Music guest on snl

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Those hallmarks are also everywhere in Fleisher’s own recordings. He was one of a generation of American pianists – including Van Cliburn, Gary Graffman, Byron Janis and Julius Katchen – whose careers burgeoned alongside the arrival of the LP and the stereo recording. Fleisher’s have stood the test of time as well as any of them. This is especially true of his incisive playing of Brahms, preserved in his recordings of the concertos with the exacting conductor George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. Above all it is true of Fleisher’s 1956 classic recording of Brahms’s Handel Variations. … [Read more...] about Leon Fleisher: there’s much more to the US pianist’s career than tragedy

To stage Moses und Aron is to attempt the impossible. Schoenberg's great fragment deals with the disparities between belief and action, and with the differences between idealism and its imperfect realisation. God commands Moses to free his oppressed people and to enlist his brother Aron in communicating to them the "unimaginable" essence of the divine - but Aron can only depict God's nature by means of concrete, reductive imagery with potentially catastrophic consequences. … [Read more...] about Moses und Aron

By now music and story were informing each other. A ravishing sleep aria from Vivaldi's Tito Manlio demanded to be featured, so I wrote a sleep scene. A rage aria from Handel's Hercules followed. Similarly, the performers, now cast, had music they wanted to sing; interestingly, Vivaldi was high on everyone's list. I was only too happy to bend the story to lead to their preferred arias. By this stage, I was contacting our baroque experts, William Christie and Ellen Rosand, and asking questions like: "Is there a fast trio for baritone tenor and soprano, in which the woman is impervious to male wooing?" Yes, in Handel's Susanna. "Is there a mixed quartet that might sound like two couples waking up?" Yes again, in Vivaldi's La Verità in Cimento. "Does anyone know a baroque sextet?" No, so I fashioned one out of an early Handel quartet. … [Read more...] about The Enchanted Island: the isle is full of mash-ups

Admittedly, Britten probably didn't imagine it like this. The 1964 premiere production had the singers masked, as they would have been for the Japanese Noh play on which the work is based, and that would have created a sense of otherness absent here; even Ian Bostridge's Madwoman, viscerally sung, was sympathetic – obsessed yet sane underneath it, and soberly dressed. The faces of Mark Stone's bluff Ferryman, Neal Davies's thoughtful Traveller and Gwynne Howell's sonorous Abbot drew us in almost as much as their voices. And perhaps the score, its lean lines played compellingly by members of the Britten Sinfonia under William Lacey, sounds less alien now than it did half a century ago – the legacy of composers including Britten himself. Whatever the answers, this was an involving, direct, unforgettable performance. … [Read more...] about Curlew River – review