Britten
Mark Wigglesworth for ENOThursday, 23 January 2014
This is great news. It should have been great news back in 2006-7, when Wigglesworth – Mark, not to be confused with the young, photogenic Ryan, composer and, when I last saw him, barely competent baton-wielder - was among the contenders for the... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Britten, Rachmaninov, Mariann MarcziSaturday, 18 January 2014
A Festival of Britten National Youth Choirs of Great Britain (Delphian)Britten's 1961 Fancie opens this collection – a tiny, sublime choral coda to the opera A Midsummer Night's Dream. It lasts barely a minute, and you'll hopefully want to... Read more... |
Classical and Opera 2013: A Year of AnniversariesSaturday, 28 December 2013
Which musical calendar year isn’t laden down with composer commemorations, too often a pretext for lazy and unimaginative planning? The last 12 months, with Verdi, Wagner and Britten as the birthday boys (in case you failed to hear), have raised the... Read more... |
Britten 100: Death in MoscowMonday, 16 December 2013
“A cold coming we had of it,” grumble the three kings in T S Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” later set by Britten as his Canticle IV. “Just the worst time of year for a journey,” they complain, carried onwards by the ungulate bass notes of... Read more... |
Britten 100: King's College Choir, Britten Sinfonia, Cleobury, BarbicanSunday, 08 December 2013
Never review the audience. Thus goes the dictum, so there’ll be no word from me about the cacophony of coughers who conspired to ruin the concert, no complaint about the woman with a video recorder, unchallenged by Barbican staff until the end of... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Britten, Hindemith, The Quadriga ConsortSaturday, 07 December 2013
Britten: Saint Nicolas, Hymn to St Cecilia, Rejoice in the Lamb Andrew Kennedy (tenor), Choir of Kings College Cambridge, Britten Sinfonia/Stephen Cleobury (Kings College)After beginning work on the cantata Saint Nicolas in 1947, Britten... Read more... |
Pavel Haas Quartet, Trifonov, Wigmore HallTuesday, 03 December 2013
There are probably more fine string quartets in the world than audiences to listen to them, or so a gloomy estimate from a major chamber music festival would have us believe. Fortunately the Wigmore Hall usually guarantees crowds to hear the best,... Read more... |
Britten 100: An Aldeburgh Centenary DiaryTuesday, 26 November 2013
The most intensive period of music-making I’ll ever experience, celebrating the 100th birthday of Benjamin Britten in and around his home town, ended on Sunday. I’m an Aldeburgh resident and I attended everything on offer. I thought the best way to... Read more... |
Albert Herring, BBCSO, Bedford, BarbicanSunday, 24 November 2013
Three cheers for good old Albert, natural laugh-out-loud heir of Verdi’s Falstaff and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and the best possible way to mark creator Britten’s being one hundred years and one day old. Youth has its day in both those earlier... Read more... |
Britten 100: Birthday Concert, Union Chapel/A Life in Pictures, National Portrait GallerySaturday, 23 November 2013
“Translated Daughter, come down and startle/Composing mortals with immortal fire.” So W H Auden invokes heavenly Cecilia, patron saint of music, and it seems she did just that with Benjamin Britten, who set Auden’s text for unaccompanied choir and... Read more... |
War Requiem, BBCSO, Bychkov, Royal Albert HallMonday, 11 November 2013
How many reviews of War Requiem do you want to read in Britten centenary year? This is theartsdesk’s fourth, and my second – simply because though I reckon one live performance every five years is enough, Rattle’s much-anticipated Berlin... Read more... |
Belcea Quartet, Wigmore HallSaturday, 02 November 2013
Pure, unorthodox genius: the terms apply both to the three works on the Belcea Quartet’s programme – Haydn at his most compressed, Britten unbuttoned and sunny, Shostakovich hitting the tragic heights – and, if the term “genius” can be applied to re... Read more... |
