Hints and tips:
...Sean Shepherd’s Wanderlust is shorter but manages to entertain the ear with deft orchestration and timbre, even if parts seem too obviously derivative (Britten comes to mind)....
...But the conductor, Michael Francis, led a brisk, no-nonsense performance of the symphony and Mutter, as always, found marvels of expression in the concerto....
...Boyd is jettisoning Garsington’s recent programme threads (British premieres of forgotten works by Vivaldi and Offenbach that nobody wants to hear) in favour of country-house staples by Britten, Mozart and...
...Benjamin Britten : A Life in the Twentieth Century, by Paul Kildea, Allen Lane, £30, 688 pages Letters from a Life : The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Volume Six, 1966-1976, edited by Philip Reed...
...His score for this mix of Così fan tutte and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream adopts the latter’s glissandi strings, is steeped in Debussy, imitates Bartók (particularly in hauntingly beautiful night...
...Island homage Pope Francis visits the island of Lampedusa where he will commemorate migrants who died crossing from Africa to Italy. Some 50,000 landed during the 2011 Arab spring....
...His fluent narrative combines just the right amount of musical analysis alongside lightly worn documentary research, as fascinating to the casual music lover as to Britten insiders....
...In 1967 she knighted the circumnavigator Francis Chichester at Greenwich with the sword Elizabeth I had used in 1580 to knight Sir Francis Drake on board the Golden Hind....
...Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, 1913-1976: Volume 6: 1966-1976, edited by Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, Boydell Press RRP£45 The sixth volume of Britten’s letters covers...
...Precocity, however, has its limits and the aggressive performance (by Han, Finckel, violinist Ani Kavafian and violist Lily Francis) offered steely extroversion in lieu of formal coherence....
...Glyndebourne UKBilly Budd Glyndebourne’s first staging of Britten’s 1951 all-male opera opens on Thursday. The libretto, co-written by E.M....
...In France, Britten’s opera of Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw has for years been the chasse gardée of Luc Bondy’s staging for the 2001 Aix festival, a production that subsequently toured to immense...
...And then there is Suffolk, the county where Constable and Gainsborough painted, and where Britten composed....
...Pinocchio’s wooden body, the turning of his legs into glowing stumps as he sits too close to the fire, and his endlessly extending nose, are all impressively conjured up by designer Francis O’Connor, as...
...Scored for a soprano and contralto, this is, rather, a cantata or a distant relative to Britten’s canticles, with a sparse mise en espace by Daniel Jeanneteau. But it’s none the worse for that....
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