazz’ Opera, With No Jazz In Weave

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:17:19 +0000

NEW YORK – The premiere of The Tin Angel, an opera by composer Daniel Asia and novelist-cum-librettist Paul Pines, was an intriguing experiment touched by eloquent poetry, but it suffered from a tumult of characters and thematic ambitions.

The post Dissonance Of Threads Tangles A ‘Jazz’ Opera, With No Jazz In Weave first appeared on Classical Voice North America.

Pelléas et Mélisande review – Longborough’s staging is accomplished and atmospheric

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:07:49 +0000

Longborough festival opera, Moreton-in-Marsh
Anthony Negus is attentive to the subtleties of Debussy’s translucent score, and, matched by Jenny Ogilvie’s darkly mysterious production, this makes for one of the most successful shows Longborough festival has ever mounted

Anthony Negus’s conducting of Wagner has long been the chief musical glory of the Longborough festival. Now he has turned his attention to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, an opera on which he assisted Pierre Boulez at the Welsh National Opera more than 30 years ago. The results are no less unmissable and authoritative as his Wagner.

From the dark chords of the opening bars, Negus conjures a fluently idiomatic reading of the translucent score. The pacing is beautifully controlled and Negus is always attentive to Debussy’s many tone colour changes and subtle dynamic contrasts. He draws some ravishing woodwind playing from the Longborough orchestra.

Warner Music Announces Layoffs, Cuts

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 16:15:00 +0000

In the memo, reviewed by The Hollywood Reporter, Kyncl wrote that WMG is looking to reduce costs by about $300 million to “future-proof” the company and “reinvest in the business,” particularly into the music itself. – The Hollywood Reporter

Milwaukee Symphony Musicians Accept New Three-Year Contract With Annual Pay Increases

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 14:36:00 +0000

“The (agreement), which continues through the 2027-28 season, extends a long history of harmonious labor relations at the symphony. For more than 30 years, MSO administration has shared its financial information with musicians.” – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

San Francisco Opera Orchestra Signs Two-Year Contract Which Expires Next Summer

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 13:01:00 +0000

That is to say, the new agreement is retroactive to August 1, 2024, which is when the previous contract expired; the orchestra had been playing under temporary extensions ever since. – San Francisco Chronicle (MSN)

A Significant Artistic Statement

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Esdras Mugatik discusses Jerome Rose and Living Musical Monuments, putting the eighty-six-year-old American pianist in context

Les Indes Galantes review – popping, leaps and whoops in immersive and spellbinding Rameau

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 11:33:07 +0000

The Grange festival, Northington, Hampshire
Director Bintou Dembélé infuses this potentially problematic colonial tale with an irresistible blend of pop culture and inclusivity for an imaginative first staging in the UK

Surprising as it sounds, this spirited production of Rameau’s Les Indes galantes represents the work’s first staging in the UK. Then again, French opéra-ballet has always presented challenges, from the substantial forces required to do it justice to the need for specialist vocal techniques rarely encouraged this side of the Channel: a gifted practitioner of the French baroque must be across a dizzying nine different types of trill.

Premiered in Paris in 1735, Rameau’s ballet héroïque tapped into Enlightenment tropes of the noble savage and the export of European ideals to the New World, whether the inhabitants wanted it or not. Its exotic locations – Turkey, Peru, Persia and the North American wilderness – present a modern-day director with a veritable minefield of cultural sensitivities. Happily, Bintou Dembélé, whose roots are in French hip-hop, navigates these perilous waters with ease, conjuring up an irresistible blend of pop culture and inclusive storytelling.

A vivid theatricality that a more conventional treatment might have missed: Bintou Dembélé & Leonardo García-Alarcón collaborate on a remarkable reinvention of Rameau's Les Indes Galantes

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 09:15:30 +0000

Rameau: Les Indes Galantes - Andreas Wolf, Cappella Mediterranea, Chœur de chambre de Namur, Structure Rualité, Leonardo García-Alarcón - The Grange Festival (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

Rameau: Les Indes Galantes; Laurène Paternò, Ana Quintans, Alasdair Kent, Andreas Wolf, Cappella Mediterranea, Chœur de chambre de Namur, Structure Rualité, director: Bintou Dembélé, Leonardo García-Alarcón; The Grange Festival
Reviewed 1 July 2025

Rameau's ballet héroïque reinvented as vivid music theatre in a collaboration between period performance and hip-hop-inspired dance at, astonishingly, the works first major UK staging

Full-scale productions of Rameau's major operas in the UK remain vanishingly small. Garsington Opera did Platée last year and Glyndebourne Opera presented Hippolite et Aricie in 2013. With Castor et Pollux making an appearance at ENO in 2011, and Dardanus at ETO in 2017. That's not a lot.

Partly, it is a problem of economics. Handel and Vivaldi's operas, whilst large-scale and somewhat problematic on the modern stage, were written for commercial opera houses, they usually require just a handful of major singers, an orchestra and perhaps a single set. Rameau was writing for the rather more lavishly funded opera in Paris, he presupposed a large orchestra, chorus and dancers, in addition to large-ish casts and plots that call for lavish scenic changes. Whereas in France, opera companies seem to be up to the challenge that Rameau's operas present, this is not the case in the UK.

Rather imaginatively, for its final operatic staging of the season the Grange Festival has partnered with a French company to bring their staging of Rameau's Les Indes Galantes. Amazingly this seems to be the work's first full staging in the UK.

