Philip Spires commonplace book

Spanish National Orchestra under Pablo González plays Espla and Mahler in ADDA Alicante

2026-10-04T13:21:22.968+02:00

In Alicante last night, the Spanish National Orchestra made its debut in the ADDA auditorium. They chose to play a piece by an Alicante composer to start their program, El Sueño de Eros, The Dream of Eros by Óscar Esplá. In Alicante city, there is a main thoroughfare named after the composer, and indeed one of its prestigious conservatories also bears his name. It is a name, however, that few concert-goers away from the Costa Blanca will recognise.

During a long career, Óscar Esplá wrote over one hundred works. He lived from 1886 to 1976 and studied in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century, and it shows. His music of the time shows a strong French influence, especially that of Debussy. But El Sueño de Eros predates the time he spent in Paris and indeed the composer was only a young man when he wrote the work in 1910. It was in fact while Óscar Esplá was studying first engineering and later philosophy in Barcelona that he received a handwritten text of a lyrical poem from the Alicante writer Gabriel Miró and the work lay unperformed for two years. It is thus revealing how French influences are the fore. The composer had studied with his father and two Spanish teachers, and he must have developed a love for the music of Debussy from an early age.

As its title suggests, the music is dreamlike, not actually finding a tonal identity, eschewing recognisably “Spanish” themes, though at one point, there is a suggestion of a local song in the strings. The work is based on Gabriel Miró’s poem in which Eros dreams of love, is caressed by the moon. wakes up startled, fires his arrows, and the moon, wounded, retreats. It is about unrequited love, and the uncertainty that can induce. El Sueño de Eros was the only collaboration between the writer and the composer, who continued to share respect for one another.

Here we are we are in the world Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande. Nothing is real, even suggestions are only part-heard. There is some influence of Richard Strauss here, particularly in the use of divided strings. Óscar Esplá often used juxtaposition of two quite mundane themes to heighten musical drama, but in this piece, it is the atmospheric orchestration that impressed. It certainly is an interesting piece that should be played more often, as should Óscar Esplá’s other compositions.

In the second half of the concert, the Spanish National Orchestra under Pablo González played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Personally, I found the attention to detail by Pablo González interesting, but it rather got in the way of the music flow. I also found some of the tempi quite strange. The first movement, for instance, is a funeral march, but the tempo chosen stressed the funeral, not the march. These things are always a matter of taste. There is no right and wrong, only difference and originality.

The orchestra’s playing was suitably dynamic on virtuosic, but I for one found that the pause for tuning after the third movement reduced the impact of the adagietto, which is such a change from the tutti of the opening movements. As ever, Gustav Mahler’s concept was exhilarating and moving.

Programa de mano de 8 oct 2026 - Denia International Piano Festival - Mathis Cathignol

2026-09-28T09:51:22.852+02:00

New season of ADDA concerts opens with The Ring Without Words

2026-09-27T11:58:24.553+02:00

The new season of ADDA concerts, titled Naturaleza, vida y amor, began last night with an unusual program. Single work programs are often symphonies or oratorios, or theatre pieces scores played primarily as musical experience. But The Ring Without Words is an arrangement, which is unusual.

The work is not a reconstruction. Neither is it an invented fantasy. Commissioned by Telarc from Lorin Maazel, The Ring Without Words is pure Wagner, his own music as selected by the conductor who must have led performances of the Ring several times. He made no revisions, added no notes and stuck to the running order of the story. What Lorin Maazel did might be characterized as a musician’s technical skill, but this would miss a point. What Maazel accomplished with this work is almost incredibly creative.

Lorin Maazel effectively condensed fifteen hours or so of music drama into a seventy-minute orchestral suite which kept Wagner’s music and story in the correct order. What he created was an orchestral showpiece of the most wonderful kind. It is, of course, full of familiar music, some of which is as well-known as any pop song, even more than a century and a half after it was written.

But what is also amazing about the work is that it comes together to tell the story. Almost absent from Lorin Maazel’s construction is Valhalla, the Giants, the fire music at the end of Die Walkűre and importantly Siegried’s forging of Nothung. Fafner is there as a dragon in just a few chords before he is similarly dispatched. But what remains is coherent and convincing.

The Ring Without Words preserves Wagner’s orchestration, which means that the sound of a hundred musicians on stage is filled out with Wagner tubas, whose penetrating tones underpin an already vast score. What is so amazing to an audience member listening to this music is the realization of how utterly original it was in its style. Almost incredibly, we are talking about the middle of the nineteenth century. All right, there was Berlioz and there was Meyerbeer and there was Liszt. But Wagner surpassed all of these in the way that he integrated his choice of material into the orchestral texture to create a musical language that was truly communicative. Thus the experience of The Ring Without Words is not primarily loud or brash. There is a genuine and successful attempt to stick to the story, so we have Wotan telling Brünnhilde why he has to surround her in fire – this will hurt me more than it hurts you - but then there is only a hint of his call to Loge to set the fire.

Lorin Maazzel was not the only person to create a purely orchestral score from the Ring. The Ring – An Orchestral Adventure by Henk de Vlieger is another attempt and also lasts about seventy minutes in concert. But whoever the arranger, it is Richard Wagner that survives via his utterly original music.

Last but not least, I have to mention the impeccable playing we heard from the ADDA orchestra. The quality of their playing means that the concert series will be a success.

Size matters, but length is not important – Einstein On The Beach in Valencia

2026-09-23T17:38:23.998+02:00

A performance of a piece of music-theatre that lasts in its originally scored version for between four and five hours, for most concertgoers, is a once in a lifetime experience. If the piece is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg by Richard Wagner, it is a one-off experience that a particular audience member I heard recently is determined should stay that way, though I personally have never heard a performance of the work in the theatre. Other time-consuming giants have to include Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, Parsifal, and Tristan und Isolde, Soarabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum, Feldman’s String Quartet No2, to name a few. Indeed I have sat through many performances of the Wagner works both in the theatre and in recording. At one hour and twenty minutes, Steve Reich’s Drumming hardly figures, despite its reputation of being interminable. I have attended three performances of the work and would go to hear it again tomorrow, if I had the chance.

At four to five hours duration in its original conception, Einstein On The Beach by Philip Glass is right up there on the consumption of time. The performance in Valencia last night by the Ictus Ensemble alongside Collegium Vocale Gent lasted just three and a half hours in their adaptation. About two hours into the piece, I reflected on the fact that in the last fortnight I have been in four art galleries and seen hundreds of works and even photographed many of them, but the total time viewing the visual art was only just more than this opera would take. Perhaps this devotion of time to music when things visual can be potentially taken in at a glance is a problem for the uninitiated. For the devoted music fan, however, time seems to dissolve to nothing when the music starts. But it does require listening.

Perhaps it is this control of time, rather in primarily Neville Shute’s apocalyptic, nuclear age book On The Beach that provided Philip Glass with the stimulus to compose. Only he can tell, and, specifically, artists are probably the last people to be conscious of such a stimulus. That said, Einstein On The Beach does control time. Despite the fact that the music rushes along, the changes happen slowly and it is the changes that provide the meat of the experience, landmarks within the sound landscape. It was Robert Wilson that originally provided the composer with the scenario, and he wanted things to be formalistic, never linear. As a consequence, the music seems to meander through time, meeting itself along the way.

In many of the choral passages, the singers simply recite numbers or jumble them up. The sequence, thus, is broken, but one–two–three–four–five–six–seven–eight does feature quite a lot. The other vocal stimuli are simply open vowels are solfège syllables, so the primary vehicle for expression becomes rhythm and change. The number four featured extensively, the performers being given prompts to indicate four repetitions of a pattern, the next “one” indicating a change. One section unexpectedly terminated on a three.

Philip Glass’s music has been criticized for being repetitious. It is repetitious and that is part of the point, because via repetition change becomes amplified. Personally, when I hear Philip Glass’s music, I am struck by the thought that this is JS Bach’s inspiration in the twentieth century. I know that this will sound outrageous to fans of the baroque but just listen to Glass’s Etudes.

Einstein On The Beach was premiered fifty years ago. When I was born, late Brahms was that old. It is at work of its time and when it was written, the composer wrote mainly for his own ensemble, hence the orchestration. No fan of opera will be happy with this work without introduction. But here there is no spectacle, no plot, no characterization. It is absolute music, absolute experience with neither consequence nor emotion, though still setting a scenario. It simply exists, and, despite it being a one off, will live forever in the memory.

Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović open the fourth Denia International Piano Festival with works by Beethoven, Papanopulo, Moszkowski and Ravel

2026-09-20T12:17:13.540+02:00

Last night Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović opened the Denia International Piano Festival with a concert of music for four hands. The Croatian pianists included in their varied programme a piece by Boris Papandopulolo, the giant of twentieth century Croatian musical life, whose music remains almost unknown to Western European audiences, despite his having published over four hundred works during a lifetime of music making.

Papandopulo’s compositional style started with Croatian folk music, but he was from the start a sophisticated, eclectic composer, who could draw on many of the styles of European music. As he got older, his music became more dissonant, and he even sought in influence from jazz. Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović included the folk inspired but highly complex and rhythmic Dance Suite by Papandopulo.

Each of the suite’s four movements drew spontaneous applause from the Denia audience who, over the years, has shown itself to be open to the exploration of the music of lesser-known composers. On this occasion, the often fiery rhythms, and broken harmonies of these dancers provided excitement in what was eventually essentially a celebration of folk tradition in the hands of a sophisticated composer.

The concert opened with Beethoven’s Opus 6, his Piano Sonata for Four Hands. This is a short work in two movements with light, playful, dance like motives, which were a perfect contrast with the intensely rhythmic twentieth century dances that followed.

In a second half on a Spanish theme, we heard Moskovsky Spanish Dancers Opus12 and then the enigmatic Rhapsodie Españole of Ravel. This latter piece is more often heard in its orchestral version, but at the heart of the work there is a habanera which was originally composed in 1895 for two pianos but was never published separately. In 1907 Ravel composed three other pieces to accompany it and so today the Rhapsodie Españole is a four-movement piece which contains much quiet and reflective music, especially in the first two movements. As ever, with Ravel, it says much about its composer, less about its inspiration.

