Latest news with #baroque
ABC News
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Freiburg Baroque Orchestra with soprano Carolyn Sampson
The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra perform Arias and instrumental works by Georg Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jan Dismas Zelenka, and Francesco Durante. The concert is titled 'Madness' and the music in the program explores the concept of madness in the 1600 and 1700s, which allowed the composers of the time, both in vocal and instrumental music, to break the compositional conventions of their time and experiment with harsh harmonies, broken phrases, and disjointed coloraturas in the so-called 'Mad Scenes'. The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra are joined by English soprano Carolyn Sampson OBE, a long time companion and friend of the orchestra and directed by Dutch violinist and Baroque specialist Hannah Visser who regularly appears as the concertmaster and soloist with the orchestra. Program Georg PhilippTelemann: Suite in G 'La Bizarre' George Frideric Handel: "Ah, mio cor" from Act 2 of 'Alcina' Henry Purcell: Curtain Tune, from 'The History of Timon of Athens' Henry Purcell: Mad Bess of Bedlam Francesco Durante: String Concerto No. 8 in A 'La Pazzia' Jan Dismas Zelenka: Hipocondrie a 7 Concertanti Antonio Vivaldi: Alma opressa, from 'La fida ninfa' Antonio Vivaldi: Trio Sonata in D minor 'La Follia' George Frideric Handel: "Where shall I fly?" from Act 3 of 'Hercules' Henry Purcell: "If love's a sweet passion" from Act 1 of 'The Fairy Queen' Artists Carolyn Sampson (soprano) Hannah Visser (violin and direction) Freiburg Baroque Orchestra Find out more Visit the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra here
Times
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Les Indes galantes review — hip-hop baroque turns Rameau into a rave
Rameau's 1735 opéra-ballet is called The Glamorous Indies but it is more like a baroque Race Across the World. We dash to Turkey, Persia and the Peru of the Incas (but about as real as the Peru of Paddington Bear). The final act is called 'The Savages': here the princess Zima decides to spurn a Frenchman and a Spaniard in favour of a suitor from among her people. Yet these Native Americans conclude contentedly that 'the conquerors bring peace to us''. Vive L'Europe! • The best classical concerts and opera: our reviews Bintou Dembélé's staging, which has its roots in a landmark show at the Opéra National de Paris in 2019, and now arrives at the Grange Festival in Hampshire on a European tour, dumps the holiday destinations and the elaborate effects for a street aesthetic. It feels like a political statement as much as an artistic one. A work performed for Louis XV at the Palais-Royal in Paris would have carefully put every performer in their place. Here, however, the stage is bare, and music, movement and voice all emerge from one body of performers. Tracksuited chorus members (the Namur Chamber Choir) and opera soloists join the hip-hop dancers of Structure Rualité. For their part the on-stage conductor Leonardo Garcia-Alarcón and players of Cappella Mediterranea are barefoot (all except the trumpeters, who perhaps missed the memo). • 'Opera lovers are going to explode' — the baroque shock coming to Hampshire The result is an impressive feat of co-ordination — and endurance, given that on first night the dancers were wearing their krumping kit in 30-degree heat. With a luxuriously large ensemble, ranging from the batsqueak of the sopranino recorder to the thwack of bass drums, Garcia-Alarcón summons Rameau's shimmering effects; period bassoons add an invigorating burr. The high point is a climactic chorus, Forêts paisibles, where an exhilarating display of physical prowess from the dancers doesn't come at the expense of vocal and instrumental glitter. Regrets? A few more than rien, unfortunately. Visual monotony dulls the musical colours — the rudimentary lighting effects leave the orchestra stranded in half-gloom, often the performers too. Sending the singers or dancers for sorties into the audience feels haphazard, rather than atmospheric. And a few attempts to nod to the intricacies of the original plot left me largely baffled (the four characterful singers — Laurène Paternò, Ana Quintans, Alasdair Kent and the especially impressive baritone Andreas Wolf — take multiple roles). This radical Rameau is undeniably powerful; a little more attention to detail would give it much more of a kick.★★★☆☆225min (including dinner interval)To Jul 2, Follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Betrayed with a kiss: How Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ made its way to Ireland
