| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 1-May-2013 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Ideas, ideals, and influences: A Child of Our Time at The Rest is Noise with the LPO and Wigglesworth |
 Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival has a number of strands of thought permeating its concerts. It explores the effects of war, sex and sexuality, politics, and race on some of the 20th century’s most important musical output. The underlying argument behind putting on this extraordinary series of events is that the music, much of which we know and love, cannot be understood properly without understanding the context in which it was written.
Read full review... | |
| 17-Jan-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Birtwistle's Minotaur at Covent Garden: Impressive but sterile |
 Revivals of 21st century operas on the stages of major houses are rarer than hens' teeth, so the Royal Opera were making a strong statement when they announced the revival of Harrison Birtwistle's 2008 The Minotaur, with the original director and much of the original cast.
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| 21-Nov-2012 The London Coliseum | Danger, sleaze, passion: Carmen re-imagined at ENO |
 Alastair Muir-sm.jpg) Carmen has always been in my head as a “pretty” opera: lovely tunes, colourful setting, exotically alluring gypsy brushing up against hunky bullfighter and handsome soldier - not exactly French Grand Opera, perhaps, but a far cry from gritty verismo. Calixto Bieito changed all that last night, with a production for ENO that strips the story down to its bare essentials, and left me thrilled beyond measure.
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| 4-Nov-2012 Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Music Hall | Knussen's magic toybox: Wigglesworth, Wood and Watkins at the Guildhall School |
 This month the BBC’s Total Immersion series celebrated the 60th birthday of British composer Oliver Knussen. A sensitively devised programme given at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on Sunday featured five works composed between the 1970s and the 1990s. The collection comprised Knussen’s Autumnal for violin and piano (1976–77), written at the time of Benjamin Britten’s death, his Variations, Op. 24 for solo piano (1989), Secret Psalm for solo violin (1990, rev. 2003), Prayer Bell Sketch (1997) inspired by Tōru Takemitsu, and the aqueous Ophelia’s Last Dance for solo piano (2009–10).Read full review... | |
