Live events
Paul Riley picks the month’s best concert and opera highlights in the UK
The best opera and concerts across the country
LONDON Purcell from the Ground Up
Wigmore Hall, London,
7 & 8 April
Tel: +44 (0)20 7935 2141
Web: www.wigmore-hall.org.uk Curated by violinist Hugo
Ticciati, and spotlighting his ensemble O/modernt alongside the likes of La Nuova Musica and The Cardinall’s Musick, a clutch of five ear-opening concerts and a study event forge links between Purcell and a world encompassing Monteverdi to rap, JS Bach to Berg. ‘Transforming Spanish Sexuality’ traces the evolution of the chaconne, while the grand finale ranges over Gibbons and Tavener before cornering into Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10.
Handel’s Giulio Cesare
St John’s Smith Square, 11 April Tel: +44 (0)20 7222 1061
Web: www.sjss.org.uk Kick-started by two performances of Acis and Galatea, opera looms large in this year’s London Handel Festival. Teseo sounds the last operatic hurrah, but first Christian Curnyn’s Early Opera Company cuts a dash in its festival debut squaring up to the smouldering passions of Giulio Cesare. Countertenor
Tim Mead is the conquering Caesar and soprano Anna Devin is Cleopatra.
Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 12-27 April
Tel: +44 (0)20 7304 4000
Web: www.roh.org.uk
Snapping at the heels of Verdi’s Macbeth comes a revival of Richard Jones’s 2004 staging of the opera that set the Stalinist cat among Shostakovich’s pigeons: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Given in the opera’s original 1932 incarnation, it features Dutch soprano Eva-maria Westbroek as the ill-fated Katerina and is conducted by Antonio Pappano.
London Symphony Orchestra
Barbican, 19 & 22 April
Tel: +44 (0)20 7638 8891
Web: www.barbican.org.uk
Late Mahler connects two concerts conducted by Simon Rattle. In the first (19 April) Helen Grime’s Woven Space receives its first performances ahead of the Ninth Symphony; the second concert (22 April) prefaces Symphony No. 10 (in Deryck Cooke’s completion) with Tippett’s Indian-summer ‘song without words for orchestra’,
The Rose Lake.
Colin Currie and Nicholas Hodges
Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, 19 April
Tel: +44 (0)20 3879 9555
Web: www.southbankcentre.co.uk Stockhausen’s late 1950s masterpiece Kontakte brings together percussionist Colin Currie (see p40) and pianist Nicholas Hodges for a concert that opens with the UK premiere of an Intrada by Harrison Birtwistle, and includes piano works by both Stockhausen and Birtwistle, plus Morton Feldman’s solo percussion piece The King of Denmark.
SOUTH Benjamin Grosvenor
St George’s Bristol, 24 April
Tel: 0845 40 24 001 (UK only) Web: www.stgeorgesbristol.co.uk Grosvenor adroitly interleaves Brahms’s solo piano swansong – the Four Pieces for Piano,
Op. 119 – with Brett Dean’s Hommage à Brahms in a recital that sets the Berg Sonata between an arrangement of Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprèsmidi d’un faune and Ravel’s formidable Gaspard de la nuit.
Nash Ensemble
Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford on Avon, 27 April
Tel: +44 (0)1225 860100
Web: www.wiltshiremusic.org.uk Dark dramas stalk Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, K478, Mahler’s Piano Quartet movement and Brahms’s Piano
Quartet, Op. 60 in C minor – dramas subtly woven around Judith Weir’s own engagement with the medium: Distance Lends Enchantment, a folk-inflected meditation on disappearance.
EAST English Touring Opera
Snape Maltings, 12-14 April
Tel: +44 (0)1728 687110
Web: snapemaltings.co.uk
The English Touring Opera Truroto-durham spring season pairs Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro with a Puccini double bill of Il tabarro and Gianni Schicchi. The While the Puccini productions date from 2011, the Mozart is a new production by Blanche Mcintyre and is conducted by Christopher Stark. John Innes Centre,
Norwich, 21 April
Tel: +44 (0)1603 598595
Web: norwichchambermusic.co.uk The current Norfolk & Norwich Chamber Music series ends in fine style as the Elias and Navarra string quartets unite – after Beethoven’s Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 ‘Serioso’ and Smetana’s autobiographical Quartet No. 1 ‘From my Life’ – for that sunburst of testosteronefuelled creativity: the 16-year-old Mendelssohn’s Octet, Op. 20.