Ciriaco Mattei, a wealthy Roman nobleman and a friend of the painter, commissioned several masterpieces from Caravaggio , including, simultaneously in 1603, Supper at Emmaus, which now belongs to the National Gallery in London, and The Taking of Christ, which is the pride of the National Gallery of Ireland . Francesca Cappelletti, now director of the Galleria Borghese in Rome, found the original contract for the commission as a graduate student in the late 1980s. The painting had been misattributed to the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst from 1793 until then. Known in Italy as Gherardo delle Notti, van Honthorst was one of many painters who flocked to Rome to imitate Caravaggio's distinctive chiaroscuro style. [ Caravaggio: the 'boozing, whoring, brawling and bisexual bad boy of baroque' Opens in new window ] The painting, which is on loan to the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, stayed in the Mattei family until 1802, when it was sold to the Scottish collector William Hamilton Nisbet. A descendant of Nisbet tried to bequeath it to the National Gallery of Scotland in 1920, but the Edinburgh museum declined, believing the Caravaggio and other pictures given with it to be copies. Marie Lea-Wilson , an Irishwoman, purchased the painting in Edinburgh in 1921 and took it home to Dublin, where she was a much-loved paediatrician. In 1930 Lea-Wilson gave it to the Jesuit House at 35 Leeson Street, to thank priests who comforted her when her husband, Capt Percival Lea-Wilson of the Royal Irish Constabulary, was assassinated by the IRA. The painting hung in the Jesuits' diningroom, gathering soot and dust, for 63 years. READ MORE The Jesuits asked Sergio Benedetti , head curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, to assess their paintings for restoration. Benedetti recognised the lost Caravaggio. The Jesuits put the masterpiece on permanent loan to the NGI. 'My mother and I travelled from Belfast to see The Taking of Christ when it was unveiled in 1993,' Caroline Campbell , the director of the NGI, says. 'I felt exalted and astonished ... This painting is really, really, really loved, and that is extraordinary.' Caravaggio: Supper at Emmaus. Photograph © Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan – MiC The painting is like a close-up of the crucial moment when Judas betrayed Christ to Roman soldiers by identifying him with a kiss. At the centre of the canvas stand Judas and a Roman soldier, both holding on to Christ. The Saviour looks down at his folded hands with an expression of suffering and resignation. His face is powerfully moving, even to nonbelievers. No reproduction can do it justice. 'This Christ is one of the most beautiful in the history of art,' Thomas Clement Salomon, director of Italy's National Gallery , says. To the left of the canvas John the Evangelist attempts to flee, but a second Roman soldier has grabbed his cloak. To the right is a self-portrait of Caravaggio, illuminating the scene with a lantern. At the Rome exhibition, Campbell is struck by similarities between The Taking of Christ and The Martyrdom of St Ursula, painted eight years later, shortly before Caravaggio's death. Again, we see two Romans in burnished armour, and the painter himself, as an onlooker. 'Caravaggio must have been thinking about The Taking of Christ just before he died,' Campbell concludes. Caravaggio 2025 is at Palazzo Barberini , in Rome, until July 6th
ABC News
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Violinist Alina Ibragimova
"I want to live every note of the music." The world is full of exciting young female violinists whose stories are plastered all over social media, their album covers similarly driven by the trend to sex-up attractive young women for marketing purposes. Alina Ibragimova has quietly followed her own path. Born in the former USSR in 1985 to two top professional musicians, the gifted Alina studied at the Gnessin School in Moscow but then at the age of 10, had to meet the challenges of moving to the UK when her late father, Rinat Ibragimov was appointed principal bass of the London Symphony Orchestra. Whilst studying at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey, which at the time had little awareness of historical performance practice, she experimented with the music of Bach, developing her own ideas about performing music from the baroque to new commissions, on both modern and period instruments. "Every composer is subject to historical style," she says. Alina went on to study with a number of pedagogues at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal College of Music, including baroque specialist Adrian Butterfield, and she also had private studies with Christian Tetzlaff. After winning the LSO scholarship aged 17, she was selected as a BBC New Generation Artist from 2005 for two years, where she met her long-time duo partner, French pianist Cédric Tiberghien. That same year, 2005, she founded her trail-blazing period-instrument ensemble, the Chiaroscuro Quartet, which specialises in music from the classical and early romantic periods played on gut strings with historical bows. Their performances of Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann and Beethoven drawing comments like: "A shock to the ears of the best kind," from one UK critic. Speaking of the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 95 Alina responds: "This is music that was designed to shock. But often it's made to sound too perfect." Signed to the Hyperion label in 2007, Alina nailed her adventurous colours to the mast with two early albums devoted to Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Nikolay Roslavets, whose music was suppressed and name expunged by the Soviets. Richard Morrison, writing in The Times said "Alina is destined to be a