We caught the second of three performances at the Grange Festival on 1 July 2025. Leonardo García-Alarcón directed his ensembles Cappella Mediterranea and Chœur de chambre de Namur with a staging by choreographer Bintou Dembélé featuring soloists Laurène Paternò, Ana Quintans, Alasdair Kent, Andreas Wolf, and Dembélé's dance company, Structure Rualité. Lighting was by Benjamin Nesme and Charlotte Coffinet,

Rameau: Les Indes Galantes - Cappella Mediterranea, Chœur de chambre de Namur, Structure Rualité, Leonardo García-Alarcón - The Grange Festival (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

The work has a somewhat complex history. The Prologue and first two entrées were staged in 1735, with a third entrée being added during the run. It was only in 1736 that the fourth entrée was added and the third achieved its final form. From then on, until 1773, the work was never absent from the Paris Opera repertoire, either complete or in part. The work then had to wait until 1952 for the next staging at the Paris Opera, with orchestrations by Paul Dukas!

Often, the joining forces between a musical company and a dance company can mean that the significant role non-singing expression takes is made more meaningful. This is what happened at the performance of Purcell's Fairy Queen at last years BBC Proms when Les Arts Florissants joined forces with Mourad Merzouki's Companie Käfig to merge period practice and hip-hop inspired dance [see my review]. The Grange Festival production of Rameau's Les Indes Galantes had a similar feel about it.

The present production was born out of the meeting between Bintou Dembélé and Leonardo García-Alarcón during the production of Les Indes Galantes directed by Clément Cogitore at the Opéra Bastille in 2019. For The Grange production, Bintou Dembélé's dance company and Leonardo García-Alarcón's ensemble collaborated on what they term a choreographed concert which the company is touring this year.

Rameau: Les Indes Galantes - Alasdair Kent, Cappella Mediterranea, Chœur de chambre de Namur, Structure Rualité, Leonardo García-Alarcón - The Grange Festival (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

The work itself was trimmed, I reckon that we perhaps lost around 30 minutes of music (which still left us with two and half hours of music), including quite a number of purely dance movements. There was no set, the orchestra was spread out on platforms towards the rear of the stage, with singing and dancing taking place further forward. Solo instrumentalists would be brought forward and there was a sense that the players were part of the whole presentation. Also, the auditorium was used so that at the beginning of the prologue, Ana Quintans' Hebe was sitting in the auditorium, sometimes the chorus was arrayed around the stalls and sometimes the dancers, whilst in the second entrée Laurène Paternò's Phani was in the gallery addressing Alasdair Kent's Carlos on stage.

Bintou Dembélé's dance is based around contemporary street styles such as hip-hop and the moments when the dancers were let off the leash, such as the final Chaconne were astonishing, but the staging was less about dance and more about a total ensemble. In the volcano scene in the second entrées, singers and dancers joined together as one ensemble, the chorus singing and dancing alongside the members of Dembélé's company. The result was an impressive piece of music theatre that, rather than mixing singing, dancing and stage spectacle, combined the three into one vision. That of Bintou Dembélé.

There were frustrations. Lighting relied on a circular right suspended from the stage (looking not unlike a space-ship) along with hand-held lights and the odd spotlight. Clearly this was intended to be portable, and there was something of the rock concert spectacular about some of the lighting effects, but more problematically the results could often be frustratingly dark, meaning instrumentalists and singers performed in gloom. The placing of the orchestra so far up-stage seemed to inhibit the full, rich sound of Rameau's orchestrations in the ensemble passages. García-Alarcón was using an orchestra of some 30 players and I rather wished the sound had had more presence, as it was the singers were rather more prominent in the mix.

Rameau: Les Indes Galantes - Ana Quintans, Cappella Mediterranea, Chœur de chambre de Namur, Structure Rualité, Leonardo García-Alarcón - The Grange Festival (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

Conventional narrative was not Dembélé's main concern. There was little sense of character development, nor were the dance episodes used to expand the drama, so what we got was a series of dramatic vignettes. Thankfully the four hard-working singers, Laurène Paternò, Ana Quintans, Alasdair Kent, and Andreas Wolf, seemed to be able to capture the moment, and the lovers' trials in the first, second and fourth entrées were strongly etched, whilst the third entrée was cut to something more abstract. Though the fact that they all wore the same street clothes for the entire evening mitigated against individual characterisation, whilst in the final entrée the two men played a total of three lovers between them with Andreas Wolf playing two rivals, one successful and the other not. The dramaturgy here might have been confusing but vocally this was strong. Paternò and Quintans played the series of female lovers, though it was Quintans incarnation as Hebe in the prologue that was the most memorable. Alasdair Kent has quite a heroic sound, bringing a rough virility to some of his performance but never less than engaging, whilst there was a real vividness to everything that Andreas Wolf sang.

Leonardo García-Alarcón took a highly active role in the whole production, his conducting needing to communicate not only with everyone on the stage, but those in the auditorium too and his range of gestures had a vividly plastic quality that seemed to go beyond simple practicality.

The number of pure dance moments was surprisingly small, and few ensembles matched the astonishing brilliance of the final Chaconne. Instead, Dembélé seemed to use quite a lot of walking about to music, merging singers and dancers into a single whole.

Intriguingly, you felt that Dembélé was also trying to tell another story. Dance was not used to extend Rameau and Louis Fuzelier's original dramaturgy but to introduce another one. Certainly the volcanic eruption in the second entrée was vividly done, but elsewhere there seemed to be another story. This was most noticeable at the end of the work where the final chorus' Chaconne as ceremony of peace did not conclude the work, but there was a further solo where the chorus and dancers seemed to turn on each other with stylised violence, and then we finished with the orchestra alone, as if saying that Rameau's music alone was enough.

Rameau: Les Indes Galantes - Cappella Mediterranea, Chœur de chambre de Namur, Structure Rualité, Leonardo García-Alarcón - The Grange Festival (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

And it was.

Whatever you thought of the performance, whatever the frustrations of the staging, there is no doubt that the evening brought Rameau's music alive with a vivid theatricality that a more conventional treatment might have missed.

