Stravinsky
Aggressively jaded: Edinburgh’s Marriage of Figaro reviewed
‘Boo!’ came a voice from the stalls. ‘Boo. Outrage!’ It was hard not to feel a pang of admiration. British…
Dancing feat
Aaron S. Watkin, an affable bearded Canadian, is the new artistic director of English National Ballet. He arrives from Dresden,…
Ballet’s lonely pioneer
Bronislava Nijinska was constantly undermined in her lifetime – most cruelly by her brother, says Sarah Crompton
Refugees from Moominland
Spoiler alert. The last words in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen come from a child playing a frog. The story…
Whistling the scenery
With Glyndebourne’s The Rake’s Progress, the show starts with David Hockney’s front cloth. The colour, the ingenuity, the visual bravura:…
Mourning glory
Alexandra Coghlan on the enduring appeal of requiems
Opera North’s Rite of Spring shows the advantages of confining the music to the pit
It was Stravinsky himself who suggested that, in order to preserve its difficulty, the opening bassoon solo of The Rite…
Beauty and the beast
I was going to start with a little moan. About the shouty marketing, the digital diarrhoea, the sycophantic drivel, which,…
Mistaken identity
This year’s Lucerne Festival is given its identity by having as its theme ‘Identity’. Since the word doesn’t mean anything,…
Myth-making
For years I have been telling people that they should listen to, in the absence of staged performances, Enescu’s opera…
An American in Paris
Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a…
Boulez est mort
Pierre Boulez, who died last week at the age of 90, would have been the last person, one hopes, to…
Murder, he wrote
The allure of Carlo Gesualdo, eighth Count of Conza and third Prince of Venosa, has been felt by music-lovers from…
Stravinsky’s ingenious toy
Is Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress anything more than an exercise in style? ‘I will lace each aria into a tight…
The price of pleasure
Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one…
Codes of conduct
Not long ago the great conductors of classical music were general practitioners. They expected to give satisfactory interpretations of music…
Notes on a scandal
While the airwaves resonate with celebrations of Britten’s birth, I cannot help thinking that what was happening in Paris at…