Nicola Kos and Danijel Gašparović finished with an encore of Dvořak’s Slavonic Dance Opus72 No2 whose gentle, swaying rhythm brought the evening to a close. The next concert in the Denia International Piano Festival is on 8 October and features French pianist Mathis Cathignol in works by Granados, Fauré and Chopin.

Programa de 19 sep 2026 Denia International Piano Festival - Duo Kos-Gasparovic

2026-09-15T12:30:23.423+02:00

Ars Alta announces the fourth Denia International Piano Festival - 19 Sept to 3 Dec 2026

2026-08-07T10:00:02.441+02:00

Piano Duo Kos–Gašparović invites you to experience music at its highest level, where two exceptional artists perform with remarkable unity, virtuosity, and expressive power. Their concerts transcend the traditional recital, transforming the piano into an orchestra and every stage into a destination.

From the elegance of Beethoven to the vibrant rhythms of Spain and the evocative colours of Ravel, each program is thoughtfully crafted to inspire, captivate, and leave a lasting impression.

Whether in the world’s leading concert halls, prestigious festivals, or intimate chamber music venues, Piano Duo Kos–Gašparović offers performances that celebrate excellence, passion, and the joy of musical discovery.

Mathis Cathignol (France, 2000) is one of the most promising pianists of his generation. A graduate of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), he earned Master’s degrees in both Piano Performance and Piano Accompaniment with the highest distinction. A prizewinner at numerous international competitions, he won First Prize at the Pierre Barbizet International Piano Competition (2024) and Third Prize at the Épinal International Piano Competition (2025).

As a soloist, he has performed concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Ravel, and Stravinsky with leading orchestras, and has appeared at prestigious venues and festivals including La Roque-d’Anthéron, Salle Cortot, and Nohant. Since 2022, he has been Professor of Piano at the Claude Debussy Conservatory in Paris. Praised for the elegance of his sound and the maturity of his interpretations, Mathis Cathignol is rapidly establishing himself as one of the leading young French pianists.

Principal clarinet of the Teatro alla Scala Orchestra and Philharmonic Orchestra since 1984, Fabrizio Meloni completed his musical studies at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. He is a winner of national and international competitions and has collaborated with internationally renowned soloists such as Bruno Canino, Alexander Lonquich, Michele Campanella, Heinrich Schiff, Friederich Gulda, Editha Gruberova, the Hagen Quartet, M.W. Chung, Philip Moll, Riccardo Muti, and Daniel Baremboim (the latter in his extraordinary capacity as pianist).

He has toured the United States and Israel with the Quintetto a Fiati Italiano. With the Nuovo Quintetto Italiano ha has toured South America and South Asia.. He has been invited to give masterclasses throughout the world.

Defined by The New York Times “an artist with supreme technical mastery, dazzling and charming with his highly cultivated sound”, Alberto Nosè is one of the most awarded piano artists of his generation. He stood out the international music world at the age of eleven winning 1st Prize at the Jugend für Mozart International Competition in Salzburg. Top prize winner of Montecarlo Piano Masters, New York Concert Artists, Paloma O’Sheain Santander, Long-Thibaud in Paris, Maj Lind in Helsinki, Busoni in Bolzano, he was laureate at the F. Chopin International Piano Competition in 2000 which led him to a worldwide career as soloist as well as with major orchestras (London Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonique de Radio France, Sinfonica de Madrid) in the most renowed concert venues like Carnegie Hall in New York, Southbank Centre in London, Konzerhaus in Berlin, Théâtre du Châtelet and Salle Pleyel in Paris, Auditorium in Madrid, Mozarteum in Salzburg, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, City Hall in Hong Kong, Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, La Fenice in Venice, Santa Cecilia in Rome.

His debut album for Piano Le Magazine featuring works by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt and Prokofiev won several awards like CHOC du Monde de la Musique and La Clef by ResMusica. His CD of the Keyboard Sonatas by J. Ch. Bach, recorded on modern piano and published by Naxos, has been broadcast by Radio France, BBC 3, Radio 4 Netherland, Radio New Zealand, ABC Classic FM USA and Australia.

István I. Székely is an internationally acclaimed concert pianist, pedagogue, and distinguished representative of the Franz Liszt pianistic tradition. He is Professor of Piano at the Katarina Gurska Conservatory in Madrid and at the Franz Liszt Center for High Performance Pianists in La Nucía, Spain.

He has given masterclasses in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Turkey, Israel, Colombia, and Spain, and is regularly invited to serve on the juries of prestigious international piano competitions. As a concert pianist, he has performed throughout Spain, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and Colombia, and has had the honor of giving a private recital for Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol of Thailand.

He is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Dénia International Piano Festival, the Alicante International Piano Competition, and the Franz Liszt Center Piano Competition, as well as the Founder and Music Director of the Sombor Philharmonic. His artistic and pedagogical career reflects a lifelong commitment to musical excellence and the preservation of the great European piano tradition.

Programme and booking details are at https://www.arsaltacultural.com/eng/ and https://www.arsaltacultural.com/

2026-08-04T09:32:57.193+02:00

This Side Of Paradise is a very famous novel and justly so. Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, has been something of a blind spot for me. I read The Great Gatsby as a teenager and, frankly, was disappointed. The reaction says more about me and my age than about the book. But that was many years ago and perhaps I should revisit it.

But This Side Of Paradise was the author’s first novel and first success. It did take him many years and much revision to complete and, frankly, it shows. The style, point of view and indeed characterisation is, for me, inconsistent throughout. And what is more the mixture of forms – narrative, description and poetry, also for me, seems to flow from the writer’s need to impress and explore rather than any desire to communicate. At the same time, it feels like the writer also does not want to experiment.

Amory Blaine, the principal character, is a Midwesterner who finds himself in a private school and then Princeton. At the outset, he appears to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth as he sets about building career, love, family, and future. But life does not work out that way for him. He is repeatedly unlucky in love, finding that the women he falls for have better, far more lucrative options. His fortune, apparently considerable at the start, dwindles, until at the end of the book he is a poor man, but returning to Princeton, no doubt to pursue the academe that he had earlier apparently turned his back on.

Amory Blaine does spend time in the trenches in World War I, but he is decidedly reticent about the experience. We have no clues as to whether this is born of trauma or indifference. Perhaps the author, himself, had no direct resource to rely on since his own time in the military was spent within the USA. At the end of the novel, amid disagreements about politics, he does mention one acquaintance who was killed in the fighting, but the loss of life in the trenches, and also from the influenza epidemic that followed apparently past him by or perhaps left no lasting impression. One feels that the events that cause Amory Blaine to rethink his life and pursue different directions were precisely those that beset the writer himself.

In the first half of the book, I felt a little frustrated about the characters, who seemed to have no depth. In effect, they all seem to live in an eternal present, hardly ever referring to their collective past or harbouring ambitions or fears about the future. What emerges is a desire to conform to the ideals of the social class that they imagine they adhere to, more specifically the social class to which they aspire. If they are successful in forming facilitating liaisons, that class identity is reinforced, if not, it is questioned. Amory increasingly finds himself in the latter position, leading him inexorably towards socialism. One feels that he would not have espoused these views if he had married money, as he originally set out to do.

Amory Blaine and several of his acquaintances are heavily into literature and regularly quote and write poetry, but the efforts are late nineteenth century in style. There is no obvious modernism here. They, and the writer, are drawn towards epithets which, though in context impress, seems overdone, overwritten. Here are just two examples. Wandering through a storm one day, Amory asks himself: ‘“Who the devil is there in Ramilly County,” muttered Amory aloud, “who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?”’ Soon after a character muses: ‘Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.’

By the end of the book, Amory declares himself a socialist, but his radicalism is couched in democratic terms, not in revolutionary and his position seems to be born of rejection by the social class he once aspired to, rather than a plea for justice in human relations. But This Side Of Paradise remains a masterpiece of its kind, a towering achievement of a young writer and is well worth reading.

Writers and their work - David Storey by John Russell Taylor

2026-07-31T17:47:03.241+02:00

A difficulty with writing a critical assessment of the work of a living writer is that an author has to gamble with time. John Tussell Taylor’s monograph was published in 1974 and so concentrated on David Storey’s output in the 1960s and the early 1970s. The problem for John Russell Taylor’s work was that David Storey published in 1976 his novel Saville, which won the Booker prize that year. Now Saville is without question a towering achievement. Reading the book, as I have done several times, it almost feels like a biography of me and the hundreds of other people from industrial, northern England whose lives were quite transformed by the 1944 Education Act. For the first time access to education was both wider and more available. My own father, no doubt academically gifted, had to leave a local grammar school before doing any public qualifications simply because his parents could not afford to have him remain as a non-earner. When I entered the same school a generation later, I was automatically assigned to the same “house” into which my father had been ascribed. Saville thus described what it felt like to be socially mobile in the 1950s and 1960s, to be separated from one’s roots, to learn to speak the same language a different way, and to feel a growing sense of alienation from one’s own background. The roots were perhaps illusory throughout, as the economic and social changes of the nineteen eighties illustrated.

What John Russell Taylor does describe so well in his monograph are the David Storey works that preceded Saville. These were already a significant literary achievement. The novelist-playwright burst onto the British literary scene with hi novel This Sporting Life. It features a rugby league player called Arthur Machin in the book and renamed Frank in Lindsay Anderson’s film. As a player, he is well known locally and moderately successful, at least when he walked the streets of his local town. When a widow makes herself available to him – for whatever reason - he enters a relationship with her. There follows an examination of misogyny, sexism, social class and identity as the local hero falls from grace and has to accept failure. These are very much the threads that John Russell Taylor examines Storey’s existing work including Flight to Camden, Passmore, The Restoration of Arthur Middleton and others.