force in the classical music firmament for decades to come… you feel that you are getting the music straight from the composer's quill." To date her discography ranges from Bach to the new concerto written for her by Huw Watkins, which she premiered at the BBC Proms in 2010. Her 2020 album of Shostakovich violin concertos with Vladimir Jurowski and the Evgeny Svetlanov State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia, which followed a tour there, won a Gramophone Award and Diapason d'Or, and was one of The Times Discs of the Year. "I'd like it if promoters would not close their eyes to different repertoire. I hate the notion that many musicians have to play programmes that 'sell better'. There's so much great music out there and it just needs to be given the chance. Once it is, it'll be loved." Alina's many accolades include two Royal Philharmonic Society awards and an MBE in the 2016 New Year Honours List. "There was always music in my family, so I found it strange with friends who didn't play an instrument. I didn't understand what they did with their time every day." Alina was born in Povlevskov, in the then USSR, in 1985 near the city of Ekaterinburg, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow on the edge of the Ural Mountains. "It's a completely different culture with its own language and food, and everything. In fact, the TV in Kazan is in Tatar and the language is not similar to Russian at all — if anything it more resembles Turkish." Music surrounded her from birth. Her late father, Rinat Ibragimov, was the award winning principal bass of the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra of the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera and a member of many other ensembles, and her mother Lyutsia Ibragimova, a leading Soviet violinist. Alina took up the violin when she was four. "I asked my parents for a green violin and then I burst into tears when they gave me one that was brown," recalls Alina. "The sound was revolting but I came back to it six months later." Within a year she was playing as a soloist with the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra. Alina has warm memories of her early childhood, especially the woods and her grandmother's cooking. "Although we lived in a tiny flat with a lot of people and cats, I never felt I lacked anything." Soon, in addition to learning from her mother, Alina was taking lessons at the renowned Gnesin Specialist Music School in Moscow with Valentina Korolkova. The Russian school with its emphasis on discipline, "definitely taught me how to practise," she says. Her mother was a major role model. "She made me listen to a lot of violinists. I remember listening to Menuhin's recording of the Beethoven concerto on a cassette, and Jascha Heifetz, and Vadim Repin. And I guess being a girl, I wanted to be Anne-Sophie Mutter.' When Alina was 10, her father was offered the position of Principal Double Bass with the LSO and after a year's trial he was given a contract and the family moved to London in 1996. Alina wasn't keen to leave her homeland but says she later changed her mind. "Arriving in Britain, everything was very green, it was the middle of summer and I had my own room in the house." "My education was always about not being 'successful' but about doing your best, being honest and achieving something in yourself that's good." In the UK her mother became a professor at both the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Royal College of Music in London. Alina, too, began her studies at the Menuhin with Natasha Boyarshaya. The hothouse atmosphere there seems to suit her. "It's very intense. You become like a family; you get to know everyone so well." As a teenager, Alina worked incredibly hard to find her own pathway forward as a violinist. "It's a tough world for someone starting out so young. Many people want to pull you in certain directions and it's hard to be strong enough to know what you want straight away. "My education was always about not being 'successful' but about doing your best, being honest and achieving something in yourself that's good." A contemporary of Nicola Benedetti, they played Bach's Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra in D minor under Menuhin as conductor, and played a part of the same work at his funeral three weeks later. At the Royal College of Music Alina began entering competitions, commenting "it was very good for me at the time, but I just didn't always like the atmosphere." Her most potent success was winning the London Symphony Orchestra Music Scholarship when she was 17. "It's not really like a normal competition because they also got you to play chamber music with the other candidates. You also get coaching sessions, there are master classes and you also get to lead the orchestra. So it's a very balanced and well-rounded thing." Then, following a searing performance of a Mozart concerto leading the Kremerata Baltica she was selected as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist from 2005-7. A little like New York's Young Concert Artists scheme, it gave her management advice, and crucially many performance opportunities, including concerts with the five BBC Orchestras. "I don't remember learning so much new stuff in