Richard Bratby is the chief classical music critic of The Spectator
We hit downtown Zalánpatak at rush hour, and it was gridlocked. True, you get used to livestock on Romanian roads; the 30-minute gravel zig-zag from the nearest main road had brought us up against stray dogs, horses and carts and free-range pigs. A shepherd huddled near the roadside in a sheepskin poncho – crook in
When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions since its première at English National Opera in 1994, but it’s been doing reasonably good business on the continent, where its source material – a story by German writer Ludwig Tieck – presumably has more
Euston Station has been in the news again, and that’s never good. After a summer of overcrowding and delays, public anger forced the Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, to intervene last week, shutting down the monstrous, flashing digital advertising screen that spans the concourse and which has made passengers feel like battery hens trapped in a
The curtain is already up at the start of Ted Huffman’s new production of Eugene Onegin. The auditorium is lit but the stage is in darkness and almost bare. Gradually, as Tchaikovsky’s prelude sighs and unfurls, the stage brightens and the theatre grows dim. But not before Onegin (Gordon Bintner) – tousle-headed and in a
It’s a critic’s job to pick holes in the dafter aspects of opera productions, but in truth audiences are usually capable of detecting nonsense when they see it. ‘She must be at least 150,’ commented the gentleman sitting behind me, referring to the wheelchair-bound old lady who was trundled on stage at the start of
Klaus Makela is kind of a big deal. He’s a pupil of the Finnish conducting guru Jorma Panula – the so-called ‘Yoda of conducting’ – and he’s chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic as well as the Orchestre de Paris. Within the next three years he’s scheduled to take the baton at both the Chicago
As the Proms season enters the home straight, it’s moved up a gear, with a string of high profile European guest orchestras. First up was the Czech Philharmonic playing Suk’s Asrael Symphony under Jakub Hrusa before moving on to Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass the following night. These grand, glittering monuments of Czech music were garnished with
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This week: Alt reich. The Spectator’s Lisa Haseldine asks if Germany’s far right is about to go mainstream, ahead of regional elections this weekend. Lisa joined the podcast, alongside the historian Katja Hoyer, to discuss why the AfD are polling so well in parts of Germany, and how comparable this is to other trends across Europe
‘Boo!’ came a voice from the stalls. ‘Boo. Outrage!’ It was hard not to feel a pang of admiration. British opera audiences don’t tend to boo; we’re either too polite or too unengaged. But there we were in Act Three of Kirill Serebrennikov’s production of The Marriage of Figaro – just after the scene where
Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens across the UK. Other sounds too: the whirr of pistons, the hissing of steam from valves. Up and down the nation, enthusiasts were fuelling up their model traction engines and steamrollers and raising steam not
Waterperry is one of the UK’s youngest summer opera festivals: it started up in 2018, at the northern limit of the species’ natural habitat. You leave the motorway at Oxford services and double back through the fields to the hamlet of Waterperry. Drive past the ‘Cats Crossing’ sign and the life-sized effigy of Rowan Atkinson
As an arts journalist, you know you’re getting old when you scan the Edinburgh Festival programme, and instead of thinking ‘Wow, look at all this,’ your reaction is ‘Oh Christ, look at all that’. You tell friends that you’re off to cover Edinburgh in August, and instead of lighting up with envy, they suck their
Artistic partnerships are elusive things. The best – where two creative personalities somehow inspire or goad each other to do better than their individual best – can seem so natural that they’re almost easier to identify by their absence. No one’s queuing up to revive Richard Rodgers’s Rex (lyrics by Sheldon Harnick). Pretending to rate
The Proms have started but there is a world elsewhere, and in Worcester Cathedral the 296th Three Choirs Festival set sail with a concert that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. A few years back I caused grave offence when I described the Three Choirs as a ‘home of lost causes’; as if, coming from The
This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time. One of the most thrilling aspects of the Tippett revival has been the discovery that his late masterpieces seem to have been fitted with a four-decade time-fuse. Works that prompted bafflement in the 1970s and 1980s, and then sat there for years looking like
It’s 1 a.m. in our small cathedral city and car horns are honking in jubilation. From down the street comes the sound of smashing bottles, and a deep bellowing roar, growing louder as the ‘whooahs’ and the chants echo off Georgian terraces. Well, it’s a country town on a Saturday night; a certain amount of
Hang out with both trainspotters and opera buffs and you’ll soon notice that opera buffs are by far the more trainspotterish. It’s the pedantry, the one-upmanship (‘Really? You should have heard it with Goodall in 1976’). Above all, it’s the impulse to collect. You can’t actually buy little pocket books with lists of obscure operas
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
If you want to kill a musical, make it into a movie. Cats, Phantom of the Opera, South Pacific… cinema history is littered with dud remakes of world-conquering theatrical sensations. But it’s almost worse when a film musical succeeds on its own terms, and – like a mask eating into the face – proceeds to
In 1905, shortly before the world première of The Merry Widow, the Viennese theatre manager Wilhelm Karczag got cold feet and tried to pull it. He offered Franz Lehar hard cash to withdraw the score, and when that failed, he rushed it on under-rehearsed, using second-hand sets from an older show. Or so the story