John Russell Taylor writes at the conclusion of his work: “If in his lack of reticence, his acceptance of openly expressed violence and passion as part of life and therefore, without embarrassment, as part of literature Storey seems like a maverick figure in the British literary scene, the impression is superficial. He can be seen as our first truly modern novelist because for him the traditional obstacles thrown up by middle-class education and the gentlemanly tradition of understatement are not consciously overcome; they quite simply do not exist.” This is a telling conclusion. It provides anyone with little knowledge of the circumstances in which David Story wrote a clear pointer as to how to approach his work. Access to education, the social changes that started post Word War II and the continuous rise of material prosperity really did change British society. Older values seemed to be sept aside. It also created a confusion of identity which persists, because though working-class people were admitted to and thereby created different social strata, they were never allowed to own their own identity.

As a footnote, I offer something that is unrelated to the book I am reviewing. I personally appear in the Film of This Sporting Life. In the big crowd scene filmed at Wakefield Trinity’s Belle Vue ground, I am the nine-year-old that appears for a split second behind the sticks at the scoreboard end. I was one of 28000 people who turned up to watch Wakefield beat Wigan on the way to Wembley. The score was 5-4. Fred Smith scored the try. The memory is still vivid. Also vivid was the way the crowd reacted with laughter at Richard Harris’s inability to catch the ball and number of retakes Anderson had to shoot as a result. But we were extras. The real interests were on the pitch, part of the filming. The extras are still there.

3 TV Plays by David Mercer

2026-07-25T16:16:03.849+02:00

In 3 TV Plays David Mercer published the scripts of A Suitable Case For Treatment, For Tea On Sunday and And Did Those Feet. All were produced and broadcast in 1966 or before, and each one was directed by Don Taylor at the BBC. I probably watched all three plays when they were originally broadcast, no doubt accompanied by my parents initially remarking on the playwright’s origins in nearby Wakefield and then dissolving into “I don’t know why they put out this rubbish on the telly.”

But David Mercer did make an impression on me, especially the later plays On The Eve Of Publication and Let’s Murder Vivaldi, when perhaps I was more able to appreciate their subtlety. But this later work was much more conventional than these earlier plays.

David Mercer had made his name as a playwright specifically on television, rather than the theatre. His early Where The Difference Begins had explored family relations in a working-class household in which both sons had been educated out of the class and had adopted markedly different lifestyles and politics from their father.

The plays in 3 TV plays, however, find David Mercer in a much more surreal guise, flirting, if that’s the right word, with absurdity. The reaction of my parents was apparently shared by the head of drama of the BBC when Don Taylor, the director, likened Mercer’s work to Ionesco. “Ian who?” was the reply.

A Suitable Case For Treatment is a study in marital breakdown, a situation that Mercer had himself gone through some years before. The play is darkly satirical. Morgan, the principal character, frequently has visions of hammers and sickles, and gorillas, which emphasize the unpredictability of behaviour that clearly led to the breakdown of his relationships. The TV play which reflected this darkness was wiped. The 1960s film of the same script ignores the theme to become a mere frothy comedy.

In For Tea On Sunday, three couples meet to share a gentle social occasion. Unfortunately for five of them, the sixth is what would have been labelled at the time as a “mental case”. He shows up to a London flat with an axe and breaks the place apart. The reactions of the other characters to this show of absurdity is what the play is really about.

In these two plays Mercer presents a character that does not follow conventions of behaviour. It might be argued that the author portrays himself and his personality type. In these plays, he wanted to explore what the reactions of others might be if this tendency was taken to extreme. One is reminded of his first meeting with Don Taylor where Mercer claimed he poured a cup of coffee on the carpet.

And Did Those Feet explores wildly different territory. Unlike the other two plays, the original production survives and is available on the internet. I would encourage everyone to watch it, bearing in mind that this was broadcast midweek at primetime.

And Did Those Feet is a quotation from Blake’s Jerusalem, which, in a setting by Hubert Parry, still features at the last night of the proms. For the general populace, this is a symbol of the establishment, that wall of landed gentry and their professional allies that keeps the hoi-polloi out.

A member of the landed gentry is obsessed with succession. He cannot, however, sire anything but bastards, the twins, Bernard and Timothy, who, though opposites, become inseparable. There are references to Jules et Jim, the apparent uselessness of the upper classes and their hoarding of capital. Their mother goes to live with an artist in Chelsea, who keeps her in a cage, a situation she seems to be quite happy with. In an obvious skit towards the director, a character opines that working class people send their kids to Oxford.

In And Did Those Feet, Mercer approached the surreal. Who cares what it means? There is no plot, incidentally. There is a rubbishing of the upper-class contribution to the war effort by depicting the twins lazing around in Burma. There is a swimming pool sequence where the twins swing on trapezes by candlelight. Reference to Chekov comes when they try to unsuccessfully to shoot themselves. Their father gifts them each a female doll in a coffin. The two bastards then inherit everything and go canoeing on a tributary of the Amazon. Watch it. It was of its time, but who would do something like that now?

Days of Vision : working with David Mercer : television drama then and now 1990 by Don Taylor

2026-07-24T11:21:59.333+02:00

Coming from Wakefield, I have a particular interest in the work of playwright David Mercer. So it was with some excitement that I started Don Taylor’s memoir Days of Vision: working with David Mercer. In the book, Don Taylor, who directed–produced David Mercer's work for television in the early 1960s, offers far more than biography, far more than a description of a professional relationship that had the potential to change the direction that television drama might take.

Don Taylor describes his own history which took him from working class origins in West London to Oxford, and then to the BBC as a trainee. He also vividly remembers how television drama was created in those days of boom microphones and heavy cameras on wheels. It is revelatory to a twenty-first century reader to realize that many of the programmes had to be done live in the studio, because recording meant film and film meant location, and location meant expense. Anyone remotely interested in how television is made will be captivated by the author’s description of 1960s practice.

Don Taylor describes in detail a professional relationship that lasted just three years with David Mercer. What scuppered that relationship was a change within the BBC, itself, which changed the focus of television drama and effectively shut Don Taylor out of making further contributions to the medium in the way that Taylor wanted.

Mercer was himself working class, but northerner. He was different from Don Talor in that he had not been to Oxford or indeed any other prestigious university and had already been married and divorced. Both socialists, disillusioned by the 1960s, Don and David shared a political as well as a social bond. Both had been brought up by working class parents who neither appreciated nor understood either “writing” or the “theatre”.

One of the early collaborations that writer and director focused on was the play Where The Difference Begins with its themes of the death of old-style socialism, and being educated out of your class. The play eventually became the first part of Mercer’s Generations trilogy, all of which Don Taylor directed.

Quotations from Taylor about working with Mercer are jewels in the text. He says that “David Mercer’s best TV plays seem to me to rub shoulders with the best English theatre writing since the war.” The playwright’s “A Death in the Family had… an intellectual acuity about politics and political issues as they expressed themselves in conflicts between recognizable human people, that was quite new to me.” Furthermore “Mercer had … an intellectual grasp more characteristic of a European writer, a Sartre, or a Camus, or a Brecht, than any English contemporary” and that “he perceived that human beings. … have a sense of their own reality. … (Mercer’s characters) are what they believe.” He believed that “David Mercer wasn’t merely a talented new voice. He was a voice that was much needed if we were to wake up to any understanding of what kind of people we were.”

Mercer the “cuddly teddy-bear” is also here, as is his heavy drinking and his womanising. There is a priceless episode that happened at their first meeting. Unused to the middle-class flat in which Don Taylor and his wife hosted him, Mercer spilt his coffee on the carpet. Mercer later claimed he had done it on purpose.

But this professional biography is much more than a history of a collaboration. Don Taylor describes his own fall from grace in the BBC without any of the bitterness that a reader of this text will assume existed. What Taylor does do is end the book with a treatise on just how wrong the executives’ vision of television’s future had become. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Don Taylor thought that commercialism and the “low-brow” had come to dominate. One can only imagine what he would have made of the twenty-first century content-free medium, where even major sports events have to be disrupted so that advertisement can get their pounds of flesh.

As a coda to the review of Don Taylor’s Days of Vision, I set AI the task of summarizing David Reisman’s version views on US popular culture. It came up with the following: David Riesman’s view of U.S. popular culture was ambivalent rather than simply hostile. In The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that modern American society was shifting from “inner-directed” people, guided by internalised family and moral standards, toward “other-directed” people, guided by peers, approval, fashion, and mass media.

For Riesman, U.S. pop culture—films, radio, magazines, advertising, children’s stories, and later television—was not just entertainment. It acted as a social tutor, teaching people how to behave, what to desire, how to fit in, and how to read the expectations of others. This made popular culture central to the formation of the modern American personality.

He worried that mass culture could encourage conformity, status anxiety, consumerism, and a dependence on social approval: the “other-directed” person wants to be liked and accepted rather than guided by firm inner convictions.

But Riesman was not simply an elitist critic of popular culture. He also saw that mass culture could widen horizons, spread information, create shared references, and give people models for imagining different lives. That helps explain why his introduction to Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society matters: U.S. popular culture could be seen as part of modernization, exposing people in traditional societies to new lifestyles, aspirations, and forms of social mobility.

In short: Riesman saw American pop culture as a powerful engine of modernization and social learning, but also as a force that could produce shallow conformity and dependence on mass-mediated approval.

In the final section of his book, Don Taylor offers a similar analysis of what happened to television. Riesman’s position very much sums up what the author thought. US popular culture was perhaps the diametric opposite of what Don Taylor wanted to achieve in his work. It is perhaps indicative of the victory of commercialism that now Don Taylor’s and David Mercer’s work is confined to obscurity, but the aesthetic achievement is still available to experience at least in part, though most of the collaborative ventures they produced were wiped years ago.

