Present for the future: A Hansel at Snape Maltings
“One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!” George Eliot (in Middlemarch) points us to the social circularity behind a gift: and this Hansel given at Snape was…
Lucky Lieder dip: A celebration of Goethe from James Gilchrist and Anna Tilbrook
This evening of lieder, closing the Cambridge Early Music Festival of the Voice for 2016, included the chance to compare no less than four settings of Goethe’s iconic poem Erlkönig, the…
Romancing the stones
The desecration of monuments is a hot topic today: ISIS and other actors in the Middle East are being regularly, widely and rightly castigated for their destruction of world heritage…
A bewildering bed of roses: King Size at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House
King Size is an ultra-modern take on the German tradition of Liederabend, or the “evening of song”, mixing Schumann, Wagner and Schubert with the Jackson 5 and Stephen Sondheim. This…
Forever walked alone: Gerald Finley and Julius Drake’s Winterreise at Wigmore Hall
Wigmore Hall exacerbates the Dry January Blues with an icy, bare-souled stroll through Schubert’s Winterreise. Schubert was famously so overwhelmed with depression while composing Winterreise that, having invited his friends over to hear its…