Two discs of 19th century pianistic fireworks, plus a collection of Italian madrigals
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2, Strauss: BurleskeJoseph Moog (piano), Deutsche Radio Philharmonie/Nicholas Milton (Onyx)
Classical CDs Weekly: Brahms, Sterndale Bennett, Fieri Consort
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Carmen, Royal Opera review - clever concept, patchy singing, sexy dancing
No central chemistry, but Barrie Kosky serves up set pieces full of panache
Roll up, dépêchez-vous, for Carmen the - what? Circus? Vaudeville/music-hall/cabaret? Opéra-ballet, post-Rameau? Not, certainly, a show subject to the kind of updated realism which has been applied by just about every production other than the previous two at Covent Garden.
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Classical CDs Weekly: Shostakovich, Christoph Prégardien, Nataša Mirkovič
Chilly orchestral music from the USSR, plus a pair of brass-accompanied vocal recitals
Shostakovich: Symphony No 6, Sinfonietta (Quartet No 8, arr. Abram Stasevich)Estonian Festival Orchestra/Paavo Järvi (Alpha Classics)
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Tosca, Welsh National Opera review - ticking the traditionalist boxes
Pasteboard verismo done by the book with impressive results
Opera-lovers: if you’ve finally had enough of the wheelchairs and syringes, the fifties skirts and heels, the mobile phones and the white box sets, and the rest of the symbolic paraphernalia of the right-on modern opera production, pop along to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and catch up with Michael Blakemore’s quarter-century old staging of Puccini’s great warhorse.
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Iolanthe, English National Opera review - bright and beautiful G&S for all
Cal McCrystal's pretty, hilarious show should delight young and old alike
Very well, so ENO's latest Gilbert and Sullivan spectacular was originally to have been The Gondoliers directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. But that Venetian fantasia has already been seen at the Coliseum in recent years, and Iolanthe - which I can't remember experiencing live with a full orchestra since the declining years of the D'Oyly Carte - ranges wider.
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La Vie Parisienne, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire review - vintage champagne in a new bottle
A celebratory production adds up to more than the sum of its parts
Don’t you just love that new concert hall smell? The main hall at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is so new that as soon as you walk in you get the scent of fresh woodwork; so new, in fact, that it won’t even be officially opened until next month (Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the Earl of Wessex are doing the honours, apparently).
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Hallenberg, LSO, Gardiner, Barbican review - palpitating Schumann and Berlioz
Supreme communication from conductor, mezzo-soprano and an orchestra on top form
Violins, violas, wind and brass all standing for Schumann: gimmick or gain? As John Eliot Gardiner told the audience with his usual eloquence while chairs were being brought on for the Berlioz in the first half of last night's concert, Mendelssohn set the trend as conductor with Leipzig's Gewandhausorchester - though as I understand it, only the violins stood - and some chamber orchestras of comparable size have adopted the practice.
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Victorian Giants, National Portrait Gallery review - pioneers of photography
Artistic searches, technical advances fuel the discoveries of the Victorian age
It is a very human crowd at Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography. There are the slightly melancholic portraits of authoritative and bearded male Victorian eminences, among them Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle and Sir John Herschel.
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Faust, LSO, Gardiner, Barbican review - Schumann as never before
An elusive violin concerto reassessed in victory for a misunderstood orchestral master
When a great musician pulls out of a concerto appearance, you're usually lucky if a relative unknown creates a replacement sensation. In this case not one but two star pianists withdrew – Maria João Pires, scheduling early retirement, succeeded by an unwell Piotr Anderzewski – and instead we had that most musicianly and collaborative of violinists Isabelle Faust in Schumann, not the scheduled Mozart.
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La traviata, English National Opera review - into a vortex of ineptitude
Daniel Kramer digs a grave for musical-theatre possibilities
You don't have to be a good director to manage the artistic side of an opera house. Daniel Kramer arrived at ENO and boosted morale at a time when company relations with then-CEO Cressida Pollock had hit rock bottom, and his repertoire choices for the new limited seasons look fine so far.