Everything turns out in the end - Turandot in Valencia with Semenchuk, Kunde and López Moreno - Sir Mark Elder conducts, Alex Ollé directs

2026-06-17T14:35:29.724+02:00

Turandot is an operatic masterpiece. But it’s staging remains highly problematic. The two main characters, Calaf and Turandot, who does not even sing in the first act, have tour de force roles. If they cannot sing, then any production is a disaster. But the roles are very demanding and asking them to act as well is probably beyond most humans. Turandot’s character is perhaps uniquely static in opera, apart from Gianni Schicchi, of course, who does nothing but lie there to fulfil his role. Turandot, on the other hand, must have a powerful voice. There is that wonderful end of scene when she must stand out against an orchestra playing forte, a stage full of chorus in full voice, and the rest of the cast giving everything. It is musical magic but does need a lot of wind. The role, however, does not allow much scope for acting or even action.

Calaf, on the other hand, can be mobile, especially in the first act. But, after sounding his gong at the end of the act, he spends most of his time pondering. And singing, of course, and that often has to be very powerful. The body does have its limits.

There are two lesser characters in Timur and Liu. Timur is old, lame and blind, so without Liu's help, he cannot credibly add movement. Liu has two very demanding sections and, it has to be said, has the opera’s best music. At other times, however, she is tied to Timur’s immobility.

Ping, Pang and Pong, the triple act of priests, sometimes threatening, sometimes comic, at root fed up with their lot, do offer a director an opportunity for action. This is often translated to dance, but the roles actually have some demanding singing, and finding a singer who can dance as well is hard – let alone three! This often leads directors to split the roles between different people – one who dances and one who sings for each role. For the audience, this creates spectacle but does nothing for the drama.

Add to this mix the Prince of Persia, whose only role in act one is to be beheaded, an emperor in failing health, and not in full voice, let alone full body, and then minor roles which hardly figure, and one concludes that finding action in Turandot is not easily solved.

The chorus, therefore, is the opera’s main stay in terms of action. But the chorus has to do quite a lot of singing at high volume. The solution for designers is often to tier the stage with the singers occupying the gallery, whilst the action takes place at ground level. Productions often resort to a fashion show, where poor oppressed Chinese peasants wear glittering colourful costumes. Not in Valencia…

So how about this production in the hands of Alex Ollé in Valencia? Galleries for the chorus were used. These consisted of Escher-like staircases that went up and down leading nowhere. The costumes were largely black (for peasants and guards) or white for dignitaries. The principles, Calaf, Timur and Liu wore tertiary neutrals.

The use of black and white was clearly indicative of a society where there was no political power for the masses, and no desire to accommodate them on behalf of the elite. This totalitarian society thus maintained itself by recruiting soldiers from the masses – (hence dressed in black) – who oppressed the masses from which they came on behalf of the white-clad elite.

There were no dancers until the temptresses for Calaf in act three, so Ping, Pang and Pong had to do their own vaudeville routines, which worked to an extent. The problem in this production with Ping, Pang and Pong was their roles. They simply did not know who they were. In act one they appear on the street as drunken louts who taunt Calaf about his obsession with Turandot. Their concern did not convince. They are revealed in act two as army officers who inexplicably had a day off when the Prince of Persia was being beheaded! They are disgruntled about the role they feel they have to play. It comes as no surprise. Then in act three they are dressed in white – presumably priests and therefore part of the elite – when trying to attempt to persuade Calaf not to go through with his plan. Doubling these roles with dancers adds confusion. To make their three appearances seem like different characters makes no sense whatsoever. Even the implied transition from street to elite did not communicate, as a result of the functional roles they have to play in the drama.

So what then were the pluses in this production? Above all, it was act three. The final scene of Turandot was not written by Puccini who had died with the completion of Liu’s suicide. Liu killed herself so as not to divulge Calaf’s name, and she killed herself out of love for him. This leads Turandot to a change of heart. If love can do that for Liu, maybe she should try it?

No, the final scene of Turandot is usually dramatically about as convincing as Ping, Pang and Pong’s characterization in this production. Apparently, this icy princess, who has killed every suitor that has approached her, suddenly has a change of heart. It’s about his convincing a sainthood to a nonbeliever.

Alex Ollé in this production saved his master stroke until the end and – after many years of seeing productions of the opera – this was dramatically convincing and wholly in character. Calaf and Turandot walk around the dead Liu whose body remains in full view, professing their selfish love for one another, which really is love for themselves and their own interests. But Turandot does not convince anyone. Surely, she is leading her suitor on.

In Alex Ollé’s version, Turandot retrieves Liu's knife and hides it in her sleeve. Then, as she admits that it was love that changed everything, she too commits suicide as the chorus repeats Calaf’s earlier “Vincero”, meaning that it is Turandot who won in the end, still her pure self in death. She has not compromised and it makes an utterly convincing finale.

Add to that Mark Elder’s insistence that “Nessun dorma” should finish dramatically in context and not with rousing major chord and applause for the tenor. So the evening was musically convincing as well.

So what had been up to that last act an average performance of the opera, beautifully sung and played, of course, not withstanding the poor characterization of some roles and an average staging, was elevated to magical status by making sense. Gregory Kunde, Ekatarina Senenchuk, and Carolina López Moreno as the principles was superb as well, but it is the ending that will endure.

When superlatives are not enough – Josep Vicent and Anna Federova with ADDA Simfónica in Rachmaninov and Mahler

2026-06-13T15:08:34.811+02:00

Last night the 2025-2026 season of ADDA concerts was brought to close. On paper, for a seasoned concert goer, there was nothing particularly outstanding on the program. We were to hear Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody, and then the First Symphony of Mahler. In the end, the performances of both works approached perfection and originality. Despite the fact that both works were very familiar, the performances achieved memorable status, in the Rachmaninov because of the level of communication between the soloist and the orchestra, and then the Mahler because of the highly original approach to the work taken by Josep Vicent, conductor and artistic director of ADDA Simfónica.

Anna Federova was soloist in the Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The ADDA audience had a preview of the music during the previous concert when Andrey Baronov played the Caprice number 24 as an encore. Rachmaninov’s variations on the same theme are an orchestral showpiece. There is rhythm and colour in every phrase, but despite all the massive contributions from the orchestra, the composer manages never to impinge on the soloist’s audibility. This is not surprising, since Sergei Rachmaninov was writing the piece to show off his own skills as a pianist, but the handling of the orchestra is also literally brilliant. Everything seems to shine, but the Rachmaninov bells are still in evidence.

The work contains the eighteenth variation, of course, which is become without doubt one of the most popular pieces in the repertoire. It is how it is hard not to sound clichéd in this music, but, as ever, the pace of the performance without pauses between the variations keep the work alive. Context is all – and breaking that context is a recipe for disaster. But ADDA Simfónica under Joseph Vicent brought the whole work to life, not just the famous bit! Anna Fedorova's playing was superb throughout, as would be expected from a soloist who has become so famous for her interpretation of Rachmaninov.

The eighteenth variation also provided the first encore. This was followed by a solo piece by Rachmaninoff, the Prelude Opus 32 number 12 I think. The music did not surprise because it is well known, but the musicianship of all concerned approached perfection.

And then to the second half featuring Mahler’s Symphony No1. I point out that this is the sixth time I have heard the work in concert performance in the last decade. I have probably heard it broadcast many times as well. It was, however, the first time that ADDA Simfónica have played it in a concert that I also attended. I was therefore prepared to renew an acquaintance with a work that I know well and that I first heard about sixty years ago in a recording by Bruno Walter.

Put simply, I have never heard Mahler’s First Symphony played like this. Josep Vicent’s take on the music – because it was surely a personal re-examination of the score that led to this performance – stressed the impressionistic nature of the first movement. The composer himself stated that it is supposed to be infused with nature. It is supposed to be evocative of sounds that one might hear on a country walk. Josep Vicent used rubato throughout the first movement, whenever it would make a point of stressing the detail of every sound combination that Mahler wrote. The off-stage trumpets of the start were miles distant, but the variable rhythm allowed the conductor to bring to the fore every detail of the score. Also clear was how easy is the transition in the slow movement from funeral march to Jewish klezmer. And again the use of tempo change stressed the contrast.

The result was just like hearing the music for the first time, so differently did the performance bring out the contrasts in this music. The approach was wholly original, ADDA Simfónica clearly enjoyed the challenge, it was a clear triumph for Josep Vicent and superlatives were not enough to describe the effect.

Perhaps the best performance by a soloist in a lifetime: Andrey Baronov plays Taneyev’s Suite in ADDA Alicante

2026-05-30T13:09:12.908+02:00

After over fifty years of concert going, it is unusual to attend an orchestral concert that features three works, each more than a century old, that one has not heard before. I have recordings of all three works, of course, but they have not figured regularly on my personal playlist. When such experience is coupled with a solo performance that ranks amongst the best I have ever heard, then you might conclude that the experience was memorable. The experience in Alicante’s ADDA auditorium last night suppressed surpassed that by a long way.

The works concerned date from 1907, 1882 and 1897. They are respectively the Suite for Violin an Orchestra by Sergey Taneyev and Dvořák’s Domov muj, My Homeland Op62 and A Hero’s Song Op111. Taneyev’s music - especially his orchestral works – do not figure regularly on concert programmes in Western Europe, whilst Dvořák’s symphonies and orchestral dances figure regularly, whilst his tone poems do not.

A Hero’s Song, the programme notes told the audience, is probably a short autobiography of its composer. At the time of the work’s composition, Antonin Dvorak was almost sixty and had returned from his teaching in the United States. The work suffers none of the pomp and obvious self-marketing of Richard Strauss’s attempt at the same idea. Richard Strauss was still in his thirties when he wrote the grandiose Ein Heldenleben, A Hero’s Life. Both in concept and hearing it could not present more different experience than that Antonin Dvořák composed on, basically, the same idea.

