As the curtain opens on the second act of Don Pasquale, I hear a rustle of discomfort. Donizetti’s opera has not been seen at La Scala since 1994. Its restoration, on the orders of a new music director, sets off a critical flutter and Davide Livermore’s new production, set in the Cinecittà film studio during
‘Hi, it’s Jonas.’ When the great tenor rings from Vienna, I ask if there are any topics he wants me to avoid, such are his minders’ anxieties. ‘Ask anything,’ laughs Jonas. ‘I’m not shy.’ He is heading in from the airport to see a physio — ‘these concerts, you have to stand there all the
I once knew a great conductor who claimed that he never boarded a plane to a new orchestra without a tube of lube in his pocket. Just in case he got lucky (which he often did). Conductors are migratory birds who fly where their agents point them, hopping from one hotel bed to the next.
On a bullet train out of Shanghai, a nuclear family catches my eye. The father, weather-beaten and wearing an ill-fitting suit, is clearly a working man. His wife, younger and city sleek, is dressed to impress. Their son, an only child, is four or five years old. Curious, I get talking and discover they are
Even in a Trump world where reality is what you say it is, the London Symphony Orchestra’s announcement of a new concert hall occupies a bubble of pure fantasy. New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro have been awarded a contract for a project that has no funding. Concert hall, what concert hall? The only
Much fuss has been made of the title given to Sir Simon Rattle on arrival at the London Symphony Orchestra. Unlike his LSO predecessors — Valery Gergiev, Colin Davis, Michael Tilson Thomas, Claudio Abbado, André Previn — all of whom were engaged as principal conductor, Rattle has been named music director, a position that bears
Two summers ago, the BBC were offered a Proms visit by the Bavarian State Orchestra with its music director, Kirill Petrenko. The conversation went something like this. BBC: ‘Petrenko, isn’t he the chap that conducts Liverpool?’ Munich: ‘No, that’s Vasily Petrenko. This one is Kirill.’ BBC: ‘Well, we don’t really know about him over here.
This post was first published on Slipped Disc On the first night of the BBC Proms, the German-based pianist Igor Levit played Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in Liszt’s solo-piano reduction as a token of his opposition to Britain leaving the EU. His was a reasoned and reasonable gesture by an artist who has strong views
Amid the general political turmoil, a flutter of hope has greeted the arrival of Sir Nicholas Serota as chairman of Arts Council England, an organisation of fading relevance. Sir Nick, grand impresario of the Tate galleries, started life as an Arts Council gofer in 1969, taught to hang pictures by the flamboyant David Sylvester, friend
Seven years ago I ripped the CD off the front of a music magazine and found myself in the thick of a Poulenc concerto that was being played as if life depended on it. Now Poulenc is the acme of laid-back and the solo instrument, the harpsichord, had been consigned to the junkshop before young
Spare a thought for Emil Gilels, still revered today by Russians as the foremost pianist of the Soviet era. The first to win a competition abroad (Brussels, 1938), Gilels was also first to be let out after Stalin died to reconnect cultural ties and earn hard dollars for the state coffers, of which he got
For much of the past half-century, London has been the world’s orchestral capital. Not always in quality, but numerically without rival. Five full symphony orchestras and twice as many pint-sized ones kept up a constant clamour for attention. Each month brought new recordings with premier artists. Every orchestra had its own ethos, history and thumbprint.
You don’t have to be a follower of Liverpool Football Club, or football at all, to spot the difference. Two months ago the Reds were running about headless as a newly wrung chook; today they are putting the fear of perdition into the best teams in the land. Or take Leicester City. Last season they
When Margaret Thatcher imagined perfect power, she thought of the orchestral conductor. ‘She envied me,’ said Herbert von Karajan, ‘that people always did what I requested.’ Power, however, is a mirage that fades as you get close. What Mrs Thatcher saw were the trappings, never the essence. Great conductors might get the glory, but someone
Let’s face facts. Kirill Petrenko was no-one’s first choice as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. His name came into the reckoning only after 124 orchestra members split fatally down the middle in an all-day election on May 11, half of them voting for the German favourite Christian Thielemann and the other half for
The morning after the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra failed to elect a music director, I took a call from Bild-Zeitung, Berlin’s most popular tabloid, seeking analysis. Later, they asked me to write a full-page op-ed. Now shut your eyes a moment and try to imagine any circumstance in which the Sun would ever shine an inch
It is difficult to describe with equanimity the culture shock that has been administered to Arts Council England, the 69 year-old benefits office for the creative industries. Invented by Maynard Keynes to nurture the grass shoots of an English renaissance with a few quid here and there – £25,000 for Covent Garden, £2,000 for the
It may be the last water-cooler moment in world television. On the first morning of the year, at 11.15 Central European Time, in a place that considers itself the epicentre of Europe, a group of men in formal dress mount the Musikvereinssaal stage in Vienna to perform a ritual that passes for culture and tradition.
