It’s Great Gatsby season at the moment, it seems: as well as Baz Luhrmann’s keenly anticipated film, Northern Ballet are touring a new version of their own, choreographed by David Nixon and currently playing at Sadler’s Wells. Despite missing out a plethora of details which just can’t translate into this medium, Hanna found the show “very pleasant”, and “the perfect project” for the company.
English National Opera gives directors “the best conditions in the world for creating opera”, according to Artistic Director John Berry, speaking at the ENO’s 2013/14 season launch at the London Coliseum this morning. And there’s certainly a great sense of creativity surrounding the company’s latest programme, demonstrating their continuing commitment to innovation even in the face of financial adversity. Ten new productions for the company, apparently averaging “about one every three weeks”, should keep London opera-goers both new and old on their toes.
2014 might seem like a long way off, but fanfares are already ringing out around the classical music world, heralding a new year of concert programmes. Most of the major classical venues and orchestras have now announced what they’re up to in the 2013/14 season, and we’ve got so much of it in our database that we thought we’d take a look through it all and pick out some likely highlights. Have a read to find out what the concert halls have in store for you next year!
A Tchaikovsky cycle, the Stranglers with Laura Marling, and a focus on Granville Bantock: it’s not just Britten and Verdi at the BBC Proms this year, despite these two composers’ anniversaries. There is, however, a hefty amount of Richard Wagner in his bicentennial year, with seven of his operas – that’s over half of them – receiving full performances. But this is just part of an intriguing programme of events for the summer which packs plenty of surprises into its fairly conventional form.
Not an awful lot of things distract me while I’m editing reviews, but I thought it was worth keeping up with the BBC Music Magazine Awards this Tuesday as they were announced live. So half-way through going over Frances’ review of a Janina Fialkowska Chopin recital at Wigmore Hall, I surfaced for a quick glance at Twitter. At that very moment, it was tweeted that Fialkowska had won the Instrumental Award for her CD of Chopin works. Needless to say, I resumed editing rather swiftly.
Have you ever suffered an intergalactic panic attack? If so, was it while you were seated atop a white disc, wearing a white cloak and listening to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen?
This week has seen a string of successful performances of the legendary German experimental composer’s Oktophonie in New York’s Park Avenue Armory, but unfortunately it gave Rebecca nightmares.
From quirky Rite of Spring arrangements to Mozart meeting breakdance, summer 2013 is set to offer an astonishingly rich variety of classical music. We’ve been working with festivals of all shapes and sizes to try and get to grips with it all, and you can read about a few of the highlights below. Happy browsing!
The Royal Opera’s 2013/14 season, announced today, is the second under the directorship of Kasper Holten. It’s becoming easier to understand the thinking behind the current style of programming, both explicitly (from hearing Holten talk at the press conference) and implicitly (by looking at the programme and making a few inferences).
It’s not every day that you publish two reviews of Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo, or indeed of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. But it’s becoming a bizarrely common phenomenon at Bachtrack that these congruences crop up, as they did on the cases above on 25 February and 5 March respectively – both times with one performance each on each side of the Atlantic.
At Bachtrack, we’re lucky to learn about a wide mixture of classical music festivals happening around the world. From Baroque music with fireworks and palm trees in Florida to contemporary music in Iceland, the scope of classical festivals is truly vast. Every festival, it seems, comes up with an innovative way in which to distinguish itself from others, and the result is an exceptionally diverse range which epitomises the increasingly exciting, open spirit of music programming today.
It seems that the niche of this year’s Northern Lights Festival, the 26th such festival taking place in the beautiful, snowy surroundings of Tromsø, northern Norway, is in fact musical eclecticism itself.
