Delius and Dickens in Ealing

The Ealing Autumn Festival (12 - 27 October) celebrates the music of Delius and the work of Charles Dickens (both having significant anniversaries this year). Julian Lloyd Webber opens the festival with a recital which includes Delius's Cello Sonata (plus music by Rachmaninov, Britten, Bridge and William Lloyd Webber). Other musicians will also be including Delius's music in their programmes, and the West London Sinfonia, conducted by Philip Hesketh, will be playing the Delius Piano Concerto with soloist Viv McLean. Dickens features in a number of films, including the Ealing Studios Nicholas Nickelby actually shown in Ealing Studios. There is a wide mix of events including visual arts, literature, exhibitions (including one exploring Delius's link to Hanwell), plenty of films and the obligatory family friendly events. More information at the Ealing Autumn Festival website.

Gabrieli - Elijah launch

Last night, the Gabrieli Consort and Players held an event to celebrate the release of their new CD of Mendelssohn's Elijah on Paul McCreesh's Winged Lion label (see my review). There was a short illuminating video about the making of the recording (see it here on Vimeo), a talk from Paul McCreesh and some live entertainment. The video was fascinating, making clear just quite how many performers there were. Whilst the core of the choir was made up of singers from Gabriel and the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir, around half the total were young singers from choirs with which Paul McCreesh and Gabrieli have started to develop a relationship.

From bow to baton - Rachael Young's Cadogan Hall debut

Rachael Young has played cello in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music and moved to the UK to study cello with William Pleeth and Moray Welsh. But at the same time she was interested in moving from behind a cello and onto the conductor's podium. Since 2007 she has been doing masterclasses with conductors such as Neeme Jarvi and for the last three years has been studying with Leonid Grin (Paavo Jarvi's former teacher and Leonard Bernstein's assistant in the 1980's). Now she is making her Cadogan Hall debut on 23 November, conducting the Russian Virtuosi of Europe.

Britten 100 - Reaching Out

Besides celebrating Britten's music, Britten 100 involves a variety of events and artists who are reaching out to a wider audience, whether this is by creating new music, performing in unusual venues, involving 75, 000 children in singing Britten or encouraging local arts groups in Norfolk and Suffolk to perform Britten's music, and then there is the issuing of a 50p coin.

CD Review - Handel's Saul

Handel's Saul has been reasonably lucky on disc. John Eliot Gardiner's recording from 1989 with Alistair Miles as Saul is still something of a bench-mark, and Joachim Carlos Martini's 1997 recording for Naxos has its interesting dramatic moments. Now the Sixteen, under conductor Harry Christophers, have recorded the work after performing it with the same principals at the Barbican last year. The recording is based on the edition of the work by the late Anthony Hicks and the work is performed complete. In running time, Christophers comes in at just 4 minutes longer than Gardiner.

Art of the future? Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable

Robert le Diable at the Paris Opera

French Grand Opera is a rather specific sort of of sub-genre of opera that developed in Paris in the late 1820's, partly as a result of the changing audience demographic. Middle-class audiences were not interested in the tragedie lyrique which had been the Paris Opera's standard fare, so the Grand Opera developed. The first acknowledged opera in this genre was Auber's La muette de Portici with a libretto by Scribe. It was Scribe who effectively codified the rules for Grand Opera. But the composer most associated with the genre is Giacomo Meyerbeer, from the spectacular first night of Robert le Diable, his first French language opera, he was the genre's undisputed king.

HIP Bach at St. Martins

The Feinstein Ensemble and the London Bach Singers, directed by Martin Feinstein, are making three appearances at St. Martin in the Fields, Trafalgar Square, giving us all an opportunity to hear their historically informed brand of Bach, complete with just one singer per part. They will be performing two programmes of Bach cantatas  and extracts from the Christmas Oratorio on 20 September, 25 October and 24 November.

