Joseph Haydn was always a lively listen but 200 years after the composer’s death, Haydn's fresh and innovatory spirit matters more than ever.

The Czech mezzo-soprano talks about her new album and describes her life-long love affair with Monteverdi. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

After earlier Vivaldi and Handel recitals with the Venice Baroque Orchestra and Andrea Marcon, it’s back to the Baroque for Czech mezzo Magdalena Kožená, who again teams up with Marcon for a programme devoted to the music of one of Kožená’s teenage crushes: Claudio Monteverdi. Apparently Kožená was just 16 years old when she co-founded her own early music ensemble to perform the Mantuan master’s music. So this recording is a homecoming of sorts, and if Kožená is nowadays more associated with Romantic repertoire you need only look to the complex, extravagant and emotionally charged music and lyrics of these madrigals and opera excerpts to see how there’s not really that much of a leap between Monteverdi and Mahler. Of course, there’s also a lot more scope for improvisation in Renaissance and Baroque repertoire, and therefore more legitimate opportunities for the performer to stamp their own personality on the score. This heightens rather than diminishes the music’s emotional impact. There is also more room to ‘orchestrate’ in the sense of which instrumental colours to include; here, La Cetra comprises strings, a cornett, lutes, guitar, psaltery, harpsichord, organ and percussion. Thus the opening Zefiro torna, e di soave accenti… Continue reading…

Why the master of comedy, John Cleese, is planning to debut Fawlty Towers Down Under. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

‘Flott’ reflects on her career, a lifetime partnership with Graham Johnson and how she felt winning the Legion d’Honneur. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The British maestro explains his passion for MGM and why he believes his home team needs support. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Is it the sex or the politics that has fascinated us about Weimar cabaret for nearly a century? Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The soprano explains why she wants us to consider a powerfully nurturing and creative force. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The vocal music festival, due to feature Jessye Norman, has been postponed due to organiser Jarrod Carland’s ill health. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Through a Glass is the world premiere recording of a series of songs by Martin Bussey, a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. The opening work Blue Remembered Hills introduces baritone Marcus Farnsworth and pianist James Baillieu with immediacy, delving into an obscurity marked by dissonances and startling dynamics. Through a Glass, Darkly was crafted with text from different authors. The composer’s notes tell us the work refers to the relationship between reality and dreams and is “the most ambitious musically and thematically”. The fourth song The Secret Sits breaks the flow with a trumpet that simply sticks out. The closing song in the cycle Lay Your Sleeping Head crafts brief whirlwinds of angst before resolving into the most conventional sounding progression of chords we’ve heard yet – a happy ending to an eccentric piece. Farnsworth is superb – not only for the clarity in his timbre but for allowing us to identify every word. Though he leans into every note almost theatrically, Through a Glass, Darkly shows unexpected changes in character. By contrast, The Windhover is part-challenge, part-conversation between Farnsworth and solo violin, while Garden Songs features texts written across the centuries about flowers and trees. The final song…

Alfred Schnittke’s early life, with a Jewish father, Volga German mother and a musical education in occupied Vienna, was haunted by the fears and tensions of the outsider. The ‘polystylist’ language he eventually developed, with its wild juxtapositions of the ‘banal’ and ‘refined’ and a jabbing irony that confounded Soviet apparatchiks, may thus have been a fortified wall shielding a serious avant-gardist, but he risked coming across as a composer in search of a voice. As time passed by and regimes began to crumble, he allowed cracks to appear in that wall and offer glimpses of the vulnerable artist within. Declining health in the 1980s revealed spiritualist tendencies, most apparent in the Penitential Psalms for mixed choir a cappella, written in 1988 to commemorate the millennium of the Christianisation of Russia. Setting poems for Lent by anonymous monks from an anthology of Old Russian texts, the principal themes are that of original sin, the wrongs of the past and the need to repent and forgive; significant sentiments as the Soviet Union was breaking apart and old scores were being settled. The work has elements of traditional Russian Orthodox Liturgical chant with syllabic declamation and hummed drones, but… Continue reading Get…

★★★★☆ Grieves-Smith serves up an energetic mix of old and new. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in