I called on Hugo Wolf the other week, and he didn’t look too great. He wouldn’t, of course; he died in a mental asylum in 1903 after suicide attempts, professional disappointment and the slow poison of tertiary syphilis. His face gazes glumly out from his monument in Vienna: above him, a single laurel branch, beneath
By all accounts, the world première of Elgar’s Sea Pictures at the October 1899 Norwich Festival made quite a splash. Elgar conducted, and the soloist was the 27-year-old contralto Clara Butt – dressed in a silky, sinuous number which drew gasps in those corseted late-Victorian days. Elgar thought she looked ‘like a mermaid’; the critics,
Bruckner at the Wigmore Hall. Yes, you heard right: a Bruckner symphony – his second: usually performed by 80-odd musicians – on a stage scarcely larger than my bedroom. How? Welcome to Anthony Payne’s very smart 2013 chamber arrangement. Bruckner on Ozempic. Composition is an Alice in Wonderland activity. A key duty is mastering how
It was such an enticing programme, too. The Philharmonia had booked Evgeny Kissin, the last great piano prodigy of the Soviet era and one of the superstars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. And then there was the music: three Russian showpieces, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s enchanting and almost unplayed (in the UK, anyway) single-movement Piano
Stravinsky’s The Firebird begins in darkness, and it might be the softest, deepest darkness in all music. Basses and cellos rock slowly, pianissimo, in their lowest register; using mutes to give the sound that added touch of velvet. Far beneath them rumbles the bass drum: a halo of blackness, perceptible only at the very edge
In the early 1970s my father moved offices and I was plucked out of my cosy prep school in Surrey to land in the eccentric surroundings of Presentation College. My new school’s modern block was surrounded by decaying Edwardian villas occupied by Irish teaching brothers with impenetrable accents. There was a broken aeroplane on one
The French lutenist Charles Fleury, Sieur de Blancrocher, is one of those unfortunate historical figures who are chiefly remembered because of how they died. He was climbing the stairs to his apartment near the Louvre after a court dinner in November 1652 when he slipped, fell head over heels and was dead a few hours
‘Goodness Triumphant’ is the alternative title of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and you’d better believe he meant it. Possibly my reaction was coloured by last week’s experience with the weapons-grade cynicism of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, but honestly – it’s just so sweet. A gentle, put-upon girl gets her fairy-tale ending in the face of stepsisters and
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, but there’s still time for one last opera festival. Vache Baroque popped up in 2020 during that weird first release from lockdown, but to be honest, if you were starting a new festival, late August is probably the best part of the calendar to colonise. The big
Regarding Frederick Delius, how do we stand? In the 1930s, Sir Henry Wood believed that Proms audiences much preferred Delius to Holst, and most critics back then would have described him as a major British composer. Times change: if you took your music GCSE in the late 1980s, you’ll have sensed that the Bradford lad
No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. ‘This music is top-quality trash,’ proclaims his 1993 album Fashion Music. ‘We kindly ask the users of this CD to play it at the volume of a suburban Paris soundmachine or a London underground discman earphone as used by the kid next door.’
The Edinburgh International Festival opened with John Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, and I wish it hadn’t. Not that they were wrong to do it; in fact it was an heroic endeavour. Drawing on three large choirs, members of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and a sizeable team of soloists, this eight-hour performance was
The Welsh composer William Mathias died in 1992, aged 57. I was a teenager at the time, and the loss felt personal as well as premature. Not that I knew him; and nor was he regarded – in the era of Birtwistle and Tippett – as one of the A-list British composers (John Drummond, the
In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with André Previn, he played all the right notes in the right order. OK, so perhaps I’m selling the maestro a bit short: I do think Brendel, who died on 17 June at the age of
These days the heart sinks when Deutsche Grammophon announces its new releases. I still shudder at the memory of Lang Lang’s 2024 French album, in which he drooled over Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte; when I reviewed it I suggested that if the poor girl wasn’t dead when he started, then she certainly was
It’s funny what you see at orchestral concerts. See, that is, not just hear. If you weren’t in the hall during Poulenc’s Stabat Mater would you even realise that the tuba uses a mute in the final chord? Visually, it’s hard to miss – the thing’s huge, whether standing on the floor or being heaved
‘When you’re not offensive in life, you obtain absolutely nothing,’ declares a twinkly-eyed Pierre Boulez in one of the archive films that the Barbican were screening to celebrate the composer’s centenary. What a joy to be reminded of the young Boulez – the unashamed elitist, the unbeatable snob. Not even allies such as Schoenberg (too
It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very slow. Lots of people seem to. The London Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday night was a reminder of an earlier, less ingratiating Part: the dissident composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia. Hannu Lintu revived Part’s First Symphony of
Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure is an unfashionable notion these days, but I still feel a batsqueak of shame at enjoying it so much. It’s not the chinoiserie – anyone who believes that an opera based on an 18th-century Italian
Last week, Barbara Hannigan conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Haydn, Roussel, Ravel and Britten, though to be honest she had me at Haydn. It’s still relatively unusual to encounter him in a symphonic concert, and more than one promoter has told me that Haydn is ‘box office poison’, which is a shocking description of
