Oratorio, opera, or both? Peter Quantrill looks at Handel's Christian tragedy, and the stagings and recordings that have given it long overdue recognition as his masterpiece
It is, apparently, impossible to write about Handel's penultimate oratorio without quoting the composer's own gloomy view of its failure at the box office when it was first performed at the Covent Garden Theatre, London, in March 1750. 'The Jews will not come to it because it is a Christian story; and the Ladies will not come because it is a virtuous one.'
This month we review: Fuge, Williams, Singapore SO/Venzago, Freiburg Baroque/Von Der Goltz, Lied Haga, Apekisheva and Weser-Renaissance Bremen/Manfred Cordes.
Friend to Ravel and Stravinsky, hi-fi buff, mathematician and philosopher – there was more to the Swiss conductor than his dusty demeanour, as Peter Quantrill explains
Ansermet made his first recordings in 1915, as a conductor of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes while on tour in New York, and always thereafter took a keen interest in the potential and the limits of recording technology. In September 1929 he became the first non-English conductor to make records for Decca, with a set of six Handel Concerti Grossi performed by a pick-up band at the Chenil Galleries studio in Chelsea.
This month we review: Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/Paavo Jarvi, Kristoffer Hyldig, Choir Of Gonville & Caius, Cambridge/Matthew Martin and Lintl, Nyári, Magdeburg Opera/Anna Skryleva.
Though setting a poem of the American Gothic, this choral symphony breathes Russian soul in every bar. Peter Quantrill finds that modern versions have the edge on record
Towards the end of his life, Rachmaninoff looked back in the early 1940s and regarded his recent Symphonic Dances as one of his finest works. But in the same bracket he placed his choral symphony of three decades earlier. Again, as well he might, for he borrowed and adapted the opening teaser of the early piece for the later one, as well as a good deal else such as the Dies Irae plainchant. This became a signature theme (almost an idée fixe), and an orchestral palette which continually evokes bells without resorting to the literal use of them.
This month we review: Alexander Melnikov, Les Talens Lyriques/Rousset, David Le Page, Orch of the Swan/ Philip Sheppard and Huelgas Ensemble/Paul Van Nevel.
Peter Quantrill takes a personal journey through the music of a Transylvanian-born composer who defined the space age in sound and continued to discover new worlds
Kylwiria is a beautiful, unknown land with rivers, mountains and lakes, a fairytale place where people live together in harmony. It has its own language, its own grammar. But Kylwiria does not really exist. At least, it existed only in the imagination of a Hungarian teenager, born in a small town in Transylvania in 1923.
This month we review: Anna Prohaska, Pat. Kopatchinskaja, Ellinor d'Melon, RTE Orch/Martín, Clare College CH/Graham Ross and Montreal SO/Rafael Payare.
Abstract statement, or central chapter in a musical autobiography? Peter Quantrill sifts the recorded legacy for answers to one of Mahler's popular but most enigmatic pieces
There are some wilfully odd things said about the Fifth even by its interpreters. Mehta called it Mahler's Eroica (why? Because it has a funeral march and a happy ending?). Much emphasis is placed on its 'purity' of discourse as though this would make it a better or nobler symphonic statement. According to Bruno Walter, 'nothing in my talks [with Mahler], not a single note of the work, suggests that any intrinsic [extrinsic?] thought or emotion entered into its composition'.
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