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Martín, SCO, Ticciati, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - farewell to the best of chief conductors
Electrifying Dvořák 'New World' from a dream team
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s final season concert conducted by Robin Ticciati, who leaves his post as chief conductor of the SCO for the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, was bound to be an emotional occasion. Spanning a decade, the relationship between orchestra and conductor has been a very special one indeed, and has seen an abundance of success over the past 10 years.
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DVD: Queerama
A glorious film reclamation of Britain’s troubled gay past
Last year, the BFI commemorated the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality with the release of Queerama, part of its Gross Indecency film season.
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DVD/Blu-ray: An Actor's Revenge
Japanese fascination in stage story told with overlapping plot strands, distinctive doubling
Japanese director Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge is something of a one-off. Even in the context of the prolific director’s career variety, it’s an unusually stylised and visually captivating story of high artifice – there’s rich melodrama in its kabuki emotional playing and theatrical setting – that is set against the lowlife criminal comedy of 19th century Tokugawa Tokyo, or Edo as it was then known. Rich and strange, indeed.
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Robin Ticciati on conducting Brahms: 'trying to understand the man through his music'
A masterclass in the preparation and performance of a great symphony
Edinburgh, October 2015. Robin Ticciati is still flying high from a remarkable performance of Brahms's First Symphony, the start of an intended cycle with his Scottish Chamber Orchestra in his seventh season as principal conductor. After a revelatory dissection of the thinking that shaped the interpretation, we both look forward to the end of the experience later in the season, with the Fourth.
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Dickson, SCO, Swensen, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh review - world premiere of a bold new work
James MacMillan takes the saxophone into uncharted territory
It’s as intricate as it is concise. The depth to the architecture of James MacMillan’s Saxophone Concerto – which was given its world premiere this week by saxophonist Amy Dickson and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – is quite astounding, and all the more so for being packed into three five-minute movements.
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Monet and Architecture, National Gallery review - a revelation in paint
The king of the blockbuster seen in a new light
Art historians can so easily get carried away looking for a thesis, a scaffolding on which to hang theories which can sometimes obscure as much as reveal. Not so here: as near perfect as might be imagined, this is a beautifully laid out, fresh look at a master painter, that lights up the National Gallery's basement exhibition space.
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Eugene Onegin, Scottish Opera review - sweepingly sumptuous Tchaikovsky
Evocative staging coupled with glorious music-making highlight power and passion
It’s 25 years since Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin last came to the Scottish Opera stage, and this brand new production, directed by Oliver Mears, DIrector of Opera at The Royal Opera, gives the stirring score a stately yet elusive grandeur.
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Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece, British Museum review - magnificence of form across the millennia
A game-changing exhibition illuminates the great sculptor and his links to antiquity
In bronze, marble, stone and plaster, as far as the eye can see, powerful figures and fragments – divine and human, mythological and real; athletes, soldiers and horses alongside otherworldly creatures like Centaurs – stride out. They pose, re-pose, twist, turn and captivate as that 19th century sculptor of genius, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), encountered and absorbed, with such sensual pleasure, the art of antiquity.
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Classical CDs Weekly: Beethoven, Méhul, Mozart, Schubert
Revolutionary symphonies and a much-loved requiem, plus new translations of German lieder
Beethoven: Symphony No 3, Méhul: Symphony No 1Solistes Européens Luxembourg/Christoph König (Rubicon)
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Pianist Christopher Glynn on Schubert in English: 'this new translation never walks on stilts'
On working with Roderick Williams and Jeremy Sams on 'Winter Journey'
The idea for a new translation of Schubert's Winterreise came from an old recording. Harry Plunket Greene was nearly 70 (and nearly voiceless) when he entered the studio in 1934 and sang "Der Leiermann," the final song of the cycle, in English (as "The Hurdy-Gurdy Man") into a closely-placed microphone. But the result is unforgettable - a haunting performanceofthe most mysterious soliloquy in all music, given by an old singer nearing the end of his own road.
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