East Finchley Arts Festival

East Finchley tube station

Based at All Saints Church, East Finchley, the East Finchley Arts Festival offers and interesting mix of events from 5 to 14 October 2012. Founded in 1997, the festival is very much a local affair, it is heartening the way lots of different areas of London have local arts and music festivals which respond in varied ways to the area and the buildings within it. Festival Director Geoffrey Hansen is director of music at the church and his Odyssey for solo cello and strings will be receiving its premiere at the concert on 6 October with Hansen conducting the London Mozart Players, the programme also includes music by Elgar, Boccherini and Britten.

Britten 100 in print and manuscript

In print and manuscript, there are a varied selection of contributions to Britten 100. The British Library will be displaying manuscripts from its fine collection of Britten's m/s, including its recent acquisition The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra, in print there are newly published pieces, new editions of classic Britten pieces and a clutch of books including two new biographies and memoirs by Ronald Blythe and Beth Britten.

Gretry and Philidor - Bampton comes to London

Bampton Classical Opera pitch up in London on Tuesday 18 September at St Johns Smith Square. Their double bill of Philidor's Blaise le savetier and Gretry's L'amant jaloux debuted in July at the Deanery Garden in July, their 20th anniversary season at Bampton. Popular in the 18th century, the music of Philidor and Gretry has not yet made a real come back though Sir Thomas Beecham was a devotee. So a chance to appreciate them on stage.

Am I too loud - Melba and Wagner

Melba as Marguerite
in 1896

Listening to Dame Nellie Melba’s records we hear a voice which is rather white, but could be described as silvery. With a bit of imagination we can, perhaps, appreciate that live she might have sounded like a description of her voice written in 1931 by the veteran American critic W.J. Henderson; remembering her Metropolitan debut when "the voice was in the plenitude of its glory" he said her voice "has been called silvery, but what does that signify? There is one quality which it had which may be comprehended even by those who did not hear her: it had splendour. The tones glowed with a star-like brilliance. They flamed with a white heat." At the time of her European debuts, she impressed critics with her rare beauty of tone and finish of technique. She is most associated today with roles such as Ophelie (Hamlet) and Marguerite (Faust). (Listen to her on Youtube as Gounod's Juliet)

Recent CD review

My review of Cavalli's Il Giasone from Vlaamse Opera with Christopher Dumaux in the title role, is here on MusicWeb-International.com

A dramatic and engaging live event.

South Bank 2012/13 season - part 2

You can start the New Year in great fashion with OAE’s performance of The Creation under Adam Fischer (9 January), and Joseph Calleja will be appearing with the Philharmonia under Andrew Greenwood on 11 January in a programme of popular operatic favourites plus a tribute to Mario Lanza! With the LPO’s 19 January concert we see the start of the Southbank’s The Rest is Noise Festival. Themed for Alex Ross’s book, the festival is a year long survey of 20^th century classical music. On the one hand you think that the subject matter and the length (a whole year) make the festival rather too diffuse and that the Southbank should be doing this anyway. But there are some terrific events and if having a festival helps people concentrate their minds and produce something extra, then what the hell. Of course, this season also marks the LPO’s 80^th anniversary and their contribution to The Rest is Noise and the remainder of the Southbank Season is very tempting indeed.

Britten 100: broadcast, film, dvd and cd

Britten is being celebrated extensively next year on TV, radio and film as well as DVD. Tony Palmer is adding to his substantial back catalogue of films on Britten with a new film for Sky Arts, and four of his classics come out on DVD, plus a new film from Tony Britten on Benjamin Britten's pacifism. The BBC will be doing sterling work on TV (with a remastering of Owen Wingrave) and on Radio 3, with the broadcast of all of Britten's operas. ICA Classics will be releasing two DVD's, one of which includes rare footage of Britten conducting scenes from Gloriana, a work he never recorded in the studio. And a 40 CD boxed set from Decca of all of Britten's recordings of his own works.