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Elsewhere on this blog

Robert & Clara: Stephan Loges & Jocelyn Freeman at SongEasel - concert review
A vivid sense of style & stagecraft with some of the best Handel singers around: Rodelinda at Garsington - opera review
A different focus: Timothy Ridout in Mozart & Hummel with Academy of St Martin in the Fields plus Rossini & a Weber symphony - concert review
From Handel to Verdi & beyond: Soraya Mafi on singing in Handel's Saul at Glyndebourne, expanding into bel canto & Bernstein - interview
An alternative way people can encounter classical music: Baldur Brönnimann & Felix Heri introduce Between Mountains Festival - feature
The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s visit to this year’s Aldeburgh Festival - concert review
Brilliant reinvention & razor sharp take-down: Scottish Opera's double-bill pairs Gilbert & Sullivan with Toby Hession's brand new comedy - opera review
A trio of concerts at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival highlights the diversity of music to be found on the Suffolk coast - concert review
That was quite a party! Paul Curran's production of Die Fledermaus at The Grange Festival is a terrific evening in the theatre - Read more

‘Caravaggio & Monteverdi’ is a sensational success at the Istanbul Music Festival

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 22:04:27 +0000

Istanbul Music Festival [2] – ‘Caravaggio & Monteverdi’: La Venexiana – Emanuela Galli (soprano), Agnese Allegra (soprano), Giacomo Schivao (tenor), Gabriele Palomba (theorbo/conductor), Dario Carpanese (harpsichord), Teatri 35 – Antonella Parrella (performer), Gaetano Coccia (performer), Francesco Ottavio de Santis (performer). Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall, Istanbul. 24.6.2025. (GT) This celebration of two great Baroque masters ... Read more

A Rare Baroque Opera, Intimate But Epic, Gets Grandly Serious Revival

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 17:38:14 +0000

CHICAGO – The Haymarket Opera Company, which in its 15-year history has risen to North American prominence among Baroque producers, took another ambitious leap with a stylishly detailed staging of Leonardo Vinci's Artaserse.

The post A Rare Baroque Opera, Intimate But Epic, Gets Grandly Serious Revival first appeared on Classical Voice North America.

Rising Star Jakub Hrůša Will Be Czech Philharmonic’s Next Chief Conductor

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:01:00 +0000

The 43-year-old Hrůša is currently chief conductor of Germany’s Bamberg Symphony; he becomes music director of the Royal Opera House in London this fall. He has been the Czech Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor since 2018; he succeeds Semyon Bychkov as chief in 2028. – AP

Semele review – Pretty Yende is a spirited but sketchy heroine in inconsistent Handel staging

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:09:19 +0000

Royal Opera House, London
Alice Coote’s vengeful Juno steals the show in Oliver Mears’ bleak and occasionally fussy production

Handel’s Semele is a curious beast. It’s both an opera masquerading in oratorio’s clothing, and a moralising object lesson in knowing your place. “Nature to each allots its proper sphere,” sings the chorus as the overly ambitious heroine goes up in smoke, charred to a crisp by the divine brilliance of her adulterous lover. It’s a point hammered home in Oliver Mears’ astute new production where the hapless Semele is a go-getting servant trapped in a palace with a slippery cad, his vengeful spouse and their glassy-eyed children.

If you take William Congreve’s libretto at face value, Semele – the daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes – is a vain fly-by-night, easy prey for the jealous Juno who eggs her on to insist that her mighty paramour appears in all his flesh-consuming majesty rather than human form. Mears takes a more interesting approach, seeing in Semele a tenacious contender who honestly believes that Jupiter intends to make her his life partner. It’s clear, however, from the bookended byplay in the overture and finale that she is merely the latest in a long line of discarded women to be consumed in the royal incinerator. A cupboardful of urns, labelled Calisto, Io, Leda etc is a suitably chilling touch.

Music@Menlo, Silicon Valley’s Chamber Festival, Names Its Next Artistic Directors

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:09 +0000

Less than a week after founding artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han announced their 2026 departure, their successors have been announced. They are longtime Music@Menlo participants Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park; like Finckel and Wu Han, they are a married cellist-pianist couple. – San Francisco Classical Voice

Classical music news. July 2025 Newsletter

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

'The Frankenstein Moment', our July 2025 PDF newsletter, has just been published

5 Questions to Lembit Beecher (composer) and Karen Ouzounian (cellist, composer)

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Lembit Beecher and Karen Ouzounian are a husband-wife creative team who balance their collaborative work with individual interests. Ouzounian is a founding member of the Aizuri Quartet and a member of Rhiannon Giddens’ Silk Road Ensemble. Composer-animator Beecher uses his interest in his Estonian folk culture to explore themes of place, migration, natural processes, and … Continued

The post 5 Questions to Lembit Beecher (composer) and Karen Ouzounian (cellist, composer) appeared first on I CARE IF YOU LISTEN.

Challenging conventional ideas of vocal performance: Contemporary Vocal Sünds from Eleanor Westbrook & Oskar McCarthy

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 08:06:31 +0000

Two contemporary singers are joining forces to present a recital of experimental vocal music. Eleanor Westbrook and Oskar McCarthy, along with pianist Ben Smith are presenting Contemporary Vocal Sünds at The Uplands, St Leonards-on-Sea (20 July) and Lauderdale House, Highgate (22 July) with playful and radical approach to voice in works from the 20th and 21st century, challenging conventional ideas of vocal performance.

The recital features composers such as John Cage, Iannis Xenakis and Georges Aperghis, alongside pieces by Errollyn Wallen, Judith Weir, Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Liz Dilnot Johnson, plus the premiere of an electronic reworking of Jean-Philippe Rameau by Nico Bentley.

