Richard Bratby is the chief classical music critic of The Spectator
‘When a man takes it upon himself to write an oratorio — perhaps the most gratuitous exploit open to a 19th-century Englishman — he must take the consequences,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, reviewing Parry’s oratorio Judith in 1888. The consequences for Judith seem to have been unusually drastic. Premiered at the Birmingham Triennial Festival, it
Back when the UK was assumed to be leaving the European Union on 29 March, the Aurora Orchestra was invited to Brussels to participate in Klarafestival: specifically, an evening of words and music ‘celebrating cultural links between Europe and the UK’. And because arts organisations in general (and orchestras in particular) change direction with the
To stage Verdi’s Il Trovatore, they say, is easy: you just need the four greatest singers in the world. The Royal Opera has applied this principle to La forza del destino. Jonas Kaufmann sings Alvaro, Anna Netrebko is his beloved Leonora, and Ludovic Tézier her brother Carlo, with the mighty Ferruccio Furlanetto completing the set
You can see Graham Vick’s work at La Scala or the New York Met. But if you want to be directed by him, you need to go to Birmingham. The Tower Ballroom is a sticky-floored former nightspot out by Edgbaston Reservoir, artfully trashed by Block9, the people behind Banksy’s Dismaland. You crunch across the tarmac,
It was Stravinsky himself who suggested that, in order to preserve its difficulty, the opening bassoon solo of The Rite of Spring should be raised by a semitone every decade. And it was a performance by Birmingham Royal Ballet in 2005 that convinced me that he wasn’t entirely joking. The audience nattered away over the
Hector Berlioz was born on 11 December 1803 in rural Isère. ‘During the months which preceded my birth my mother never dreamed, as Virgil’s did, that she was about to bring forth a laurel branch,’ he writes in his Memoirs. ‘This is extraordinary, I agree, but it is true… Can it be that our age
It’s a 31ºC Mumbai morning, and on Marine Drive the Russian winter is closing in. The Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) is rehearsing Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony ahead of its first ever UK tour, and even on the campus of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) — a palm-shaded tropical Barbican next to the
Spoiler alert: it’s all a dream. At least, I think that’s what we’re meant to take away from the business with which director James Brining accompanies the overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. A little girl in ochre pyjamas is trying to sleep while in an adjacent room braying, guffawing adults sit down to a
Grade: A– 1898: two Parisiennes and a housemaid secretly invite each other’s partners to the Paris Opera ball and… c’mon, you can guess the rest. It’s Christmas: you don’t want Götterdämmerung. You want luxury, you want tunes and you want irresponsible fun. Richard Heuberger’s waltz-operetta Der Opernball is basically a deluxe box of musical liqueur
It’s a strange compliment to pay a composer — that the most profound impression their music makes is of an absence. I can’t claim much prior experience of the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who died in 1996: a vague sense of a Shostakovich-like figure who had a bad time of it under Stalin, and the composer
The People are angry. In fact, they’re bloody furious. As the lights flash up on David Pountney’s production of Prokofiev’s War & Peace, the entire cast confronts the audience: grim, braced, defiant. And before you’ve had time to wonder if this sort of thing is just the long-term legacy of Les Misérables, or whether opera
‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?’ We’ve heard a lot, lately, of the knell that tolls through the opening bars of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, and at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral it was played on actual church bells. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s percussionist Graham Johns has had a set specially cast, and as
Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning Italian film composer, has died at the age of 91. Here, Richard Bratby spoke to the ‘Maestro’. Ennio Morricone’s staff wish it to be known that he does not write soundtracks. ‘Maestro Morricone writes “Film Music” NOT “Sound Tracks”’, explain the printed interview guidelines. ‘Maestro Morricone is a composer. Composers do
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess springs to life fully formed, and pulls you in before a word has been sung. A whirlwind flourish; the hectic bustle of violins and xylophone, and then a quick fade into an image of a woman cradling a child and ‘Summertime’, the very first number we hear sung. The aria’s fame
‘On Brünnhilde’s rock I drew the breath that called your name; so swift was my journey here.’ It’s Act Two of Götterdämmerung. Siegfried, entoiled in evil beyond his comprehension, has unwittingly committed the betrayal that will tip the whole vast drama into its final collapse, and at this point Covent Garden’s Ring cycle really does
A pregnant silence, a peaty belch from the tuba, and the scrape of brass on brass as gears lock into position and judder forward. It’s almost worth making a bingo card for a Harrison Birtwistle première these days, and I’m not complaining. His last big orchestral work, Deep Time, showed worrying signs of him mellowing
The lady behind me on Kensington Gore clearly felt that she owed her friend an apology: ‘It’s Bruckner. I don’t know how that happened.’ I felt for her. ‘It’s Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Phil,’ I’d told a succession of my own musical friends. They’d seemed interested. Since the youngish Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin took over
Cannock Chase is the long, low range of hills that’s visible to your right as you drive north up the M6 beyond Birmingham. If you’ve travelled by train between Euston and Crewe, you’ve practically brushed its cloak. Soon after Rugeley the landscape closes in, and a palisade of dark pines presses down the slope before
It’s the lederhosen that grabs you first. Two gents were walking down the street ahead of us in full Alpine rig: long socks, collarless loden jackets, and hunting hats decorated with what looked like shaving brushes. Among the flowerbeds and fountains that surround the main theatre of the Bad Ischl Lehar Festival a posse of
There’s one big problem with Wagner’s Siegfried, and the clue’s in the name. None of Wagner’s mature works hangs so completely upon a single individual. The character himself isn’t really the issue either, however troublesome he might superficially appear (a ‘randy overgrown schoolboy’, if you believe the misguided programme note for this Usher Hall performance).