Symphonic in structure but spanning a single movement lasting less than 25 minutes, A Hero’s Song Op111 is recognizably the music of Dvořák, but it has modernistic directions in its writing. It is scored for a large orchestra, which is used by the composer to create tones and colours rather than a blunderbuss. Unlike Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, A Hero’s Song was indeed the composer’s final orchestral work. If it is autobiographical, it is upbeat about things in general. There is a slow section that contains a funeral march, but then we all go there. Generally, the music dances, its way through its twenty minutes, but there are moments when Dvorak simply delights in the sounds that he can write for a full orchestra. And, though the work ends proudly upbeat, there is real humility in this music, as if the composer was saying to posterity, “That is who I am and that is what I can do. It’s now up to you!”

The performance of A Hero’s Song was preceded in the second half of the concert by Dvořák’s overture Domov muj, My Homeland, in which the composer celebrated Czech Theatre. This is middle Dvořák, after, it has to be said, that he had thrown off his mid-century tendency to gigantism when his compositions – the early symphony is for example – run to great length. My Homeland is a celebration of themes which were well known to his audience. The non-Czechs in an audience simply revel in the melodies.

This evening finished with the Slavonic Dance Op 72 No2 and in a second half devoted to three works by Dvořák, we had covered the nationalism, the folkloric dancing, and the serious introspection that characterized his work. Rossen Milanov’s conducting brought out all three sides of the composer’s music. He is clearly passionate about the music of Antonin Dvořák.

The first half of the concert had been devoted to a single work. And the Suite for Violin and Orchestra Op28 by Sergey Taneyev, at over forty minutes, is longer than most concerti for the instrument. The composer chose not to use to use the title “concerto”, but this is a vast work, making concerto-like demands on the soloist. Across its five movements, there is no obvious use of sonata form and the music – in the wrong hands – could appear episodic. Hence the title, “suite”.

But under the baton of Rossen Milanov and especially with Andrey Baronov as soloist, what we heard was not only virtuosic playing, but also a work that deserves to be more central in the repertoire of violin and orchestra.

Its five movements were diverse. It opens with a Prelude, a dialogue between soloist and orchestra, reminiscent in my ear, at least, to the opening of the first concerto of Shostakovich. This is music that seems to be searching for a home and then decides just to keep wandering. The movement that follows could have been written by Respighi some years later. It is almost pop music, but its neoclassical style twists and turns the thematic material is surprising ways.

The Fairy Tale that follows was surely in Sergei Prokofiev’s mind when he wrote his first violin concerto. The violin appears to be alone in a land of strange orchestral colours and a succession of broken phrases. As fairytales go, it is something magical.

The biggest of the five movements, Theme and Variations comes next. Taneyev was here showing off how many styles in which he could present what is really a rather trite theme. It holds together because of its virtuosity, the solo part being dominant without being domineering.

The finale is a Tarantella that dances its way out of a work that has lasted over forty minutes. The movement is reminiscent of those biting scherzos that became popular amongst composers in the mid twentieth century, but its teeth were not so sharp, and the music remains celebratory.

And so ended the real surprise that will change my listening habits. I do have a recording of the piece, but it’s a recording that I have hardly played. It may now even become worn out.

Lastly, I must record that Andrey Baranov’s playing as soloist in Taneyev’s Suite must rank amongst the most impressive performances that I have ever heard. Not only was he committed to the music, with which he clearly was a good deal more familiar than anyone in the audience, but he made every phrase communicative. The suite is not a concerto, so he had no cadenza in which to show off. But the result was much more than a suite of unrelated pieces. It became more of a dialogue between orchestra and violin that made musical and experiential sense. It is not often that a soloist takes repeated curtain calls to the unanimous applause – not just bow waving – of the entire orchestra, but Andrey Baranov did just that. This was not merely memorable: it went way beyond that.

As an encore, Andrey Baranov chose to play the 24th Caprice of Paganini, which was an interesting choice, because next time the ADDA audience will hear Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on the same piece.

Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Eduard Topchjan with Sergey Khachatryan as soloist

2026-05-17T12:27:55.825+02:00

The program for the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Eduard Topchjan listed three works. These were, in printed order, the Brahms Violin Concerto with Sergey Khachatryan as soloist, Francesca de Rimini of Tchaikovsky, and then Khachaturian’s Gayaneh. What we heard was considerably different.

The concert actually opened with two movements from Khachaturian’s suite from Spartacus. It certainly was not the Brahms Concerto, which we had expected. It was already going to be quite a long concert, so it was with some relief that the piece that followed was the concerto.

Sergey Khachatryan is a world-renowned violinist. For a seasoned concert goer, there is not much more to say about the Brahms concerto, except to comment on the playing of the soloist. Sergey Khachatryan’s playing was technically perfect and indeed elegant. Personally, I found his reading of the work rather too mechanically expressive. His quiet sections, I found, were excessively quiet and on occasions I found the orchestra overpowered his playing, which is a characteristic I do not often find in this concerto. Personally, I find this concerto works best in the concert hall when the soloist does not try to over interpret. There is enough structure in Brahms’s writing, and the drama is all in the music. This is not a criticism of Sergey Khachatryan’s playing, it is a statement of my own prejudice. Certainly the audience was enthusiastic about the performance.

The soloist gave a substantial encore. Against almost a drone of tremolo played by the front desks of the first violin, Sergey Khachatryan played a modal piece that I suggest was Havoun, havoun by Grigor Narekatski. The piece was written in the tenth century by an Armenian monk and mystic, also known as Gregory of Narek. This is music that the soloist plays regularly as an encore. It does not offer any opportunity to show off, being rather quiet, modal, and slow. What it does display is control, spirituality, and identity. It was received in silence by an attentive audience who absorbed every note. We then had an interval.

Thoroughly expecting Tchaikovsky’s tone poem Francesca de Rimini after the break, the audience was surprised to hear the opening bassoon solos of the Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet, which did not appear on the printed program at all. The Armenian Philharmonic gave a spirited performance of an intensely dramatic work, which, somehow, did not approach tragedy.

Then, expecting Gayaneh of Khachaturian, the audience got their performance of Tchaikovsky’s tone poem Francesca de Rimini. This is an enormous piece, described in the program as one of the composer’s most powerful works. It is a real opportunity for an orchestra to show off, and the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra did just that. In over five decades and once going, this was the first time I had heard the piece “live”, and it makes a considerable sound, with paroxysms of modulation, peppered with gigantic brass chords. The work makes a vast statement and the playing was up to the challenge.

Khachaturian’s Gayaneh is for another day. It was not the encore!

Yui Higashijima in Schumann's Piano Concerto with the Elche Orchestra under Achim Holub in ADDA, Alicante

2026-05-16T11:50:24.083+02:00

Yui Higashijima won the third Alicante Piano Competition “Gonzalo Soriano” in 2025. As part of her prize, she was invited to play a concerto with the Elche Symphony Orchestra. The Schumann Piano Concerto was chosen, and last night she played the concerto with the orchestra in one of three concerts in the cycle. This particular concert took place in the ADDA auditorium in Alicante, and there will be another performance in Torrevieja tonight.

As one of the organisers of the competition in Alicante, I would be expected to give a positive review of the concert and the playing of the soloist. I will not disappoint. But I will go considerably further than that.

I have heard the Schumann Piano Concerto many times in concert and literally hundreds of times in broadcasts and recordings. As anyone who reads my reviews regularly will already know, I maintain that I have a musical blind spot when it comes to Robert Schumann. I often find his music rather empty, with emotion worn on the sleeve of his frockcoat to make up for the absence of the real thing. Well, I realized last night that, in order to understand this music, I needed someone who could communicate the musical experience with both confidence and vision.

The first thing to note is the tempo marking on the first movement. It is “alegro affettuoso”. Now, in previous hearings of the work, I was never musically conscious of the intellectual conflict that Schumann wanted to describe. The conflict is between a youthful vigorous figure and more contemplative character who is conscious of humanity’s darker side. Whether on previous occasions this conflict has been lacking in the interpretations I have heard or whether I missed it in my eagerness to pre-judge the composer, I have no idea.

But last night in the hands of Yui Higashijima, and under the expert and committed direction of Achim Holub, the musical conflict took centre stage. Soloist and conductor were not afraid to vary the tempi to stress the dialogue which leads to conflicting arguments. Now this sounds simple, but in performance it requires discussion, rehearsal and execution. Anyone who has performed in public will know that “getting it done” can be paramount. To exert control and interpretation to this level of performance is a real achievement and both soloist and conductor were of the same mind. Together, they opened the ears of this particular listener, who came away from the performance, as if hearing the work for the first time. Perhaps I had heard it for the first time, all the previous occasions, being “hearings”, not “listenings”.

Yui Higashijima’s performance of the piece was simply outstanding. She brought meaning and shaped to every phrase of the score. Achim Holub’s conducting was expert. He demanded a lot of the Elche Orchestra and the players responded with perfection. I will simply never listen to the concerto again, or indeed, Robert Schumann’s music in general, without having this performance in mind as a new benchmark.

Yui Higashijima followed with an encore of one of Mozart’s well-known rondos, the one in D major K485. It was interesting to hear how she played this familiar music. She managed to emphasize the surprises without being without losing the overall playfulness of Mozart’s music. Perhaps Yui Higashijima worked magic with Mozart as well!

The concert was subtitled “Portraits of Romanticism”, and the phrase was important. Having heard Schumann’s mid-century version, we then heard the Elche Orchestra under Achim Holub perform the Symphony No. 4 of Johannes Brahms from 1885. By the fourth symphony, it seemed that Brahms had relaxed a little. Again, the music was given space to express itself and it did so with expert guidance and playing. When last year the same orchestra also played the Brahms Symphony No. 4 in a concert, I wrote that there were some difficulties with the experience. The first movement on that occasion lacked shape. Not so on this occasion, when clearly the direction of Achim Holub made a real difference that reshaped the experience. Last year, the work was listed as lasting 42 minutes and this year it was 45. The three minutes extra were probably of the result of Achim Holub’s choice of tempi. Clearly an expert in the performance of Brahms symphonies, he conducted from memory and successfully transmitted his personal feelings for the music to the orchestral playing, which was nothing less than superb.