Eleanor Westbrook is an interdisciplinary performer working at the intersection of opera, physical theatre, clowning, and experimental music. She is artistic director of TUFT, producing large-scale performance events in Hastings Castle and Caves, and is currently developing a multidisciplinary production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Oskar McCarthy has premiered operas by Avner Dorman, Robert Reid Allan and Bertie Baigent, and commissioned new work including Laura Bowler’s Lines, Letters and Disinformation for baritone and tape, performed at Snape Maltings and Café OTO. A VOICEBOX alumnus [see my article], he trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and recently worked with the Royal Opera House’s Opera Lab, part of the Jette Parker Programme.

Further information about the St Leonards-on-Sea performance, and the Lauderdale House performance.

Robert & Clara: Stephan Loges & Jocelyn Freeman at SongEasel

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:46:49 +0000

Stephan Loges at a SongEasel recital on 22 June 2025
(Photo: Kate Kantur)

Robert & Clara: songs by Clara Schumann & Robert Schumann including Liederkreis, Op. 39; Stephan Loges, Jocelyn Freeman; SongEasel at St Matthew's Church
Reviewed 27 June 2025

An evening of intimate lieder in Elephant & Castle, intertwining songs by Robert & Clara Schumann including his complete Eichendorff Liederkreis

For its latest season, Jocelyn Freeman's SongEasel has been filling South East London with song, bringing distinguished artists such as Helen Charlston, Sholto Kynoch, Juliane Banse and James Gilchrist to give recitals in local venues.

On Friday 27 June 2025 it was the turn of St Matthew's Church, Elephant and Castle, a modern hall-church that is home to a bilingual (Spanish and English-speaking) Church of England congregation. Bass-baritone Stephan Loges (SongEasel's artist in residence for this season) was joined at the piano by Jocelyn Freeman. The focus of these concerts has been Robert and Clara Schumann, including performing Robert's major song-cycles from 1840 and all of Clara's songs.

For this recital, the first half alternated Clara and Robert's songs, picking up on the themes present in Robert Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis which formed the second part of the evening.

We began with three Clara Schumann songs. Das Veilchen (setting Goethe) was a late song from 1853. Strophic, Loges really brought out the narrative using his resonant bass-baritone to make the words count, but then in the final verse when the violet is trampled by the young girl, Clara's music moves away from the norm. Der Abenstern was quiet and intense, almost confiding, whilst the Justinus Kerner setting Der Wanderer in der Sägemühle seemed to begin as simply story telling with a vivid piano, yet it did not go where we expected in musical terms and ended up rather in the air.

We continued with the poet Justinus Kerner with three of Robert's settings from his Kernerlieder. Wanderlied began all vivid vigour and swaggering before a change of mood to something calmer and more confiding, but Robert repeats the first verse, bringing back the original mood. Erstes Grün was gentler and more intense, but this was still strong stuff, leading to Sehnsucht nach der Waldgegend where the longing was dark and sober with a chorale-like melody over flowing piano, becoming more expansive in the middle.

Back to Clara with two songs from her Sechs Lieder, Op. 13 and the one of her songs from Liebesfrühling, the Rückert sequence she wrote jointly with Robert. Ich hab' in deinem Auge, setting Rückert, was ingratiating yet not without passion, whilst Sie liebten sich beide, setting Heine, was sober yet intense with a rather poignant piano part. Finally, we returned to Rückert for Warum willst du and're fragen, one of her best-known songs, with Loges and Freeman bringing out the lyrical beauty, leading to a fine climax.

We then returned to Robert's Kernerlieder. Wanderung moved between vigorous swagger and the more poetic, whilst though the piano introduction to Stille Liebe was poetic, the main song became sober and thoughtful.

Clara's Heine setting, Lorelei was perhaps not the style of song associated with her, being closer to one of Robert's ballads. Here we had vivid story telling and a slow build to a powerful climax as the boatman and his boat are consumed. We stayed with Clara for the final song, the lyrical beauty of the farewell, Beim Abschied.

For the second half, Loges and Freeman gave us Robert Schumann's sequence of Eichendorff poems that form a literal and metaphorical journey through the forest, the outer world mirroring the poet's inner world. 'In der Fremde I' started us off with flowing, lyrical melancholy whilst though 'Intermezzo' seemed measured it was almost overflowing with passion. 'Waldesgespräch' returned us to the Lorelei with Loges moving between the wanderers swagger and the scarier enchantress. 'Die Stille' was deceptively simple, revealing amazing attention to detail from Loges and Freeman.

'Mondnacht' combined magical piano playing with Loges' intimate, confiding vocals giving a sense of time suspended. 'Schöne Fremde' was rather urgent with a feeling of compelling intensity, then 'Auf einer Burg' was strong and intense, serious stuff indeed but ending almost mid-air as we never find out who the lovely weeping bride is. The poet's lost love, perhaps. 'In der Fremde II' was urgent yet ending in sudden darkness. We began to notice the way Schumann had a fondness for ending the songs on a question, the young man's journey not being as straightforward as it might seem.

'Wehmut' was sombre with Loges making it seem highly personal, then 'Zwielicht' had a slowing unfolding melody over a piano that seemed to echo Robert's obsession with JS Bach, yet there seemed a deeper meaning here to with, again, a surprise at the end. 'Im Walde' began engagingly bouncy but then there was an amazing change of mood. Yet when we return to the end of our journey, in 'Frühlingsnacht', the young man seems to have returned to his senses and this was engagingly conveyed in a performance that was impulsive and full of joy.

We had an encore, one more of Clara Schumann's Rückert settings, Die Gute Nacht.

