Daniel Barenboim and Charles Dutoit help us discover the private pianist behind the public persona.

Ahead of his Pelléas with the SSO, the maestro talks French music and modern opera – just don’t mention the R-word! Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Brett Dean wrangles the moody Dane into two-and-half hours of thrilling music theatre.

Poor old Ethel Smyth. A fine composer, she had the misfortune to be a) English and b) a woman, both of which have condemned her to musical purgatory for much of the 70 years since her death. Still, Der Wald (never recorded) was the only opera by a woman to be staged at the Met until Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin in 2016. The Boatswain’s Mate (1914) is a small-scale but quintessential English comic opera. The widow and publican Mrs Waters is wooed relentlessly by a retired boatswain. When he recruits an unemployed soldier to frighten her into thinking she needs protecting, matters are turned upside down, with unexpected results for Mrs Waters’ head and heart. Act I employs spoken dialogue, a device awkwardly dropped in Act II, and some sections go on far too long, but it’s a winning libretto set to highly attractive music and incorporates elements of folk and popular song – it even quotes Smyth’s suffragette anthem, The March of the Women, though the work really doesn’t own the feminist credentials that are sometimes claimed for it. This world premiere is conducted by Odaline de la Martinez who directed the marvelous first recording of Smyth’s The Wreckers…

Composers from Berlioz to Verdi have shied away from the complex Dane, but not Dean, whose opera is opening at Glyndebourne.

Johann Christoph Pepusch, aka John Christopher Pepusch or just plain Dr Pepusch, was born in Berlin in 1677, but moved to England around 1700 where he became a leading light of London’s musical life. In 1726, he was one of the founders of the Academy of Ancient Music and two years later scored his greatest success arranging the music for John Gay’s runaway hit, The Beggar’s Opera. The peak of his career coincided with the rise of the Italian opera in London, and, as his involvement with Gay’s famous lampoon would suggest, Pepusch was strong on the side of those seeking an English alternative to continental excess. Written in 1715, his masque Venus and Adonis looked like it might be just the thing to ‘reconcile Musick to the English Tongue.’ For all its Englishness – and it’s a clear precursor of Handel’s Acis and Galatea – the work is packed with the stock in trade of Italian opera including da capo arias, virtuoso instrumental effects and plenty of accompagnato recitative. So, what’s it like? The immediate observation listening to what is a world-premiere recording on the enterprising Ramée label is how can this melodious and memorable music have… Continue reading…

Along with Claire Edwardes and seven canny composers, the playwright explains how she created a musical Everywoman.

The French conductor, whose Daphnis is our Recording of the Month, explains how symphonic music serves the dance. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Pitch-perfectly performed slice of Aussie queer history still has something to say.

For over a century composers have been drawn to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and the enigmatic songs of the waif-like Mignon. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The Polish harpsichordist who redefined her instrument’s contemporary repertoire passes at 77. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Baryshnikov and others rally in defence of Kirill Serebrennikov, who they believe falsely implicated in a million rouble embezzlement.