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana in Cluj

2026-05-16T11:47:51.123+02:00

The Academic College – Auditorium Maximum, Cluj-Napoca

Choir and Orchestra of the Transylvania State Philharmonic

Gergely Madaras conductor

Andreea Guriță Novac soprano

Andrea Mirchev tenor

Geani Brad baritone

Carl Orff - Carmina Burana

Sceptical about yet another Carmina Burana, and yet I need not have worried. There was nothing else available, so I booked it.

The hall has a rounded end and at first sight would focus the sound. Well it did, but in a very musical way. What we heard was a quite brilliant acoustic, when every sound was crisp and clearly defined. Add to that the tempi choice of the conductor, Georgely Madaras, and the mix was perfect.

The tempi were all quite fast and he used quite a lot of accelerando. The music seemed to chase itself along and early on I was worried that the baritone would get left behind. Appropriately, the tenor wore a white jacket and the soprano a red dress. These soloists were all more than competent and really acted out the roles they sang. The tenor had the right mix of humour and pain to be convincing.

Above all the chorus made the evening. They were together, responsive to the tempi changes and very enthusiastic. The orchestral playing was brilliant, and the audience lapped it up, finishing with one of those applause sessions in unison that are so popular in eastern Europe.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales plays Grace Williams, Saint-Saens and Elgar under Jaime Martín with Akiko Suwanai

2026-05-16T11:44:14.073+02:00

Last night’s concert in ADDA, Alicante was given by BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jaime Martín with Akiko Suwanai as soloist. On the face of the published schedule, they were just two works, the third violin concerto of Saint-Saens and Elgar’s Enigma Variations. A little short, one might think… Well think again!

The evening’s programme scheduled a third work, a substantial piece as well. It was Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches for string orchestra. At nearly twenty minutes, this rendered the concert’s length substantial at least.

Written in 1944 by its Welsh composer, Sea Sketches predates Britten's Peter Grimes, which, of course, includes the now separately performed Sea Interludes. Sea Sketches by Grace Williams comprises five movements that explore the sonorities of a string orchestra, as well as giving an impressionistic portrait of the sea in five different pictures– in wind, in song, with mysterious sirens, breaking on the shore and becalmed in summer. The textures of Grace Williams’s writing for strings stressed the coolness of a windy beach, with neo-classical flavours hardening the language of late Romanticism. One might think of Britten’s string writing when listening to Sea Sketches, but Grace Williams in the piece speaks to an audience with her own voice and communicates her own personal feelings. Grace Williams died almost fifty years ago, and her music richly deserves a wider audience.

Akiko Suwanai was soloist in Saint-Saen’s Violin Concerto No. 3. Her playing was simply breathtaking. From the work’s quiet opening and then into the opening allegro, she gave everything the work needed. If Saint-Saens was anything, he was a composer of technical mastery, and in this concerto there is both real dialogue between the orchestra and soloist and, indeed, that dialogue is always audible. The composer’s handling of the orchestra is nothing less than expert. A listener is always aware of its power to dominate, always conscious of its lines of argument, but also confident that none of the soloist’s statements will be drowned.

The slow movement was pure delight after the energy of the opening. Its longer lines allowed Akiko Suwanai to show the lyrical side of her playing, and she used the opportunity to give a beautiful performance, stressing the elegance of this music. The final allegro is again full of energy and Akiko Suwanai’s playing reproduced the communication of the first movement. It was a superb performance of the spectacular music. Akiko Suwanai gave the audience a little unaccompanied Bach has an encore. As she played alone, it was interesting to note how attentively even the orchestra listened.

Elgar’s Enigma Variations is so well-known seems unnecessary to say any more about it. But the work as a whole is not as well known as the Nimrod variation, which is often played stand-alone. It is decades since I last heard a live performance of the entire work, and I was struck by the extreme dynamics, the composer demands.

A challenge of variation writing is to keep an audience interested in the familiar. Elgar’s solution in Enigma is to present the theme and then fourteen variations which exploit the full range of orchestral possibilities. Each variation is ostensibly a portrait of an individual and the composer ups the pace by keeping the variations short, except of course, for Nimrod, which is always too short for an audience from an audience's point of view.

What had turned out to be quite a long concert finished with a Russian encore, Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla Overture. It was played with real gusto and enthusiasm, as was everything else we heard. What a delight, also, to hear a British Orchestra playing two works by British composers on a foreign tour.

Josep Vicent and the ADDA Orchestra programme one of the twentieth century’s major works and a concerto by Campogrande featuring Meta4

2026-04-19T09:28:00.000+02:00

The challenge of reviewing a performance of a work that one is deeply fond of is to remain objective. Well, I have already failed to be so. I first came across the Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable by Carl Nielsen when I was in my late teens. I have been listening to it regularly since then, so I must have heard it several hundred times. One might have thought that over the years its effect would grow less intense, its originality might have blurred, its surprise diminished. Not so.

Live performances of the work – except on radio – have been rare. It must be forty years since I last heard it in the concert hall. In a near lifetime of concert going, I have never heard the composer’s first or second symphony in concert. I have heard the Espansiva once, the fourth maybe twice and the fifth maybe four times. The enigmatic sixth, Sinfonia Semplice, once only. At home, I regularly listen to recordings, but Nielsen in the concert hall is something of a rarity.

Thank you, thus, to Josep Vicent and the ADDA Orchestra for programming the work and performing it with such commitment. For me. It was the highlight of the season and did not disappoint.

Written in 1916 and containing the composer’s references to The First World War, The Inextinguishable is a revolutionary work despite being musically conservative and sharing with Nielsen’s other works a considerable debt to Johannes Brahms. Carl Nielsen became one of music’s most original voices and it is in this symphony that we hear some of his most profound musical statements.

The fourth, for instance, has four conventional movements. But they are played without a break. Nielsen developed the idea of “progressive keys” in which music starts in one key and ends in another, thus suggesting in the listener’s ear an idea of “progress”. In the case of the fourth symphony, this is enhanced by playing the movements without breaks. And within those movements the musical material is very varied. Other composers might have used the progression of keys for entirely musical reasons, but in Nielsen there is this added layer of a journey for the listener. And the effect is subtle. Carl Nielsen never wanted to lead his audience by the nose through a “programme”. The effect is personal, even Romantic, and utterly convincing.

Two timpanis go to war occasionally in this work, and the orchestra manages to overcome their anger by being level-headed and positive, thus reflecting the composer’s fundamental optimism. In the fourth symphony, this optimism still triumphs, whereas in the fifth symphony, this optimism still comes through in the end but for all of forty minutes, the music is in minor keys, only finding its way to a major key in the closing coda. But by the time Carl Nielsen wrote the sixth symphony, cynicism had got the better of his optimistic spirit, and that is why the work remains problematic.

But still in the fourth Symphony, the compositional style is late Romanticism. It is still the individual that matters, though Nilsson is modern enough to frame the experience in current events in the external world. He is musically conservative enough to use fugues, but they bite with sharp edges, their counterpoint being jagged and modernistic. But within this conservative approach to composition, the composer manages to present material that is succinct, to the point and always subservient to an overall idea. The music is almost Neo-Classical despite being written before the term was invented!

But above all, there is energy in this music. The energy is “life energy”, which the composer thought would shine through current difficulties and result in positive outcomes. As a symphonist, the conservative Carl Nielsen became overall a thoroughly modern individual, ultimately wearied by the life he so desperately tried to affirm. How modern is that?

In the first half of the concert, we heard Josep Vicent’s selection of Manuel de Fallas’s Three Cornered Hart and Liberi Tutti, Nicola Campogrande’s Concerto for String Quartet, and Orchestra. The ADDA audience has heard the former work regularly and it never fails to rouse. The latter work featured the now superstars of Meta4, who performed brilliantly, if at the same time a little anonymously. Personally, I found the work always interesting, but eventually disappointing. Its generally minimalist style seemed to concentrate on creating a sheen of sound which was in itself convincing but also seemed to envelop the soloists in an overall orchestral sound which rather hid their significant and substantial contribution. The problem for me was not in the performance but in the handling of the musical material.

Overall, I found the Nielsen still much more modern, despite its being written over a century ago.

Escandinavia – ADDA hosts Joan Enric Lluna and Joana Carneiro in Grundman, Bach and Schumann

2026-03-28T16:18:00.003+01:00

The concert was subtitled “Escandinavia”, a label that some of the audience found a little confusing. But a program note clarified that the Symphony No. 2 of Robert Schumann is also often called Escandinavia as a nickname. Despite being premiered in Dresden in 1845, it was also dedicated to King Oscar of Norway and Sweden – hence the nickname.

Baffling labels aside, there was nothing in this program to challenge a concert-going audience, apart from possibly a world premiere of a piece by locally resident composer, Jorge Grundman. The History of a Smile for clarinet and orchestra was listed as his opus 96, no less. The orchestra in question turned out to be strings and a percussion section of a vibraphone and a marimba. These latter instruments played a significant part in creating a soundscape for the work, while, if anything, the full complement of strings was, if anything, underused.

But this is essentially a show piece for solo clarinet, though it would be stretching things to say it was a concerto. Minimalist structures are heard here, with many figures relying on minor scales or modes around a bass pedal. The overall effect is perhaps rather monotonous, but, given the minimalist inspiration, that is part of the point. Joan Enric Lluna’s playing was superb, as were the two encores he offered, both his own compositions and forming two parts of his Homenaje á Maestro Rodrigo.

Joana Carneiro’s conducting of this opening work was itself astounding in that she prompted every detail of the score. It came, therefore, as no surprise to read that she often specialises in contemporary music. When she moved onto Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, she was equally precise with music that demands above all precision. Now this is every well-known music, especially the second movement, the Air, which is often heard as a standalone piece. The ADDA Orchestra’s playing, especially that of the trumpet, was breathtaking.

And in the second half we heard a Romantic symphony that epitomises the mid-nineteenth century approach to music. It is often levied as a criticism against minimalism that the music is all process, not product. Anyone thinking that this is a characteristic of modern music should listen to the Symphony No. 2 of Robert Schumann, where the composer’s assumptions of form, modulation and orchestration are more than evident. In the end, it is a satisfying work, but, for all Schumann’s reputation for unpredictability, this particular concertgoer tends to find his approach formulaic. It’s a personal opinion.

The orchestral playing, the conducting, and the solo playing were all superb. The program also held together beautifully and as a whole it was also superb.

L’Écume des Jours by Edison Denisov from Lille Opera on OperaVision

2026-03-22T20:10:15.384+01:00

I do not usually review anything outside of direct experience. Theatre, opera, and concerts, yes, because they are experienced at firsthand. I make an exception for books, because reading is so personal that each different reader may find a different world within pages visited by others. Film, recordings and television I regard as packaged and, though I might record what I have seen, I do not write reviews. There are exceptions, notably the operas Eros and Psyche by Rosicky and Von Einem’s Der Prozess - The Trial, both of which were live performances made available by the wonderful work of OperaVision. The exception has come around again, this time in the form of Denisov’s L’Écume des Jours, an opera also broadcast by OperaVision.

Premiered in 1986, Opera de Lille recently presented the work, and it is available on the OperaVision website until September 2026. I encourage opera lovers everywhere to try it, and anyone interested in contemporary music should make a make a point of listening, perhaps on several occasions.

Edison Denisov’s music does not have many performances in the concert halls of western Europe and North America. Personally, I can see a straight line of influence through the twentieth century – the Soviet century – starting with Shostakovich, continuing through Schnittke and terminating with Denisov. Seen together, the work of these three composers seems to illustrate the history and fate of the Soviet Union from its creation to its demise. Right from the Symphony No1 of Dmitri Shostakovich, with its almost confident modernity anticipating the Constructivism in art that would follow, through to the disparate multiplicity of style and form that characterizes Denisov’s music, there was generally an increasing loss of confidence in the ideal and increasing resort to cynicism on behalf of the composers in order to express what they were feeling.

Listen, for instance, to each composer’s first symphony, and compare them. As recently mentioned, Shostakovich was generally upbeat, though as a composer he was never particularly optimistic. Later, always prone to pastiche, in his case circus, music and jazz often invade the gloom, the first symphony limits itself to what might be achieved by a young genius. It is forward looking, if not quite confident.

Contrast that with the first symphony of Arnold Schnittke. The vision is equally grand, but now there is evidence of cynicism, some use of the random, inclusion of electronics and frequent use of popular forms, though these are generally integrated and interwoven. There is less confidence than in Shostakovich and more cynicism, but the overall impression is that the individual can still make a contribution, though the outlook is bleak.

In Denisov’s first symphony, equally grand in vision as the two already mentioned, it seems that recognizable forms and shapes have been subsumed into confusion, a thoroughly competent confusion where the composer can express what he wishes but cannot settle mentally into a particular style or groove. Everything is disparate – at least on the surface. The concerns of previous generations of composers are still there are still here, but they are packaged together, as if the composer cannot decide what should take precedence. The despair seems here closer to the surface, the energy of cynicism that both Shostakovich and Schnittke is here dissipated to despair. It sounds as if Edison Denisov lacks the commitment to espouse as a particular style and consciously dithered the sound.

And said we come to L’Écume des Jours in the production by Opera Lille. Based on Boris Vian’s surrealist novel Froth On The Daydream, we meet Chloë, who is clearly not well. She turns to Isis, her friend and lover, and pleads for one last chance to meet a boy and be happy. Such a boy appears in the shape of Colin. Chloë and Colin hit it off, though Chloë has to disguise herself in a pink dress and wear a wig to hide the fact that she that her treatment has caused her to lose her hair. Chloë is in fact suffering from water lily in the lung and her treatment is to be surrounded with flowers.

Serious surreal encounters ensue, which involve mice, people emitting smoke, a doctor who prepares a treatment by severing his own tongue and piercing his own arm, a character who cuts off his arm with a knife, and various other visual treats.

Initially, the flights of fancy are vaguely shocking and part humorous, but as the opera progresses, they become darker and more threatening. A real crucified Christ appears regularly, accompanied by his own choir, and a character called Alise asserts her substantial presence on the proceedings.

The opera’s denouement is a lethal injection for Chloë to end her suffering, and we are left at the end with Isis, Chloë and Colin reclining on a hospital bed, with Chloë dying But with Isis placed centrally, we realise that she is suffering the most. The opera seems to be saying that the real suffering is felt by those who experience bereavement, not death.

Denisov’s music is perfect for the scenario. It comes and goes, makes its point, then disappears. When popular forms appear, they threaten rather than or relieve. Eventually, these characters are tossed around by events like rudderless boats in a storm. They are part of and party to the events, but they are never in control. Chloë is dying, Colin, to some extent, exists only because Chloë wished him to. It is Isis, the person in the middle of the love triangle who suffers, and it is she who is alive and will continue to live. The shortest straw, perhaps.

L’Écume des Jours is a rarity. Opera lovers should give it a go. Do not be daunted by the apparent disconnectedness of most of the music. After two hours, it will all make sense in the sense that it remains nonsense. The above is what I took from the experience in a single sitting. There will be more.

Bassem Akiki conducts and the direction of Anna Smolar is amazing. Josefin Feiler, Cameron Becker, Katia Ledoux, Elmar Gilbertsson, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Natasha Te Rupe Wilson, Robin Neck, Maurel Endong, Matthieu Lécroart have important parts in the cast. Do experience L’Écume des Jours on OperaVision.

Martha Argerich, Charles Dutoit and the Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana present a star-studded concert in ADDA, Alicante

2026-03-21T13:16:22.901+01:00

Star billing often does not live up to audience expectations. Such events tend to attract attendees who are more interested in seeing a star name than in listening to what that performer might be able to do. There was not one minute like that in the entire evening last night in ADDA, Alicante, where we were privileged to hear music made by Martha Argerich and Charles Dutoit.

They are both getting on in years. Martha Argerich is 84 and Charles Dutoit 90, but no one who listened to the music they made would have had any inkling of their advancing years, so fresh and eager were both in their music making.

Martha Argerich’s name would grace any concert in any auditorium. Here she played the first concerto of Beethoven, the same work that opened her concerto-performing career just 76 years ago. It is hard when listening to this music to imagine that it was written before 1800. This is fresh, sophisticated, jolly, and serious at the same time, and displays the kind of integration between the orchestra and soloist that was to shape and so completely change the form so completely from the elegance and decoration of the eighteenth-century model.

Though it was not Beethoven’s first attempt at the form - we know that he was in intensely self-critical - it has a freshness and directness that belies its complexity. Here Beethoven wanders wide from the declared C major and makes abrupt transitions, both rhythmic and harmonic. This can make a performance of the work seem disconnected, but not, of course, in the hands of Martha Argerich, who first recorded the work over 40 years ago.

The followed an encore. Scarlatti’s Sonata K1 41 is a piece that Martha Argerich plays regularly as an encore. What her right hand has to do in this piece is both fast and intricate. But the effect is above our musical: there is no show here, only quality.

The orchestra and Charles Dutoit had started the evening with a performance of Ravel’s Mother Goose. Now Ravel’s music is always surprising. Here, Charles Dutoit chose slow tempi that stressed both of the beauty of the phrases and the detail of the orchestration. Nothing in music exists, of course, if the musicians are not up to the task. In this concert, the Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana was not only up to the task, their playing and integration as an ensemble sculpted every phrase to perfection.

In the second half, Charles Dutoit directed the Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana in the fourth symphony of Mendelson, the Italian. At 90 years of age, Charles Dutoit keeps gestures to a minimum, but what he gets from his players is superb. And it was especially joyful for the audience to witness how much the players were enjoying the experience, a response, which kept the music, both lyrical and vibrant. Charles Dutoit announced that the encore would be a piece that was “very well known”, and it was. Perfection.

Handel's Giulio Cesare In Egitto in Valencia is a triumph for all concerned, singers, designers, directors, technicians and especially musicians

2026-03-15T12:20:00.001+01:00

Giulio Cesare In Egitto is an opera by Handel dating from approximately 1724. The word “approximately” must also be applied to the operas of George Frederick Handel because he was nothing if not a pragmatist. He regularly rewrote or edited passages to accommodate the particular skills or shortcomings of whatever singers he had at his disposal. For a composer who wrote over forty Italian operas, some of them almost household names, we would expect that opportunities to hear his work in major houses are frequent. Though I personally have not sought performances of the composer’s work, I admit that the last time I heard a performance of one of the operas was forty years ago in London when the English National Opera did Xerxes. I recall that I attended two performances, because it was a superb production. So it was with some misgivings that I approached this production in Valencia of Giulio Cesare In Egitto. My musical tastes have changed over the years and I was not sure that the experience would measure up to expectations - or perhaps the real fear was that it would!

The reluctance was not musical. Handel’s melodic gift is one of the most dependable things in European music. Basically, I worried that a three-and-a-half-hour baroque opera would not sustain my interest in a hall like Les Arts, Valencia, where the presence of a baroque orchestra might just be lost in the sheer size of the place. I need not have worried. A seat in row five meant that everything was perfectly audible, though I imagine that some passages of this production might have been less than audible in the gods.

And speaking of gods, they were remarkably absent in this libretto. Though the sets regularly featured pyramids and ibises, there were a few references to any religious differences that might have existed between Egypt and Rome. Indeed, the setting was the Ptolemaic period, so indeed there may have been not have been many differences, at least as far as emperors and generals were concerned.

At the start, Caesar is victorious. Tolomeo, ruler of Egypt, has had Pompeo, the opposing general in the recent battle, beheaded, and, thinking the trophy of the head would please Caesar, he has his henchman, Achilla, present it to Caesar. To perform the task, Achilla is dressed like a cross between a jester and an ogre. Caesar is revolted, as is Cordelia, Pompeo’s wife and Sesto, his son, who vows to avenge the death of his father. In this production Sesto’s youth is emphasised by his inability to lift the sword that he wields as a threat.