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Elsewhere on this blog

A vivid sense of style & stagecraft with some of the best Handel singers around: Rodelinda at Garsington - opera review
A different focus: Timothy Ridout in Mozart & Hummel with Academy of St Martin in the Fields plus Rossini & a Weber symphony - concert review
From Handel to Verdi & beyond: Soraya Mafi on singing in Handel's Saul at Glyndebourne, expanding into bel canto & Bernstein - interview
An alternative way people can encounter classical music: Baldur Brönnimann & Felix Heri introduce Between Mountains Festival - feature
The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s visit to this year’s Aldeburgh Festival - concert review
Brilliant reinvention & razor sharp take-down: Scottish Opera's double-bill pairs Gilbert & Sullivan with Toby Hession's brand new comedy - opera review
A trio of concerts at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival highlights the diversity of music to be found on the Suffolk coast - concert review
That was quite a party! Paul Curran's production of Die Fledermaus at The Grange Festival is a terrific evening in the theatre - opera review
Modern resonances & musical style: Richard Farnes conducts Verdi's La traviata at The Grange Festival with Samantha Clarke & Nico Darmanin - opera review
Maiden, Mother & Crone: Rowan Hellier on her interdisciplinary project integrating music & movement exploring Baba Yaga - interview
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Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood invites us to laugh at ourselves – I wanted my music to do the same | Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:00:07 +0000

Dylan Thomas’s evocative radio play has been adapted into films, a ballet, even a jazz suite. From its drunkards and nosey-parkers, to its ghosts and dreamers, Ninfea Crutwell-Reade’s new reimagining connects it back to its origins

In October 1953, Dylan Thomas took part in a symposium on poetry and film in New York. A recording of the event captures the Welsh writer’s speaking voice in what would be one of his last public appearances before his death 12 days later at the age of 39. Amid the pops, ticks and crackles of the tape, we hear Thomas on sparkling form, telling the audience about an experimental play he had been to see “in a cellar or a sewer or somewhere”, accompanied by the US playwright Arthur Miller. In the middle of the performance, he recounts, Miller turned to him and remarked, “Good god, this is avant garde. In a moment the hero’s going to take his clothes off.” Roars of laughter follow this anecdote, before questions turn to Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood, which had enjoyed a number of public readings in New York City that year, billed as a “new comedy”.

Under Milk Wood is quite a different sort of play to the avant garde production Miller and Thomas had attended. Set in the fictional Welsh town of Llareggub (“Bugger all” backwards), it documents the dreams, digressions and foibles of the town’s inhabitants in a blaze of poetic beauty and vibrant satire. It is a “play for voices”, borne out of the world of the mid-20th-century BBC radio feature – a fluid, experimental genre in which narration, acting, song, verse, music and sound effects were mixed together often without the constraint of a dramatic plot. Thomas himself was a gifted radio actor and had taken part in a number of BBC radio features, including The Dark Tower by Louis MacNiece and In Parenthesis by David Jones. When Milk Wood was first broadcast in 1954 on the BBC’s Third Programme, the cast was led by his friend and acting companion, Richard Burton.

Garsington offers a vision of hope as well as freedom in a musically urgent account of Fidelio

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:59:45 +0000

Garsington Opera 2025 [4] – Beethoven, Fidelio: Soloists, & Garsington Opera Chorus, The English Concert / Douglas Boyd (conductor). Garsington Opera at Wormsley, 27.6.2025. (CR) Production: Director – John Cox Revival director – Jamie Manton Designer – Gary McCann Lighting – Ben Pickersgill Chorus director – Jonathon Cole-Swinard Cast: Florestan – Robert Murray Leonore – ... Read more

Longborough’s Péllias et Mélisande uses audience imagination to tell the story and the music is terrific!

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:49:40 +0000

Longborough Festival Opera 2025 [3] – Debussy, Pélleas et Mélisande: Soloists, Longborough Festival Orchestra / Anthony Negus (conductor). Longborough, Gloucestershire, 28.6.2025. (CP) Production: Director – Jenny Ogilvie Designer – Max Johns Costume designer – Anisha Fisher Lighting designer – Peter Small Associate director – Alex Gotch Associate designer – Alys Whitehead Cast: Arkel – Julian ... Read more

Aurora Orchestra/Collon/Power review – Italian immersion with introspective Berlioz and extrovert Mendelssohn

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 15:09:36 +0000

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Pairing Mendelssohn’s sun-filled Italian symphony with Berlioz’s broodingly romantic Harold en Italie – with actor Charlotte Ritchie on hand to bring Berlioz’s own voice to life - the Aurora Orchestra were on irresistible form

So much shared, yet so utterly different. Mendelssohn wrote his Italian symphony in 1833, revising it the following year. Berlioz wrote his Harold en Italie symphony in 1834, following a stay in Rome during which the two composers had spent quality time together. Thus the Aurora Orchestra came up with the smart idea of putting the two Italian symphonies side by side.

Beyond their loosely shared inspiration and form, however, the two works have little in common. Mendelssohn’s is an expert and extrovert piece of symphonic writing, tight and technically impeccable. That of Berlioz, meanwhile, follows a wandering star all its own, broodingly romantic and constantly innovative, exemplified by the solo viola that depicts the melancholy of Byron’s introspective hero Childe Harold.

Pocahontas Came Out Three Decades Ago, But Gen Z Is Making Its Signature Song A Rallying Cry

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 14:30:00 +0000

The movie isn’t seen as progressive, but “on TikTok, people … have reinterpreted the ‘Colors of the Wind’ lyrics to comment on an array of contemporary topics they feel strongly about, like immigration, the Middle East, the president and Elon Musk, Black Lives Matter and oil drilling.” – The New York Times

450 children celebrate & take part in a wide variety of music: Richard Shephard Music Foundation's annual Make Music Day in York

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:08:06 +0000

Richard Shephard Music Foundation's annual Make Music Day in York

Over 450 school children gathered last week (25 June) at York St John University for a day of inspiring music as the Richard Shephard Music Foundation hosted its annual Make Music Day. The event brought together over 450 primary school children from across the region to celebrate and take part in a wide variety of music.

