London
London Handel Festival
When: 27 March – 29 April
Tel: +44 (0)1460 54660
Web: www.london-handel-festival.com
At a time when women composers and performers have never been more visible, the capital’s annual celebration of its adopted son couldn’t be more on trend. ‘Handel’s Divas’ explores those who inspired his music and created it in performance. First up is Berenice in a collaboration with the Royal Opera House; and, at the end, a performance of the rarely-heard oratorio Athalia. In between, the knives are sharpened for ‘Rival Queens’, and in an eye-catching swerve off-piste, electronics producer Nico Bentley and the Pencil Collective reimagine Dixit Dominus.
DON’T MISS:
Early Opera Company 24 April Readings, newspaper accounts and Handel’s choicest arias track sopranos Faustina Bordoni and Francesca Cuzzoni through 1720s London. Mhairi Lawson and Eleanor Dennis assume their mantle; Christian Curnyn conducts.
St John’s Smith Square Holy Week Festival
When: 14-20 April
Tel: +44 (0)20 7222 1061
Web: www.sjss.org.uk
To include both JS Bach’s St John and St Matthew Passions within a festival shadowing the events of Holy Week is luxury indeed; but St John’s Easter addition to its long-established Christmas Festival grows ever more audacious. Sir James Macmillan at 60 prompts a BBC Singers concert in which the composer conducts his own music entwined with Gesualdo; and Sansara follows it with Macmillan woven through Nordic and Celtic works. Penitential Renaissance music, meanwhile, absorbs the Tallis Scholars, Marian Consort and Siglo de Oro.
DON’T MISS:
Tenebrae & Britten Sinfonia 19 April Nigel Short conducts Poulenc’s Quatre motets pour un temps de penitence, excerpts from Victoria’s Good Friday Tenebrae Responsories, and Macmillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross.
OUR FESTIVAL CHOICE
London Festival of Baroque When: 10-18 May
Tel: + 44 (0)20 7222 1061 Web: www.lfbm.org.uk
Borders – geographical and otherwise – are waiting to be crossed in the latest edition of SW1’S annual dalliance with the Baroque. Those seasoned boundaries-blind travellers Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI skirt frontiers national as well as stylistic; Improviso
indulges Telemann’s Polish predilections before dipping into the 17th-century Ottoman music to be found in Wojciech Bobowski’s Mecmûa-i Sâz ü Sös; and, over at Mayfair’s elegant Grosvenor Chapel, the Andalusian roots of flamenco are untangled by Lux Musicae London, oud player Ahmed Mukhtar and guitarist Ignacio Lusardi.
DON’T MISS:
Hespèrion XX1 12 May
Music for viols, vihuela and harp ventures from the Spain of Diego Ortiz, through Germany and England, to Marin Marais’s France – where his Couplets des folies d’espagne brings the journey satisfyingly full circle.
Sound Unbound
When: 18-19 May
Tel: +44 (0)20 7638 8891
Web: www.barbican.org.uk
Who can forget the 12 helium-powered harmonicas or the flash-mob horns? Sound Unbound returns to the Barbican for its third incarnation, spilling out across the Culture Mile with a cornucopia of concerts and installations taking in the likes of St Bart’s the Great and Fabric nightclub. Serenaded by the LSO Chorus, even the Conservatory terrapins don’t miss out! Many of the Barbican’s resident ensembles pitch in, including Britten Sinfonia under Thomas Adès, and the Academy of Ancient Music. Visitors include guitar quartets from New York and Belgium, who unleash a Barbican Lakeside foray into Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint.
DON’T MISS:
Nora Fischer 19 May
In 14th-century Charterhouse, the singer and guitarist Marnix Dorrestein revisit their Edison Award-winning album HUSH, reimagining 17th-century classics by Monteverdi, Purcell and Dowland in the spirit of current pop songs.
Opera Holland Park
When: 4 June-9 August
Tel: +44 (0)300 999 1000 Web: www.operahollandpark.com
The chorus takes a night out to lend its heft to Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at Aldeburgh Festival, but back home, whether in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut or Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, full-blooded Romanticism reigns. And Opera Holland Park just wouldn’t be the same without its Italian rarity. This year Bizet can
look away as the opera that helped launch Caruso casts its Provençal spell: Cilea’s L’arlesiana, a work, like Bizet’s incidental music, indebted to Daudet’s play.
DON’T MISS:
Il segreto di Susanna/iolanta from 22 July
Wolf-ferrari’s nicotine-fuelled intermezzo and Tchaikovsky’s fairytale farewell to the operatic stage make for an unusual double bill, the latter conducted by Sian Edwards with Natalya Romaniw as the princess.
New Music Biennial
When: 5-7 July
Tel: +44 (0)20 3879 9555
Web: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
The first PRS Foundation biennial opened in Hull before heading to the Southbank. This year the tables are turned, with London getting the first bite of a cherry unfolding 19 new works across all media from symphony orchestra and electronica to chamber music and solo oud. Meanwhile, the leading English composer and pianist Rolf Hind pairs gamelan ensemble with prepared pianos and percussion; and, for Manchester Collective, Edmund Finnis’s The Centre is Everywhere responds to Strauss’s Metamorphosen.
DON’T MISS:
Chineke! 7 July
Baritone Roderick Williams and Chineke! performed at last year’s re-opening of the Queen Elizabeth
Hall. Now they return to the Southbank for a new jazz-inflected work written (and sung) by the multi-talented Williams himself.
Wimbledon Music Festival
When: 9-24 November
Tel: +44 (0)20 8946 5078
Web: wimbledonmusicfestival.co.uk
With its ambitions for a Frank Gehrydesigned concert hall in the public domain (see p14), it’s perhaps not surprising that Wimbledon enters its second decade contemplating ‘Music – Mathematics – and Architecture’.
It’s a theme that probes the building blocks of JS Bach’s Art of Fugue and Heinrich Isaac’s numerological calculations in Hugo Ticciati’s concert with his O/modernt Quartet; and the spatial possibilities of Italy’s great ecclesiastical edifices are pursued in Armonico’s ‘Land of Pope and Glory’. Not that Wimbledon is a ‘theme’ slave. Try Vivaldi meets Finnish rock for size. Hearing is believing!
DON’T MISS:
Haydn’s Creation 9 November Matthew Best conducts the Academy Choir and London Mozart Players in a spatially conceived performance of Haydn’s dramatic oratorio setting chapters from the Book of Genesis. Soloists include soprano Kate Royal and bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu.