Chimes and gentle winds open A Celestial Map of the Sky – the title track on this disc by British-American composer Tarik O’Regan – before the Hallé, led by Sir Mark Elder, is joined by the choir. The luminous opening soon gives way to powerful, driving intensity, O’Regan setting extracts of poetic texts (by Walt Whitman, Mahmood Jamal and more) that reflect his response to a pair of woodcuts – star charts – by Albrecht Dürer. Haunting vocal meditations are entwined with a glittering, astral score. Jamie Philips conducts the Hallé in the remaining works. O’Regan takes the Adagio of JS Bach’s third Violin Sonata (BWV 1005) as his jumping off point in Latent Manifest. Solo violin is joined by harp and percussion, O’Regan extrapolating Bach’s quadruple-stops into a whorl of vivid orchestral colour and sizzling rhythms. Both Raï and Chaâbi (which was commissioned for the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s 2012 tour) derive from O’Regan’s memories of childhood visits to relatives in Algeria and Morocco. Raï is full of fierce strings, rhythmic drumming and bright momentum from the Hallé, while shifting string textures in Chaâbi create a reflective mood. The finale is Fragments from Heart of Darkness, a dramatic… Continue reading…

A seasonal opera with temporal jiggery-pokery makes a wonderful find for the end of any year. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Joyce El-Khoury on being thrown to Donizetti's lions.

★★★★★ Donizetti was one of the most prolific opera composers of all time, an appealingly personable fellow (if you read the letters), and an extraordinary professional capable of turning out a work in just a few weeks. That very facility though has led to a general dismissal of his music as too easy, rushed, derivative, or worse. Les Martyrs disproves all of these. A late work (1840), this grandest of his French grand operas was written simultaneously with the slighter, yet inexplicably more popular La Fille du Régiment, but the two works couldn’t be more different – one a trivially sucrose French confection, the other a profound meditation on faith and duty. But while Daughter of the Regiment went on to conquer the world, Les Martyrs sank without a trace. That latter statement isn’t entirely true. Les Martyrs was itself an expanded reworking of Poliuto, an opera Donizetti had written for Naples that fell foul of the censors and so never made it to the stage. Poliuto has been championed intermittently over the years (there’s a superb live version with Callas, Corelli and Bastianini) and Glyndebourne have just given its British premiere, but Les Martyrs is a horse of a…

The revered British maestro will be making his only Australian appearances in 2015.

The British recording label NMC has done wonders making available the rarer works of British composers, and during the Britten centenary turned to that master. With Britten To America they focus on perhaps Britten’s second most important collaborator, the great modernist poet WH Auden, with whom in the 1930s he collaborated in works for radio and stage. Although Auden’s ‘cabaret’ songs would become popular from recitals with Britten’s life partner, the tenor Peter Pears, it’s wonderful to discover them in their original choral context as music for the play The Ascent of F6 (1936), written by Auden in conjunction with Christopher Isherwood on the subject of mountaineering. The other substantial piece here, On the Frontier, comes from the following year and is also written by those two playwrights with a contemporary political eye on a transfer to the West End. Others – namely An American in England and the closing setting by poet Louis Macneice, Where do we go from here?, stem from contemporary BBC radio programmes. Whilst these works may be regarded as peripheral to Britten’s output, there is no doubt as to the professionalism of the group of performers involved and Britten’s compositional brilliance shines through, even in…

A comic opera about wife beating? Not sure how it would go down today but in 1841, Donizetti penned Rita, a one act, to a French libretto. Due to various vicissitudes, not the least of which must have been the composer’s advancing case of the clap, it was never performed in Donizetti’s lifetime, premiering posthumously at Paris’ Opéra-Comique in 1860. It’s a slight affair. Believing her husband Gasparo drowned at sea, Rita has married the timorous Pepe. Gasparo used to beat Rita, she now beats her new spouse. When Gasparo, who fancies wedding another hapless maid in Canada, turns up hoping to destroy his old marriage certificate, Pepe sees his chance to escape his matrimonial obligations. Several farcical twists and turns involving games of chance and fake disabilities end in a duel, at which point Rita sees the value of Pepe after all and Gasparo heads into the sunset advising Rita to keep her fists primed for the future. Opera Rara have done their usual superb job with recording and packaging but it can’t quite disguise the thinness of the material. It’s late Donizetti, therefore it’s tuneful and crafted fare. The orchestra and conductor couldn’t be bettered and the three…

Let me say at the very outset that musically Belisario is one of Donizetti’s very finest works. Dating from 1836, it came hot on the heels of Maria Stuarda and Lucia di Lammermoor and it finds the composer at the height of his lyrical powers. It had a bumpy ride to opening night (see the excellent booklet) but despite cast problems and a libretto that had been turned down by a previous management Donizetti enjoyed something of a triumph. The young librettist, Salvadore Cammerano, was to become one of the century’s greatest, but here he fails to make everything add up to a satisfying dramatic whole. Belisario’s embittered wife, who in the first act looks set to be the prima donna, fails to put in an appearance in Act Two, while the tenor who turns out to be her long-lost child is an old saw long past its sell-by. The composer too made the odd slip – the perky second tune of the overture for example is at odds with the tragic nature of Belisario’s fall from grace, blinding and eventual demise. BUT, that aside, there are some superb scenes to be relished, especially in a performance as compelling as the one delivered here by the……

The BBC Proms are a Mecca for classical musicians. If there was any audience in the world I could play for, it would probably be an audience at The Proms. Not only does its home the Royal Albert Hall cater for an audience of over 5,000, but in my experience it’s an audience like no other: a mix of dedicated fans and curious Prommers of all ages. Hundreds stand for the entire performance in the arena, and even more way up in the gallery. Some have season passes, others queue up (“prom”) for hours to snap up £5 tickets on the day! You can imagine my reaction then when I received the good news that I’d have the opportunity to perform here alongside over 100 young musicians in an epic program that included Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring! The month-long project, developed in the small English seaside town home to Benjamin Britten’s legendary classical music festival, was instigated by the Britten-Pears Young Artist Program and appropriately named the Aldeburgh World Orchestra. You can read more about the audition process we went through on my earlier blog. We met only a few weeks prior to our Proms… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access…