There were hands-on workshops ranging from Beatboxing to Trinidadian Percussion, intergenerational music workshops with organisation Musical Connections and interactive performances from Back Chat Brass and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s Learning and Engagement Orchestra.

Since the Foundation was established in memory of composer Dr Richard Shephard in 2021, over 7,500 children have received weekly subsidised music lessons, 15 music specialists have been recruited to work in our schools and 800 places have been provided at free music holiday clubs.

Full details from the Foundation's website.

Transforming A Sports Arena Into A Concert Venue Takes A Steady Hand

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 13:00:00 +0000

“Five times a year, art is sandwiched by science. It typically takes four to five days to transform T-Mobile Park into one of Seattle’s most versatile concert venues, before the bells and whistles are deconstructed in an overnight sprint.” – Seattle Times

New concertos, more Mozart Made in Manchester, expanding Music in Mind: Manchester Camerata's new season

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:48:03 +0000

Gábor Takács-Nagy conducts Manchester Camerata (Photo: Anthony Robling)

Music director Gábor Takács-Nagy conducts Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 with Caroline Pether plus music by Fanny Mendelssohn and Beethoven, and returns with Mozart, Made in Manchester, with soprano Ying Fang in arias by Mozart.

Daniel Pioro, one of Manchester Camerata’s artistic partners, will premiere a new violin concerto by Nick Martin. Inspired by the sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth, the piece will receive premier performances at Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and The Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire, plus Kings Place in London. Composer and conductor, Jack Sheen conducts his own Hollow Propranolol Séance (II) alongside music by Ravel and Isabella Gellis at The University of Manchester and Wigmore Hall. Thomas Fetherstonhaugh conducts Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten in a programme with Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus.

Laurence Osborn’s horn concerto written for soloist Ben Goldscheider, commissioned by Trinity College, Cambridge will be premiered by Goldscheider in a concert conducted by Karel Deseure at The Stoller Hall with Manchester-based dance group Company Chameleon. The programme includes Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 “Haffner” which the orchestra will perform from memory whilst the musicians tell stories through movement and dance alongside Company Chameleon.

John Andrews conducts an all-British programme with music by William Alwyn, Doreen Carwithen and Elizabeth Maconchy with soloists violist Alex Mitchell, pianist Alexandra Dariescu and cor anglais player Rachael Clegg. John Andrews returns to conduct Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ monodrama, Eight Songs for a Mad King, directed by Ruth Knight with mezzo-soprano Idunnu Münch, at The Stoller Hall

At Christmas there is Handel’s Messiah with Kantos Chamber Choir conducted by Laurence Cummings, plus gospel celebration with the critically acclaimed vocal group and Camerata artistic partner, AMC Gospel Choir. The programme, Festive Happening, will be performed in Birmingham and Manchester. The orchestra will perform Sir James MacMillan’s Eleven at the National Football Museum conducted by Enyi Okpara in a programme centred around the theme of football.

For five days in October, Manchester Camerata is crossing Greater Manchester in its festival called Here We Are. The orchestra will perform in chamber-group pop-ups across all 10 boroughs, meeting people where they are.

In the 2025/26 season, the orchestra is expanding its Music in Mind programme. Twelve of its flagship Music Cafés for people living with dementia across are currently live with a further eight being introduced in autumn 2025, collaborating with local delivery partners in each Greater Manchester borough such as Age UK, Together Dementia Support and Lighthouse Project. Manchester Camerata welcomes all people living with dementia and their carers to take part in the Music Cafés. Their expansion follows a partnership with The University of Manchester of more than a decade and the launch of the UK’s first Centre of Excellence for Music and Dementia in Greater Manchester last year, hosted by Manchester Camerata.

The Camerata 360° Ruth Sutton Fellowship is also expanding. This supports musicians and composers based in Greater Manchester and the surrounding counties. The 2025/26 season sees the inclusion of wind, brass and string players under 30 with an undergraduate music degree or equivalent qualification. The fellowship trains young musicians and composers in their individual crafts, combating the increasing lack of such opportunities in the region, giving them hands-on work experience across the community, performance and creative aspects of Camerata’s work, preparing them for careers in an ever-changing sector.

Full details from the Manchester Camerata website.

Wagner and the Creation of the Ring

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Nikolas Mavreas, in his first article for Classical Music Daily, reads Michael Downes' book

A vivid sense of style & stagecraft with some of the best Handel singers around: Rodelinda at Garsington Opera

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 09:07:55 +0000

Handel: Rodelinda - Lucy Crowe - Garsington Opera (Photo: courtesy Garsington Opera)

Handel: Rodelinda; Lucy Crowe, Tim Mead, Ed Lyon, Brandon Cedel, Marvic Monreal, Hugh Cutting, director: Ruth Knight, the English Concert, conductor: Peter Whelan; Garsington Opera
Reviewed 29 June 2025

With a title role performed with real style and agency by Lucy Crowe partnered by Tim Mead singing with luminous tone there is plenty to enjoy, complemented by an intelligent and imaginative presentation of some real drama

Unlike some Baroque operas, where narrative logic takes second place to the creation of dramatic situations that put their characters through a series of moral dilemmas, Handel's Rodelinda has a remarkable focus to its plot. Partly, this is because the drama concentrates on Rodelinda and Bertarido and the piece becomes, effectively, an examination of marital fidelity. Of course, there are logic holes too; in Act Three, for instance, Nicola Francesco Haym's libretto rather trips up on itself in order to give Rodelinda a scene where she believes Bertarido is dead. But what a scene it is. And that is the attraction of this opera; Handel at his peak writing music allied to a libretto that requires a lot less special pleading than some Baroque operas.

