A dramatic feast for the eyes as well as the ears, this should have been on TV
How do you make your mark in a crucial last week after the Olympian spectaculars of Kirill Petrenko's Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic?
Prom 71, DiDonato, Tamestit, ORR, Gardiner review - concert Berlioz as bracing theatre
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Isouard's Cendrillon, Bampton Classical Opera review - stepsisters shine in fairy-tale bagatelle
Maltese-French composer's Cinders opera is mostly routine, but performed with esprit
Cinderella as opera in French: of late, the palm has always gone to Massenet's adorable (as in a-dor-Ah-bler) confection, and it should again soon when Glyndebourne offers a worthy home to the master's magic touch. The Cendrillon of Maltese-born honorary Parisian Nicolas Isouard, aka Nicolò, clearly had its day after the 1810 premiere, but it was eclipsed by Rossini's La Cenerentola coming along seven years later, and with good reason.
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Das Rheingold, Royal Opera review - high drama and dark comedy
Strong casting and dynamic staging augur well for Covent Garden’s latest Ring revival
Keith Warner’s production of Wagner'sDer Ring des Nibelungen was first seen at Covent Garden between 2004 and 2006, and is now back for a third and final series of full runs, chiefly to catch the Brünnhilde of Nina Stemme in three of the operas, continuing into November.
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Die Walküre, Royal Opera review – putting family before sex
Strong casting and unreliable chemistry in the last hurrah for a well-grooved staging
Perched alone and fearful in her hut as the curtain rises on Die Walküre, Sieglinde clutches and then throws aside a grimy teddy-bear. Story time is over. The nymphs and gold and bickering gods all belong in the past, to the ‘preliminary evening’ of Das Rheingold, or so Sieglinde might think. The real drama of Wagner's Ring begins here.
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Psappha, Kok / Kempf, Northern Chamber Orchestra, Stoller Hall, Manchester review - new and old
Classics come in two sizes at Manchester season openers
The Stoller Hall, the modest-size auditorium inside Chetham’s School of Music, is really proving itself to be the venue Manchester has long needed this season. Two concerts on successive days, each the first of a series and both making something of a statement, proved that.
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Siegfried, Royal Opera review - a truly fearless hero
Stefan Vinke and Nina Stemme bring epic poetry to an often prosaic Ring
Siegfried is usually the problem with Siegfried. Even Stuart Skelton, top Tristan and currently singing an acclaimed Siegmund in this last revival of Keith Warner's rattlebag Ring, won't touch the longest, toughest heroic-tenor role in Wagner, the protagonist of his third opera in the tetralogy.
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Gerald Finley, Julius Drake, Middle Temple Hall review - sublimity in 18 serious songs
Profound insights but no ponderousness from a great bass-baritone and piano duo
Earth stood hard as iron in parts of this awe-inspiring recital from a true song partnership, but theirs was an autumnal odyssey, not a winter journey.
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The Sweet Science of Bruising, Southwark Playhouse review - boxing clever
Victorian pugilistic drama: thoroughly heartfelt, highly original and completely timely
There are not that many plays about sport, but, whether you gamble on results or not, you can bet that most of them are about boxing. And often set in the past.
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Montserrat Caballé (1933-2018): from Bellini to 'Barcelona'
Glimpses of the Spanish soprano who could float a line like no other
Her special claim to fame was the most luminous pianissimo in the business, but that often went hand in velvet glove with fabulous breath control and a peerless sense of bel canto line. To know Maria de Montserrat Viviana Concepción Caballé i Folch, born in Barcelona 85 years ago, was clearly to love her. I never did (know her, that is), and I only saw her once, in a 1986 recital at the Edinburgh Festival. By then she was careful with her resources, but the subtly jewelled programme delivered on its own terms.
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BBC Philharmonic, Wellber, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - new conductor’s debut
Harbinger of things to come – the spirit of the stage
Two days after announcing his appointment as their next chief conductor (he takes the reins officially next summer, in time for the Proms), by remarkable good fortune the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic was able to present Omer Meir Wellber as the conductor of their second Bridgewater Hall series concert.