Cleopatra, not satisfied with playing second fiddle to her brother, then sets about a plot to remove him from the throne and bring Caesar along with her, thus uniting power and cementing her position. Much of the opera’s plot revolves around the way Cleopatra uses her guile and looks to win Caesar over to her plan. It is essential, therefore, that Cleopatra can not only sing, she needs to act supremely well, without once hamming it up.

One of the major successes of this imaginative production was to use two Cleopatras, one of whom sang. Cleopatra, the seductress, wore a long frilly dress, while Cleopatra the schemer wore a business suit. The two Cleopatras were made up to appear very similar and swapped clothes here and there, depending on what the music was conveying. In a moment of absolute magic, Cleopatra, as an inconsequential servant, seduces a snoozing Caesar. But he is on stage, while Cleopatra sings from within the audience, dressed as the seductress. At the scenes denouement, the second Cleopatra appears on stage to stand in triumph over Caesar, but she, the non-singing character, is dressed as the schemer. Ultimate conquest is achieved. Both the drama and the beauty this scene conveyed was one of the production’s triumphs.

By the end, Pompeo’s death is avenged, Tolomeo gets his comeuppance and Cesar and Cleopatra are married to everyone’s delight, even the characters who also who have been recently killed.

Baroque opera is not renowned for either action or drama. Indeed in Giulio Cesare In Egitto, the norm is for one character to present an aria expressing their current emotional state and the dilemmas that they imagine. This focuses the attention of the audience on two things: musicality and production. Musicality underpins the credibility of the character and production contextualises their thoughts and makes sense of everything.

The musicality was masterfully executed by Mark Minkowski, who clearly has a genuine penchant for this form. The tempi he chose and especially the dynamics he employed were nothing less than masterful, and the Valencia Orchestra was not only up to the challenge, but the players also seemed to relish the opportunity to show off their prowess. The pianissimo passages in particular were riveting. Here, in this great theatre before an audience of more than thousand, a character with orchestral accompaniment was able to sing quietly and be heard by everyone. It made all the characters, above all, human and their expressed psychological dilemmas real. Only rarely have I heard a production of an opera where as much obvious planning has gone into integrating what we heard and saw. It is one thing to plan on another to execute, but the cast of Giulio Cesare In Egitto did it all. Everything, ultimately, had to make sense and it did!

And the production needs to be highlighted. It is hard to single out a particular aspect, so the triumvirate of director Vicent Boussard, designer Frank Philipp Schlossman and costume designer Christine Lacroix must all be mentioned, as indeed must the lighting of Andreas Grűter. All these elements came together in an utterly convincing whole that always integrated, never separated the audience from the meaning as interpreted by the characters on stage. It is rare to find such obvious harmony of purpose across all aspects of an opera production.

Visually, the staging used a mock screen, outlined in white and was therefore almost cinematic. Occasionally, a black panel would slide across the front to divide the stage in two. This was used to emphasize a particular character’s isolation. It also provided a stunning way to chang scene, with the lighting effects following the movement of the panel across the stage. Also innovative was the use of the moving panel to facilitate the entry and exit of protagonists. It all added up to a seamless and wholly credible production where each aspect complemented the whole and never intruded. This was a significant achievement. In addition, we had singers and musicians within the audience, a violinist on stage in a musical duel with Caesar and above all wonderful playing from the orchestra.

And I have not mentioned the singers! Marina Monzó as Cleopatra quite stole the show. Her singing was perfect for the role, and she also managed to portray the two roles of seductress and schemer perfectly. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen as Caesar was also perfect, if at times a little less than audible if singing backstage. Caesar’s foray into the audience after Cleopatra’s seduction was pure magic. Sara Mingado’s Cordelia and Arianna Vendittelli as Sesto were in some respects cameo roles but nevertheless came across superbly as three-dimensional characters. Cameron Shahbazi’s Tolomeo, camp and gay in the extreme, was utterly convincing and Jen-Philippe McClish as Achilla and Bryan Sala as Curio were also superb. Achilla’s inconsistency and constant wavering were communicated superbly.

This was an utterly memorable visit to the opera, and an opportunity to revisit the world of baroque opera in the hands of Handel. It was memorable in every aspect, music, singing and staging, and I stress again that it was the integration of these elements that was so successful. I hope it is not forty years until the next Handel opera.

Two outstanding soloists in Mussorgsky and Khachaturian both give superb performances in concert to remember by the Slovak Philharmonic under Daniel Raiskin

2026-03-10T11:04:00.001+01:00

One of the interesting things about regular concert going with a subscription is the visiting orchestra. Once in a while, a group from a country which is not on the usual map of music making in Western Europe is programmed to appear. Last night in ADDA, Alicante, for instance, we were privileged to hear the Slovak Philharmonic in a program of works that, for the most part, have not been performed frequently in Spain. What the Slovak Philharmonic did not bring, at least at first sight, was any music by a Slovak composer. On the bill were a Czech, two Russians and an Armenian, who during his lifetime would have perhaps preferred the label “Soviet”. And indeed alongside the Slovak Philharmonic was a Ukrainian conductor, Daniel Raiskin, a Croatian baritone, Marko Mimica, a Moldovan violinist, Alexandra Cununova, and Spanish chorus, so the experience was decidedly multi-national. We did hear Slovak music in the final encore, Slovakian Czardas in fact, and indeed some folk-inspired Moldavian music for solo violin. But amidst this apparently disparate evening what held this program together was the commitment of those involved to deliver fine music, and outstanding it proved to be.

We started with Dvořák’s Symphonic Variations Op78. This is Dvořák, it must be said, not at his most tuneful, but the compositional skill in constructing these largely quiet variations is immense. Variation form is often quite difficult for an audience to listen to, largely because by its nature it is episodic. The Slovak Philharmonic gave a superb performance which brought the piece together. I describe largely “quiet” music, but in the final fugue the composer goes to town on orchestral colours. It is a work worthy of exploration at length.

Then we heard Marko Mimica as baritone soloist in Shostakovich’s orchestral version of Mussorgky’s Songs and Dances of Death. Marko Mimica has a powerful but lyric baritone, and his voice is perfect for these songs where the soloist is very much to the fore. His dark tones penetrated every corner of the auditorium, even pianissimo, and his expression communicated meaning, despite the fact that the back projection of the words were unreadable for a good part of the audience.

The evening finished with the Polovtsian Dances of Borodin, a work, which always brings the house down, perhaps by virtue of the vibration created by the high volume of the sound that the composer demands. Again, the words sung by the chorus were generally unreadable on the back wall of the auditorium. The coordination between the chorus, the Coro Amici Musicae under the direction of Igor Tantos Sevillano, and the orchestra was superb.

Just after the interval, we heard Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto in the concert’s main work. The soloist was Alexandra Cununova, who played the piece with a prompt from the score, but no-one in the audience listening with closed eyes would have known. This is not the repertoire’s most played violin concerto, but on the evidence of this performance, it is a masterpiece and deserves a wider audience. The judgment is not offered without having listed to the work again after the concert.

Alexandra Cununova’s playing of the solo part was superb. The writing of the solo part was also superb. But what came across above all was the compositional skill of Aran Khachaturian. In this thirty-five-minute-concerto, there were regular orchestral tutti from a large ensemble which played at considerable volume, but every note of the solo part was audible, even to the fore. This is a concerto written by a master of orchestral writing.

The play of Alexandra Cununova was not only perfection: it went way beyond that. Despite the fact that she took prompts from a score, the playing seemed completely spontaneous and utterly committed. This was the kind of performance that will live forever in a concert-goer’s memory. It was a work in over fifty years of concert going that I have never heard performed before. I will seek it out in future and make sure to hear it again.

Alexandra Cununova finished with a piece by a Moldovan composer, inspired by folk music, and this work for solo violin complemented and contrasted perfectly with the rhythmic bravura of the concerto. What a performance!

2026-03-06T10:27:00.000+01:00

Once upon a Time, I read the writing of Aldous Huxley with enthusiasm. I was a little younger then… More recently, I have tended to find his attitudes rather stuffy, and class-ridden, not embodying the fresh view of the world I once thought he held. Brave New World was not representative and, in my youth, I perhaps mis-read its intentions. A television adaptation of Eyeless In Gaza at the end of the 1960s prompted further exploration. Recently, I found The Art Of Seeing worth avoiding. So it was with mixed expectations that I started Mortal Coils, a work the author published in 1921

Its form is interesting. Aldous Huxley described its five separate sections as three short stories, a novelette and a play. In each of the pieces, there is a keen, if somewhat caricatured central character for whom some random event, some twist of fate provides an ironic punchline. For that reason, I will not review the stories in detail. What happens is crucial, and it tends to happen right at the end.

Throughout, Aldous Huxley seems to be mocking anyone who apparently takes him or herself, seriously. There is a keen eye for pretension, but, it has to be said, these tales of competition are won, more often than not, by the wily, not the showy.

The Gioconda Smile is the novelette. Miss Spence has the smile in question. She is thirtyish and a spinster. Mr. Hutton is a well-to-do friend with a hypochondriac wife, who needs to take her medicine.

Permutations Among The Nightingales is a play set in a hotel. Various society-type guests pirouette around themselves for attention. There is a lot of coming and going.

The Tillotson Banquet involves rather rich people with a decoration urge tracing a long-lost artist who has fallen on bad times. There might be a commission. In his nineties, and living in a basement among beetles, the old artist accepts the invitation to dine.

The Green Tunnels is it story about a group of visitors to Italy. They become obsessed with one another as well as with themselves. Both gestures and actions are mis-interpreted.

In Nuns At Luncheon, Huxley mocks the act of writing, itself, as a scribbler imagines how he might fictionalize a tale about a nun who falls from grace.

None of these has anything like a grand vision. These five pieces are like extended jokes with unexpected punch lines. They are stories, however, worth the telling, and certainly worth the reading.