Sir Neville Marriner, founding director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields orchestra turned 90 earlier this month. Believe it or not he apparently was beaten for ‘over- gesticulating’!
He looks back on his career in this interview with Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian.
Anna Dowsley’s debut season as Carmen continues at the Staatstheater Nürnberg. Check out these five stunning images from the production. Anna looks likes she’s absolutely ‘killing’ the role! Images courtesy Anna Dowsley©
Discovered in 2004, amongst a collection of drafts and rejected sketches, the prologue to Shostakovich’s incomplete and forgotten opera Orango received its world premiere in Los Angeles in December 2012. The work was intended to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Soviet revolution but became a satire on the bourgeois Russian press. The world premiere was directed…
What is the secret of the enduring appeal of the music of JS Bach?! Even of you don’t like his music, the complexity of his writing, his output and his role as an innovator are unparalleled. Pianist James Rhodes claims that Bach takes us into a “fourth dimension of existence.” Read more from BBC Culture.
Yesong Sophie Lee, just 12 years old has won the biennial 2016 Menuhin competition, held in London last month. It was the centenary of the competition whose Laureates include Australians Ray Chen, Susie Park and Grace Clifford, Germany’s Julia Fisher and Russia’s Alina Ibragimova. Charlotte Smith in The Strad asks whether competitions are defined more…
Donizetti’s bel canto masterpiece Lucia di Lammermoor opens in Sydney this week. The Opera Australia production has Emma Matthews in the title role with American tenor James Valenti as Edgardo and Giorgio Caoduro as Enrico. These images give an idea of the power and drama of the opera and below them, the link to a feature about the…
Wagner specialist conductor Christian Thielemann’s reading of the complete Ring Cycle at the Wiener Staatsoper in 2011 was recognised as one of the greatest Wagnerian events of recent times. On August 2nd, Deutsche Grammophon releases a recording of this performance as a boxed set of 14 CDs of the four Ring operas and 2 DVDs featuring four…