For its new production of Handel's Rodelinda, Garsington Opera has turned to Ruth Knight for a production that builds on Handel's focus on the title role by giving Rodelinda real agency. We caught the performance on Sunday 29 June 2025. The English Concert was conducted by Peter Whelan, artistic director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra with whom he performed Vivaldi's L'Olimpiade with Irish National Opera in 2024 [see my review].

Handel: Rodelinda - Tim Mead, Marvic Monreal - Garsington Opera (Photo: courtesy Garsington Opera)

Lucy Crowe was Rodelinda with Tim Mead as Bertarido, plus Ed Lyon as Grimoaldo, Brandon Cedel as Garibaldo, Marvic Monreal as Eduige and Hugh Cutting as Unulfo. Designs were by Leslie Travers with lighting by Ben Pickersgill and movement by Rebecca Meltzer.

Travers' elegant set was based around steelwork that almost seemed an extension of the theatre itself. The look was modern, with a series of balconies and linking upper walkway which imaginatively gave the stage two levels. Costumes were modern, but there was also an element to the exotic too; place and time were nonspecific, though the characters' obsession with regal regalia (crown, orb and sceptre) placed it at a remove from the contemporary. There was a playful element, when Bertarido is in disguise in Act 2, Tim Mead wore a costume that would not have disgraced Elton John in his pomp, and when Garibaldo made public appearances he wore a mask somewhat similar to something Orville Peck would wear. But the biggest visual stimulus during the opera was the use of 14 dancers who formed a troupe that did Garibaldo and Grimoaldo's bidding, but also acted as a sort of visual commentary.

Knight told the story well, providing clarity and helping the narrative by including a prologue (during the overture) where we saw the events that led up to the opera's narrative. But there was a restless element too. The use of the dancers hinted at the idea that Knight was not quite comfortable with an empty stage, the Handelian trope of one singer on stage alone for ten minutes or so. Instead we had a visual commentary; at times, such as in Act Two when the sequence of Marvic Monreal's Eduige using a pigs head, then both Brandon Cedel's Grimoaldo and Hugh Cutting's Unulfo having a full accompaniment of dancers participating in their arias, things did feel over busy but thankfully by the end of that act things had calmed down.

Handel: Rodelinda - Marvic Monreal - Garsington Opera (Photo: courtesy Garsington Opera)

The drama needed no extra help because Knight and Whelan had drawn such strong and musical performances from the cast.

From the outset, Lucy Crowe made a powerful, intent Rodelinda. There was no doubting her feeling for her husband during the opening aria where Crowe's plangent tone brought out the intensity of the music, but in her second aria she was all defiance against Ed Lyon's Garibaldo. And this was a Rodelinda who wore trousers and knew how to use a sword. She might lament the loss of her husband, yet she had real agency. In Act Two, dressed remarkably in Medieval style (with a wimple) in Virginal blue and white, Crowe brought real strength to Rodelinda's challenge to Grimoaldo (if you want to marry me, kill my son), even to the extent of drinking pigs blood. Crowe brought this all off with real relish, singing with fearsome tone, yet her final aria in the act, when Tim Mead's Bertarido revealed himself to her, was quietly moving. The third act places Rodelinda on an emotional rollercoaster, there is the wonderful duet with her husband but then his apparent loss (again!) and a powerful aria of lament. The duet with Mead was everything we could wish for whilst Crowe was intensely moving in the aria, pushing everything onto the tone and the music, with little in the way of staging.

Bertarido does get an action aria at the very end of the opera when he lets Grimoaldo live. But for much of the time, the role displays the first Bertarido, castrato Senesino's penchant for the 'pathetic' in 18th century usage. He is initially somewhat passive, with a pastoral element, along with a willingness to think the worst. The advantage was that Tim Mead sang this music so beautifully, from the opening notes of his first aria with the messa di voce on 'Dove sei' we knew that we were in for a treat. Mead brought a luminous quality and an intensity to Bertarido's music, so that his character felt rather less of a wimp. There was real depth to his feelings in Act Two when he believes Rodelinda is unfaithful, and the connection between Mead and Crowe was palpable at their reconciliation in Act Two and the duet in Act Three. Then Mead gave us heroic tone and real bravura for that final aria. Bertarido is never going to be an action hero, but here he felt a lot less passive. His appearance in disguise in Act Two, with a smoke-filled entrance reminiscent of a rock concert was at some remove from the pastoral nature of his aria, but Mead brought this off brilliantly.

Handel: Rodelinda - Brandon Cedel, Ed Lyon - Garsington Opera (Photo: courtesy Garsington Opera)

Grimoaldo is a weak, vacillating character. To this Ed Lyon brought a heavy dose of charm too, his Grimoaldo seemed to think he could get whatever he wanted through personality alone. His attempt to be overbearing in Act One failed, and for his wedding in Act Two his outfit was almost laughably over the top. If he wasn't so vicious, this Grimoaldo would have been a pitiable figure and it was part of Lyon's skill that he managed to walk the fine line between the two; vain, vicious and vacillating, a fatal mix. Vocally Lyon had the right combination of power and flexibility in the voice.

The power behind the throne was Brandon Cedel's Garibaldo, strong and resonant of tone, with a nice sense of bravura where necessary, Cedel brought real focus to the character, there was no black and white. He very much projected 'hard man' sex appeal, and his seduction of Monreal's Eduige in Act One was masterly, but it was followed by a solo where Cedel brought out the real blackness in Garibaldo. There was a control about him and his body language, in his vivid aria in Act Two it was the dancers who swirled around, articulating the music.

Bertarido's sister Eduige can be a somewhat sorry character, always mooning after the wrong man. Here she was firmly a secondary role, yet Marvic Monreal brought strength to her performance, and with a vividness to Eduige's various swings of humour, from vowing revenge on Grimoaldo in Act One, to her remarkably vicious aria in Act Two with its use of a pigs head; a real bravura performance. Yet Monreal was touching in her reconciliation with Mead's Bertarido at the end of Act Two.

Unulfo is a secondary role, one where the arias can often be cut and it has to be admitted that none of them take the plot forward in any way. But when you have a singer of the quality of Hugh Cutting in the role, it makes sense to include all three. And Cutting sang with great beauty of tone, investing his simile arias in a real depth of meaning. Yet his performance had puckish quality too in the way that his Unulfo has agency, it is he that orchestrates things in the background.

Nicholas Thurbin who played the silent role of Flavio, Rodelinda and Bertarido's teenage son, had a rather bigger role than is often the case, and Thurbin played it admirably.

Handel: Rodelinda - Hugh Cutting - Garsington Opera (Photo: courtesy Garsington Opera)

Orchestrally, Handel uses only flute/recorder, oboe and bassoons in addition to strings and continuo, yet Peter Whelan and the orchestra found real tonal riches in the music. Whelan managed to conjure some wonderfully rich sounds from his players, whilst providing admirable support to the singers. Musically this was a very strong performance, with a soloists who were all fine stylists sympathetically partnered by Whelan and the orchestra. The continuo of two harpsichords (Whelan and Ashok Gupta), theorbo (Sergio Bucheli) and cello (Joseph Crouch) provided variety and imagination, whilst the recitatives kept up in a nicely pacey manner.

This was an evening that seemed admirably free of gimmick. There was little sense of that element of crowd pleasing that can creep into Handel's opera seria. Everything was here for a reason, yet done with a vivid sense of style and stagecraft that made the stage performances all the more compelling, supported by strong musical performances from some of the best Handel singers around.

Never miss out on future posts by following us

The blog is free, but I'd be delighted if you were to show your appreciation by buying me a coffee.

Elsewhere on this blog

A different focus: Timothy Ridout in Mozart & Hummel with Academy of St Martin in the Fields plus Rossini & a Weber symphony - concert review
From Handel to Verdi & beyond: Soraya Mafi on singing in Handel's Saul at Glyndebourne, expanding into bel canto & Bernstein - interview
An alternative way people can encounter classical music: Baldur Brönnimann & Felix Heri introduce Between Mountains Festival - feature
The BBC Symphony Orchestra’s visit to this year’s Aldeburgh Festival - concert review
Brilliant reinvention & razor sharp take-down: Scottish Opera's double-bill pairs Gilbert & Sullivan with Toby Hession's brand new comedy - opera review
A trio of concerts at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival highlights the diversity of music to be found on the Suffolk coast - concert review
That was quite a party! Paul Curran's production of Die Fledermaus at The Grange Festival is a terrific evening in the theatre - opera review
Modern resonances & musical style: Richard Farnes conducts Verdi's La traviata at The Grange Festival with Samantha Clarke & Nico Darmanin - opera review
Maiden, Mother & Crone: Rowan Hellier on her interdisciplinary project integrating music & movement exploring Baba Yaga - interview
The Merry Widow meets the Godfather: Scottish Opera brings John Savournin's production of Lehár's operetta to Opera Holland Park - review
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Summoning the ancestors with harpist Brandee Younger

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Lara Downes sits down with the brilliant jazz harpist to discuss the power of female lineage in the worlds of jazz and classical music.

Gerald Finzi (1901-56) Prelude, op.25 for string orchestra (late 1920s.)

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 05:00:00 +0000

The Prelude, op. 25 for string orchestra was originally the first movement of a projected chamber symphony with the rustic title of The Bud, The Blossom and the Berry. This was to have been, in effect, Finzi’s Seasons. These movements were written after the composer had moved to London and had come under the aegis of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The work was never completed, although the composer did revisit the score in later years.

The piece was recovered from Finzi’s sketches after his death. The other surviving movement from this abandoned project is The Fall of the Leaf.

The Prelude begins quietly, followed by a solo violin adding its thoughts, before the music builds up to a restrained climax, where, for a short while the predominant sadness suddenly reflects the warmth of spring. However, even this short-lived rapture is tinged with melancholy. The harmonic structure of the work is largely straightforward, but here and there some mild dissonances add to the music’s introspection.

Finzi scholar Diana McVeagh has remarked that the temper of the Prelude is ‘gloomy’ and hardly presents the mood of ‘spring’, which was its original intention. Listeners must recall that much of Finzi’s music meditates on the transience of life. This melancholy temperament may have been encouraged by the profound impact of his father’s death in 1909: nine years later, Finzi’s music teacher Ernest Farrar was killed at Cambrai in the last months of the Great War.

Gerald Finzi’s Prelude was given its premiere posthumously at St John’s Church, Stockcross, Berkshire on 27 April 1957. The Newbury String Players, which Finzi founded in 1940 and had a long and deep association, were conducted by the composer’s son, Christopher. The work was published by Boosey & Hawkes the following year.

With thanks to the English Music Festival where this programme note was first published.

Eyvazov is a compelling Hermann and Netrebko an expressive Lisa in a Vienna revival of The Queen of Spades

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 22:57:48 +0000

Tchaikovsky, The Queen of Spades (Pique Dame): Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Vienna State Opera / Timur Zangiev (conductor). Livestreamed from the Vienna State Opera (directed by Dominik Kepczynski), 27.6.2025. (JPr) I still see quite a lot of opera one way or other but it was only when the curtain sent up for Tchaikovsky’s 1890 The Queen of ... Read more