MIDLANDS & NORTH & WALES Ludlow English Song Weekend
Ludlow, Shropshire, 6-8 April Tel: +44 (0)1584 878141
Web: ludlowenglishsongweekend.com ‘How English is English song?’ asks pianist Iain Burnside’s Shropshire song weekend where ‘Celtic connections’ come thick and fast. Among the singers attempting an answer are soprano Ailish Tynan and tenor Robin Tritschler, with examples ranging from Grieg and Grainger to Stanford and Stenhammar. A morning sequence devoted to the theme of flight concludes with Warlock’s haunting cycle The Curlew and the premiere of Philip Hammond’s The Blackbird’s Poet.
Hallé Orchestra
Bridgewater Hall,
Manchester, 12 April
Tel: +44 (0)161 907 9000
Web: www.bridgewater-hall.co.uk John Adams’s Harmonium furnishes the choral climax to a programme conducted by Nicholas Collon that also includes Ravel’s elegant Valses nobles et sentimentales and Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 performed by Boris Giltburg.
Richard Strauss’s Salome
Town Hall, Leeds,
19, 22 & 25 April
Tel: +44 (0)844 848 2720
Web: www.operanorth.co.uk
Sir Richard Armstrong conducts Opera North’s six-venue concert tour of Richard Strauss’s 1905 succès de scandale. Soprano Jennifer Holloway lifts the veil on the title role with tenor Arnold Bezuyen singing Herod and mezzo-soprano Katarina Karnéus as his wife Herodias.
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Brangwyn Hall,
Swansea, 19 April
Tel: 0800 052 1812
Web: www.bbc.co.uk/bbcnow
Is there a still a hint of autumn in the air? Soprano Erin Wall sings Strauss’s Four Last Songs before conductor Otto Tausk addresses Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. Mozart’s Figaro Overture is a bustling opener.
Leeds Lieder Festival
Leeds, West Yorkshire,
19-22 April
Tel: +44 (0)113 222 3434
Web: www.leedslieder.org.uk Schumann from soprano Carolyn Sampson and tenor Julian Prégardian launches this year’s Leeds songfest whose allembracing theme is ‘Poetry into Song’. The inventive programme includes a Paris salute, Schubert song cycles, ‘A Garland of English Song’ plucked by mezzo Kathryn Rudge, ‘Lieder for Little’uns’ and a late-night Lieder Lounge.
SCOTLAND & N IRELAND Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 5-7 April
Tel: +44 (0)131 529 6000
Web: www.scottishopera.org.uk Conducted by Brad Cohen, Antony Mcdonald’s new production of Strauss’s deliciously provocative contest between ‘high art’ and earthy vaudeville washes up in Edinburgh after three Glasgow performances. Soprano Mardi Byers is the marooned Ariadne, baritone Thomas Allen is the petulant composer and Eleanor Bron plays the Major Domo.
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Concert Hall, Perth, 11 April
Tel: +44 (0)1738 621031
Web: www.sco.org.uk
Glazunov’s Saxophone Concerto is the companion piece of choice as Amy Dickson (above) also gives the world premiere of James Macmillan’s concerto. (The Scottish Chamber Orchestra also premiered Macmillan’s glittering percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel in 1992.) Conductor Joseph Swensen bookends the programme with Sibelius and Beethoven.
Ulster Orchestra
Ulster Hall, Belfast, 13 April
Tel: +44 (0)28 9033 4455
Web: www.ulsterorchestra.org.uk Conductor Jac van Steen continues The ‘Great Concerto’ series with Elgar’s mighty essay for violin performed by Tasmin Little, one of its most compelling champions. First is David Matthews’s Eighth Symphony and Sibelius’s Pohjola’s Daughter.