ENO Magic Flute

Shawn Mathey, Elena Xanthoudakis
(c) Alastair Muir

Is it really 25 years? English National Opera have revived Nicholas Hytner’s 1988 production of The Magic Flute for one last time, to celebrate the production’s 25th anniversary. My first encounter with The Magic Flute in a professional production was ENO on tour in 1976 in a production by Anthony Besch, which was itself relatively long lived. For years after its opening, Nicholas Hytner’s production remained in my eyes ‘the new production’. For their revival this time, (the 14th revival), ENO went for a cast which mixed innocence and experience, led by conductor Nicholas Collon making his ENO debut. We saw the opening night on Thursday 13 September 2012.

This autumn's season at the Royal College of Music starts of with something of a stunner. On 26 September there are two pieces by Hans Gal, in a concert curated by Norbert Meyn and with soprano Patrizia Rosario. Gal was a distinguished composer in Germany in the 1930's who had to flee the Nazis. He ended up living in the Black Forest, where he wrote Nachtmusik for soprano, male choir, flute, cello and piano. Come seven years later, he had fled to the UK where he was interned as an enemy alien in a camp on the Isle of Wight. There he wrote the comic review What a life! I had exposure to some of Gal's fascinating and elegant music when I lived in Scotland, as he was the Hon. President of the Edinburgh Chamber Orchestra, the orchestra that I played in. In fact I played in his Serenade, Op 46 at a concert in the late 1970's, conducted by Miles Baster, where Hans Gal was present.

British Youth Opera - A Night at the Chinese Opera

Louise Kemeny (Little Moon),
Johnny Herford (Chao Lin),
Helen Bruce (Mrs Chin) and
Thomas Elwin (Old P'eng)

Over the last few years, British Youth Opera has expanded its repertoire to include contemporary operas, alongside the classics and 20th century masterworks. Jonathan Dove’s Flight and Stephen Oliver’s Euridice have already featured in its summer season at the Peacock Theatre and for its 25th anniversary season there was Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera. We saw the opening night on 12 September, in a production directed by Stuart Barker, designed by Simon Bejer and conducted by Lionel Friend.

Gurney Violin sonata recording

20th century British music continues to inch its way out from the bottom draw, but there is still a considerable amount of music unpublished and unrecorded. Ivor Gurney is best known as a poet and as a composer of songs. But his output, slim though it is, consists of more than just songs, according to Grove there are six violin sonatas, five string quartets and an extended orchestral piece all remaining unpublished. Now EM Records, the recording arm of the Dorset based English Music Festival, is recording Gurney's Sonata for Violin and Piano in E flat. The work is being recorded later this month by Rupert Marshall-Luck and Matthew Wickard for release on the EM Records label. The label has already acquired an interesting list of lesser known English works, works deserving to be hear.

Further details from the EM Records website.

In Harmony - Sistema England gets new board members

Having received the recent news that further In Harmony - Sistema England projects are to be funded by the Department of Education and the Arts Council, the board of trustees of In Harmony - Sistema England is to have two new members. Existing board members, Julian Lloyd Webber (cellist and founder of In Harmony), Richard Hallam (former government music education advisor) and Nina Kaye (performing arts professional) are being joined by Marshall Marcus and Melanie Stoutzker.

Southbank 2012/13 season - part 1

The Southbank's new season kick’s off with a bang later this month with a pair of rarely performed operas. The New London Orchestra under Ronald Corp are performing Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet on 24 September with a terrific cast, Andrew Staples, Anna Devin, Christopher Maltman, Andrew Shore and David Wilson-Johnson as the Dark Fiddler. It is a welcome opportunity to see an opera which has been woefully lacking in London. Then the London Philharmonic under Vlladimir Jurowski is performing Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy, based on Oscar Wilde’s play. This will be teamed with excerpts from Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten. These are just the harbingers of a season at the Southbank which has reacquired some of the zing and sparkle that seems to have been missing recently.