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Opolais, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Nelsons, RFH review - splendid and awful stretches
New work excepted, this second Southbank concert from Germans and Latvians shone
Latvia is fighting fit. The recent elections did not see the expected victory for the pro-Kremlin Harmony party; support for the European Union and NATO will be well represented. Last week the feisty Lavtian Ambassador to the UK, Baiba Braže, landed a perfectly diplomatic punch on the smug mug of our latest apology for a Foreign Secretary, taking former Remainer Hunt to task for his outrageous parallels between the EU and the Soviet gulag by reminding him how Latvia had suffered under the USSR and how eagerly it has adopted the best European values.
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CBSO, Leleux, Birmingham Town Hall review - oboe extraordinaire
Who needs a baton when you've got an oboe? Charisma triumphs in Haydn and Bizet
There’s always a special atmosphere when the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra returns to Birmingham Town Hall, and it’s not just because of the building’s Greek Revival beauty: the gilded sunburst on the ceiling, or the towering, intricately painted mass of the organ, topped with its cameo of Queen Victoria.
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theartsdesk in Stockholm: the Birgit Nilsson Prize unites two great Wagnerian sopranos
Nina Stemme does honour to her compatriot, who would have been 100 this year
Why are great Wagnerian singers the most down-to-earth and collegial in the world of opera? Perhaps you have to be to master and sustain the biggest roles in the business, ones which can't be performed in isolation, and a strong constitution helps, too. Birgit Nilsson, the farmer's daughter born in rural Sweden 100 years ago, had all those qualities and many more.
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Verdi's Requiem, Royal Opera, Pappano review - all that heaven allows
Incandescence from soloists, chorus, orchestra and conductor in a near-perfect ritual
Here it comes - get a grip. The tears have started flowing in the trio "Quid sum miser" and 12 minutes later, as the tenor embarks on his "Ingemisco" solo, you have to stop the shakes turning into noisy sobbing. The composer then lets you off the hook for a bit, but only transcendent beauty in singing and playing can achieve quite this effect in Verdi's Requiem.
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A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre review - black comedy falls flat
Martin McDonagh's latest is poorly written and lacking in imagination
It's all in the title, isn't it? Martin McDonagh's surreal new play comes with a warning that not only screams its intentions, but echoes them through repetition. Okay, okay, I get it. This is going to be a dark story, a very very very dark story. And, talking of repetition, the show's cast — in its premiere at the Bridge Theatre— is led by Jim Broadbent, who has form with this playwright.
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Red Dead Redemption 2 review - the cowboy drama makes a triumphant return
An ambitious Wild West odyssey that matches epic scale with benchmark skill
Realistic open world games need the little touches to convince you of the reality within which you play. Perhaps it’s your character’s beard that grows a little more each day, maybe it’s the way mud builds up on his boots during wet weather, or how he makes a cup of coffee and talks to members of his 20-strong gang in the morning.
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Peterloo review - Mike Leigh's angry historical drama
Sprawling and wordy, but riveting
Considering how the UK prides itself on having created the "Mother of Parliaments" and its citizens having once chopped off a king's head for thwarting its will, remarkably little is taught in our schools about one of the seminal events on the way to fully democratising this country: the Peterloo Massacre.
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Edward Burne-Jones, Tate Britain review - time for a rethink?
Wide-ranging exhibition of idiosyncratic English artist, both loved and loathed
When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have been expected that the course of his life would change so radically. His mother having died in childbirth, he was brought up by his father, a not particularly successful picture- and mirror-framer in the then mocked industrial city of Birmingham. Early on at King Edward’s School he was marked out as a pupil of promise and transferred to the classics department which enabled him to attend university and prepare for a career in the Church.
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Death and Nightingales, BBC Two, review - slow, lyrical, slightly dull
Jamie Dornan reunites with The Fall creator to explore passion and bigotry in 19th-century Fermanagh
And now for something completely different from The Fall. The nerve-shredding drama from Northern Ireland was written by Allan Cubitt and featured, as its resident psychopathic hottie, Jamie Dornan (pictured below).
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Classical CDs Weekly: Telarc Vinyl, Stravinsky, Hideko Udagawa
Vinyl treasures exhumed, plus two discs of Russian music
Telarc LP Reissues (Craft Recordings)
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