| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 26-Jan-2013 Salle Wilfrid Pelletier | "The Bat" meets the burlesque: Die Fledermaus with L'Opéra de Montréal |
 According to General and Production Director Pierre Dufour, tonight’s production of Die Fledermaus, or in this case La Chauve Souris, was to be in the style of the vaudeville and burlesque. Set in 1930’s upper class Montréal, the production was purchased from Opera Australia though Stage Director Oriol Tomas’s conceptual influence would prove wholly original.Read full review... | |
| 20-Jan-2013 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Music worth fighting over: Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony at The Rest is Noise |
 You are sitting in the choir stalls of the Royal Festival Hall, watching the ceramic artist and writer Edmund de Waal address you, his back to an enormous sea of empty, grey, imposing seats. He is delivering a vivid narrative account of a day in the life of a young aristocratic Jewish boy in early 20th-century Vienna. He puts you, his audience, in the protagonist’s shoes, referring to this character as “you”. Quite taken with this technique, you later decide to write your review of the event in the same style.
Read full review... | |
| 26-Dec-2012 Volksoper Vienna | Wiener Blut at the Volksoper |
 Along with Die Fledermaus and Der Zigeunerbaron, Wiener Blut is generally considered to be Johann Strauss’s most popular operetta, although it is really a pasticcio for which Adolf Müller recycled parts of 31 popular dance pieces, artistically weaving various motifs into a new score. Strauss was amazed by the result (“I wrote that?” he is reported to have exclaimed more than once), but luckily did not live to see the failure of its première at the Carltheater and the house’s subsequent bankruptcy, ultimately leading to its director’s suicide.
Read full review... | |
| 5-Oct-2012 Birmingham Town Hall | Viennese whirl in Birmingham: Sweet treats from the Vienna Boys' Choir |
 Here’s a choir that need never worry about attracting younger members. It runs its own school, with around 300 children, and from the age of ten the most musically gifted boys are channelled into the choir. The present membership of around 100 are in good company, as the 500-year history of the choir in its various guises is littered with illustrious names, either as choristers or directors: Mozart, Bruckner, Schubert, Haydn. Historically, the boys sang at the imperial court, then after the Habsburg Empire collapsed the choir became a private enterprise.Read full review... | |