such a short period of time before. We did some recitals and chamber music [too] with the other members of the scheme." Violinist Alina Ibragimova. ( Eva Vermandel. ) "It's the feeling that we can totally trust each other no matter what." In 2005, when they were both part of the BBC New Generations Artists Scheme, Alina met her long-standing recital partner — French pianist Cédric Tiberghien. "We have a mysterious alchemy," he says. "It's something natural, something that imposed itself — there are many aspects of the music that we don't talk about — because we feel them immediately. It's the feeling that we can totally trust each other no matter what." "As far as style is concerned, we each have our own history and background. Alina comes from the baroque repertoire, which has influenced me in my personal playing and contributed to my artistic development. There are balances that are found naturally and implicitly. Our main discussions are whether we should play certain works on period instruments." The duo has been applauded all over the world and is a regular guest of the Wigmore Hall in London, where it presented an acclaimed complete cycle of the Beethoven violin sonatas in the 2009-10 season. This was followed in 2015-16 by a series of five concerts as part of the Hall's "The Mozart Odyssey" series which saw them perform his complete sonatas for violin and piano, which they've gone on to record. "When I play, I don't feel it's my performance or my music. It's a communal thing." Her award-winning Chiaroscuro Quartet owes its origins to Mozart too. At the Royal College of Music in 2005, she brought together a group of like-minded fellow students to celebrate the then up-coming 250th anniversary of the composer's birth in 2006. Under the guiding hand of Sir Roger Norrington, Alina prepared one of Mozart's quartets and after the project, Alina decided as it had gone so well, they should continue. It's an ensemble that continues to defy expectations. They utilise some historical practices like a sparing use of vibrato, but not to the detriment of a modern playing approach. The Chiaroscuro are in huge demand in concert halls and at festivals all over the world. They've just played in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, so hopefully they will tour in Australia soon, and audiences I know can't wait for Alina to return. She last visited in 2018 as the compelling guest director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. I'll never forget their performance of Schubert's Death and the Maiden . "When I play, I don't feel it's my performance or my music. It's a communal thing. It's as if I am the audience, and they are me. We're all in it together. It's not about me or the audience, it's about the music."
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
I Fagiolini review – startlingly intense surround-sound baroque
I Fagiolini may be a small vocal ensemble, but their director Robert Hollingworth thinks big, always pushing boundaries in an imaginative way. Their 2023 recording of music by the 17th century Orazio Benevoli – a leading composer in Rome's post-Palestrina era – was much admired and they're now exploring more of Benevoli's masses for multiple choirs. Bristol's St George's, whose gallery runs on three full sides of the former church, offered an excellent setting. In Benevoli's Missa Angelus Domini for three choirs of four voices – a single voice to each part as was the usual practice – the complexity of the interweaving lines emerged with clarity, the singing gutsy rather than overly refined. Individual voices were free to come through the texture with colourful flourishes when appropriate, the primacy of the text paramount and the two chamber organs and theorbo added subtle detail. This programme's overall theme was the feast of Pentecost, with Palestrina's motet Dum Complerentur – the mighty rushing wind of the Holy Spirit reflected in graceful ascending phrases – preceding Benevoli's Missa Dum Complerentur for four choirs, plus four doubling choirs. I Fagiolini voices were now divided into two choirs on stage and two choirs above them on either side, with the four further choirs – the Bristol University Singers, schooled by Hollingworth – strategically positioned around the gallery, surround sound baroque-style. Familiar as this might be in Venetian composers such as Giovanni Gabrieli, Benevoli's more modernist approach clearly sought new effects. The choirs' antiphonal exchanges were striking, with the lines where entries in close imitation by the four doubling choirs moving round the auditorium sounding quite magical. The cumulative wonder of the Credo's final Amen alone felt like justification, were it needed, for Benevoli to be better acknowledged. In both these masses, Hollingworth interpolated a different composer between the Gloria and the Credo. Greg Skidmore was the dramatically expressive soloist in Audio Coelum from Monteverdi's Vespers, the echoing voice at the back of the gallery giving the spatial dimension here. Infantas's Loquebantur Variis Linguis for eight voices was a startlingly intense experience, again underlining how refreshing and welcome I Fagiolini's advocacy of such less well-known repertoire is. At the Stour festival, Kent, on 22 June
