Editorial Board
Melanie
Eskenazi
Webmaster: Len Mullenger
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PERFORMANCES
OF THE YEAR 2006 : Seen and Heard reviewers
reported nearly 700 events worldwide during the year just
past. Here is a selection of the most memorable. The blue
highlighted links open the original reviews.
MELANIE ESKENAZI (London Editor)
It has not exactly been a vintage year for opera for me, but the performance – if hardly the production – which emerges as most memorable is ENO’s highly charged Jenůfa chiefly remarkable for Amanda Roocroft’s assumption of the central character, and for the emotional impact of the personenregie by David Alden.
My
one orchestral choice of the year (in November and
also in Birmingham - turning chilly again) was provided
by more Finns, lots of Scots and one Russian. Osmo
Vänskä with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra,
the Helsinki YL Men's Chorus, Päivi Nisula and
Raimo Laukka from FNO and fiddler Alina Ibragimova
gave readings of Sibelius's Kullervo
and Violin Concerto
which were about as good as you'd find anywhere
to my mind. Despite the sartorial challenges
PATRICK
BURNSON (USA)
COLIN CLARKE (UK)
My
concert of the year 2006 without a shadow of a doubt
came from the Kirov forces under Gergiev. The performance
of Shostakovich’s Katerina
Izmaylova at the Coliseum in July
was a nerve-shredding roller-coaster of an evening.
Olga Sergeyeva as Katerina was matched in memorability
by Gennady Bezubenkov’s Boris on Oleg Balashov’s
Sergei. The orchestra was electric all evening,
the intensity simply overwhelming.
Maxim Vengerov and Magdalena Kozena showed that established artists can still exceed already high expectations of their abilities. Whilst those who prefer spectacle will be unsurprised to see the Bolshoi Opera’s staging of Prokofiev’s The Fiery Angel on my list.
Even that paled beside the RCM
Benjamin Britten International Opera School’s
production of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione
di Poppea – an achievement
of astounding professionalism by any standards.
In the two Shostakovich/Gergiev
concerts I attended on the 5th and the 6th of December
with the Marinsky Theatre orchestra, it was the
first which included the Thirteenth symphony, set
to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem ‘Babi
Yar’ which I want to single out as particularly
inspiring, in the powerful music/text itself, also
Gergiev’s intense reading of the score. One
of the reasons I found the piece so powerful is
that it speaks to/of our age…an age of war,
deception, propaganda, (or spin?), mis-use of power
and a fair degree of religious, racial intolerance.
The wonderfully ‘Bakhtinian’ carnivalesque
poem ‘Humour’ was brilliantly projected
by all concerned, and belongs to a long tradition
in Russian culture where the most grotesque humour
and laughter (beyond mere ‘black humour’)
acts as a defence against monolithic power forms;
think of Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Mussorgsky. A commentator
once described Shostakovich as the composer of ‘undecidability’,
and nowhere is this more touchingly realized or
de-realized than in the coda here.
Verdi, Il trovatore at the Royal Stockholm Opera, 13.05.2006 (GF)
A
gripping production and singing of a calibre that
can’t be taken for granded even in the big international
houses. Hillevi Martinpelto and Karl Magnus Fredriksson
were outstanding.
Review.
The
most beautiful and logically convincing production
of this opera I have ever seen; and with singing
on the same exalted level by some of today’s leading
Finnish singers.
Review.
Although
I don’t pretend to have heard everything in
the music river that is New York City, four events
seemed to offer particular distinction. At the International
Keyboard Festival in July, Marc-André
Hamelin introduced many of us
to Paul Dukas’ fiendishly difficult Piano
Sonata, followed by Schubert’s last one
with the pianist in profound and sublime concentration.
And the final of three Cleveland
Orchestra concerts with Franz
Welser-Möst showed them at their best in a
Messiaen rarity, some superb Mozart with Thomas
Quasthoff, and one of the most thoughtful, insightful
and gleamingly played Bruckner readings I expect
to hear for a very long time.
BERNARD JACOBSON (USA)
Editor
Bill Kenny was asking for trouble when he asked
for “up to (say) four choices” for the Best-of-the-Year
list. I am taking the “say” at full value, and have
eventually narrowed my list down to five. That still
entails omitting such pleasures as performances
by a succession of fine violinists, ranging from
Dmitri Sitkovetsky in the Sibelius concerto to Leonidas
Kavakos in Bartók No. 2, Julia Fischer in the Dvořák,
the impossibly young Stefan Jackiw in Mendelssohn’s
E-minor, and James Ehnes in the “Kreutzer” sonata;
a Seattle Symphony Shostakovich festival highlighted
by Gerard Schwarz’s thrilling projection of the
Eighth Symphony; mostly delightful productions of
Rosenkavalier and L’italiana in Algeri
by the Seattle Opera, as well as a superb Turn
of the Screw directed by the gifted Peter Kazaras
for the company’s Young Artists program; and some
highly promising introductory performances at the
Annas Bay Festival in the town of Union on the shore
of the Hood Canal.
Ignat
Solzhenitsyn’s extraordinarily
eloquent and stylish music-making with his Chamber
Orchestra of Philadelphia reasserted its magic when
I was on a visit back to my former home-town last
spring. Go To Page Two Back to the Index Page
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