Music
More than a yard of tickets to the Proms!
Queen Victoria would almost certainly not have been amused by her loyal citizens but we, the 2025 London audience, enjoyed a top class performance of ENO’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pirates of Penzance” at the London Coliseum.
Period costumes but a minimal set, abstracted to the essentials necessary to support the absurd storyline, gives the production the flexibility to tell truths though serious and comic moments, ridiculing “duty” in particular but taking in family succession, loyalty to the Crown, women’s rights and ageism etc. along the way.
Read more: The Pirates of Penzance - ENO at the London Coliseum
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor), Barbara Hannigan (soprano), George Benjamin (composer), London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Hall, London
Boulez’ almost infamous piece Éclat started the LSO’s programme at the Barbican. A touchstone work, “difficult” at first hearing but staking the claim for music as exploration in sound for the rest of the second half of the twentieth century. Seeing Simon Rattle conducting made clear the grammar which is there in the sound but is clarified seeing the music in performance. An educational privilege I think, to hear and see this piece laid clear like this.
Read more: Boulez, Benjamin and Brahms 4 at the Barbican Hall, London
A hurdy gurdy is front and centre of the interesting array of instruments for December’s Keswick Music Society concert. The group PIVA The Renaissance Collective played music and songs from Tudor and Elizabethan times celebrating the Yuletide season. The programme started with a lively fanfare of some raw and unfamiliar sounds but the old tune we know well, In Dulci Jubilo.
We heard music played on recorders, shawns, crumhorns, border bagpipes and a hurdy gurdy, all reproduction instruments. There was a full audience despite the storm raging outside. The well-crafted singing of Jude Rees invigorated the historic tunes although it was hard to imagine a bawdy Tudor pub atmosphere with Winter Warmer ales on every table.
The Parish Church of St John, Keswick, has a very serious tree this Christmas; I wonder how they got it through the door!
Da Vinci Piano Trio at Keswick Music Society
The new season of Keswick Music Society started with a fine concert of piano trio music. The Da Vinci Trio played four pieces showing the spread of music in this genre: Beethoven innovating by treating each instrument as an individual, Mendelssohn filling the hall with cascades of notes and contrasting the drawn strings with the percussive piano. The student Dimitri Shostakovich exploring various styles which came to feature highly in his later works and the Estonian Arvo Pӓrt treating the trio almost orchestrally.
ENO’s production is very much for 2024 London. Completely charming but fuelled with conceptual depth and thinking. Fine singing, live video artist, live sound effects artist, dialogue in colloquial English and many additional performers as well as the scripted characters. The orchestra’s flautist and glockenspiel play on stage, alongside Tamino and Pagageno with the glockenspiel player being the comedic butt of some of Papageno’s jokes.
