Handel

An ensemble achievement that dances and sparkles: Glyndebourne’s Giulio Cesare reviewed

A classic opera production ages like wine. When David McVicar’s staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare first opened at Glyndebourne in 2005, Michael Tanner – writing in these pages – loathed it. ‘A quite hateful betrayal’ was how he described a production that is now widely regarded as a classic. It would be easy to brandish those words now he’s gone – ha ha, no one ever erected a statue to a critic – ignoring the truth that any first night review can only ever be a snapshot, and that the big story back then was the hyperactive, neon-lit debut of Danielle de Niese as Cleopatra. Tanner did predict that de

You could have built a tent city from all the red chinos: Aci by the River reviewed

The Thames cruise for which Handel composed his Water Music in 1717 famously went on until around 4 a.m. The boat trip downstream that formed part of the London Handel Festival’s Aci by the River was a bit zippier. We piled onto a chartered Thames Clipper at Westminster Pier, and a quartet of wind players were already huddled in the gangway, playing suitably aquatic Handel favourites. A bassoonist gave an anxious grimace as the captain floored the throttle and the boat lurched forward. If our craft had been wrecked on some enchanted isle, we could have built a tent city from the red chinos You do get to see an

Simply not as good as Mozart’s: RCM’s Don Giovanni Tenorio reviewed

In Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, Don Giovanni finds himself in hell, chatting to the sentient Statue that dragged him to his doom. ‘It sounds rather flat without my trombones,’ admits the Statue, conceding that once you remove the genius of Mozart from the mix, you’re left with a trite (if titillating) morality tale. You could draw the same conclusion from the opera Don Giovanni Tenorio, by Giuseppe Gazzaniga (1743-1818), and if you haven’t heard of him you might wonder why not. Institutional racism? Patriarchal hegemony? Not this time. Gazzaniga was a Neapolitan composer of perfectly adequate operas that simply aren’t as good as Mozart’s. Anyway, Don Giovanni Tenorio made

How the Georgians invented nightlife

Modern nightlife was invented in London around 1700. So argued the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, who traced this revolution in city life to its origins in court culture. Medieval and Renaissance courts held their festivities while it was still light outside, but by the late 17th century, aristocrats preferred to party after dark. The trend was rapidly commercialised: a new kind of conspicuous consumer descended on pleasure gardens like Vauxhall and Ranelagh, to eat, drink, stroll and listen to music by the many-coloured light of thousands of oil lamps. Before the 1700s, night was a fearful all-consuming presence, and the main challenge was to get through it Or you can give

Florid flummery: ETO’s Il viaggio a Reims reviewed

Lightning sometimes strikes twice. English Touring Opera hit topical gold last spring when, wholly by coincidence, they found themselves touring with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian anti-war satire The Golden Cockerel. Now the company’s general director Robin Norton-Hale insists that their current tour of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims – written in 1825 to celebrate the coronation of King Charles X of France – was fixed long before this month’s events at Westminster Abbey were even a glint in the Earl Marshal’s eye. Really? In truth, opera planning cycles generally operate in years rather than months. On the other hand, Il viaggio a Reims is an extravagant heap of dramatic (if not musical)

The coronation music was – mostly – a triumph

Sir Hubert Parry was upgraded from knight bachelor to baronet by King Edward VII in 1902, and my goodness he earned it. His anthem for Edward’s coronation, I was Glad when they Said Unto Me, begins with a thrilling brass fanfare – or it has done since George V’s coronation in 1911: Parry’s original introit wasn’t sufficiently attention-grabbing, so he beefed it up. But the most spine-tingling moment has been there from the beginning. ‘I was…’ sings the choir on the tonic chord of B flat major – and then the word ‘glad’ bursts out where we aren’t expecting it, in G major. The Abbey staged a musical banquet in

Handel as Netflix thriller: Royal Opera’s Theodora reviewed

The Royal Opera has come over all baroque. In the Linbury Theatre, they’re hosting Irish National Opera’s production of Vivaldi’s 1735 carnival opera Bajazet; unsurprisingly, its first appearance at Covent Garden. Upstairs in the big room, they’re doing Handel’s Theodora: premièred at Covent Garden in March 1750 and then ignored by the Royal Opera and its forebears for the next 272 years. In fairness, it isn’t actually an opera. It’s an oratorio, and it was a flop. Handel attributed its neglect to the fact that the story ‘is a virtuous one’, though the music’s emotional appeal is uncompromising, and the basic morality — Christians and virtuous pagans vs a tyrannical

You’ll shrug where you should marvel: Garsington’s Amadigi reviewed

When you think of Handel’s Amadigi (in so far as anyone thinks about the composer’s rarely staged, also-ran London score at all) it’s as a magic-opera. Sorcerers and sorceresses do battle in a fantasy land not found on any map. The stage directions alone are enough to stir the commercial loins of any 18th-century impresario. Enchanted palaces are ‘split asunder’, caves transformed into ‘beautiful palaces’, monsters ‘ascend from the bowels of the Earth’ and a chariot ‘descends covered in clouds’. All of which originally took place in full view of an audience so beguiled by illusion that even the Georgians’ rather more informal attitude to health and safety was tested,

Community music-making is the jewel in the British crown

Music is a universal language. The style that has enraptured me since childhood, classical music, has always had an international dimension, and has taken me around the world in the decades since. But even in those early boyhood encounters I became aware of music and musicians from many different lands and eras. Apart from the beauty and excitement of the music itself, the art form became an early gateway for me to languages, history, geography, philosophy, theology and much more. There were clearly a lot of Germans to grapple with (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) — and some French (Debussy, Ravel) —as well as Italians (Vivaldi, Verdi) and lots of Russians too

The grotesque unevenness of Mozart’s Requiem

It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the packaging these events come in, when they do. ENO relayed free a concert of Mozart’s Requiem, but it was preceded by a snatch of Strictly, with a row of muscular young guys ripping off their shirts, before we entered the Coliseum for a heavily pregnant Danielle de Niese hyping the event we were about to see and hear. She is delightful, but I wish she hadn’t been compelled to tell us that, despite his hard life, Mozart was sending us a message of hope that everyone, however ignorant of classical

A new opera that deserves more than one outing: Royal Opera’s New Dark Age reviewed

It’s quite a title sequence. Puccini swells on the soundtrack and words flash before your eyes. ‘Ecstatic!’ ‘Spellbound!’ ‘Passionate!’ ‘Dazzled!’ Champagne fizzes, ballerinas pirouette; for some reason Bryn Terfel hovers in the roof of the Floral Hall. The Royal Opera House is back in the game, bringing the uplift of live music-drama to an opera-starved Britain, and if you’re watching it online, the only remaining question is whether the offering on stage can possibly live up to the energy, colour and sheer affirmation of the Royal Opera’s on-screen intro. Don’t be silly. What we get is New Dark Age — a double bill that takes its name from its second

The original Edinburgh Festival

Edinburgh, 3 November 1815. The university courtyard is buzzing. A band is playing. Surrounding streets are filled with thousands of excited spectators, many waiting since 10 a.m. From the Castle, from windows and rooftops, from Calton Hill, Holyrood Park and Salisbury Crags, all strain to get a glimpse. Then finally at 3 p.m., above the university, a large balloon suddenly emerges, climbing wondrously into the crisp November sky. Orchestrating this aeronautical display was pioneer English balloonist James Sadler. His balloon rose majestically as the westerly wind took it towards the sea. Sadler continued waving his flags as long as he could be seen, and the crowds applauded and gasped. Having

Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers: the raucous world of 19th century British music

For a patriotic German in the decades before Bismarck, Britain’s power was an object of envy. But there was one thing, at least, that you could always hold over the Anglo-Saxons on their foggy little island. On 1 January 1837, Robert Schumann sat down in Leipzig to hear a new piano concerto by the 20-year-old William Sterndale Bennett. ‘An English composer; no composer,’ commented his neighbour, smugly, before the music started. Few 19th-century German music-lovers failed to point out that the land of Shakespeare had somehow failed to produce a single really significant composer since the late 17th century. We know how that story ended; and if you want to