Rachel Dear News
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2024-03-28
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2024-03-26 08:10:00
A radical new look: full line-up for Nevill Holt's 2024 festival
The full line-up for the radical new 2024 Nevill Holt Festival has now been announced. Running from 1 to 26 June 2024, guest festival director James Dacre's programme features opera, classical music, jazz and contemporary, alongside visual arts, talks and literature.This is a very different style of festival to previously, instead of two main operas there is a wide mix of events intended to tempt people into repeat visits. Also, the wider estate is more involved with an outdoor art exhibition, come for a concert and stay for Anthony Caro's sculpture.The musical events place quite a reliance on established artists and I miss a young artists strand, though casting for the opera has not yet been announced.Opera remains a strong strand in the festival, there will be six performances of Melly Still's new production of Mozart's The Magic Flute, with Finnegan Downie Dear conducting Britten Sinfonia. And Finnegan Downie Dear returns […]
2024-03-25 03:30:00
Dvořák: Cello Concerto et al. (CD Review)
by Karl NehringCello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, B. 191; Klid (Silent Woods), Op. 68, B 182; Rondo in G minor, Op. 94, B. 181; Romance in F minor, Op. 11B. 39; Mazurek in E minor, Op. 49, B. 90. Zara Nelsova, cello; Ruggiero Ricci, violin; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra; Walter Susskind, conductor VOX-NX-3034CDAntonin Dvořák’s Cello Concerto is a work that is Dear to many music lovers. It is filled with beautiful melodies that appeal to both the head and the heart, making it one of those pieces that can serve as a wonderful way to introduce those unfamiliar with classical music into its spellbinding realm. When I received this recording for review, I tried to remember which recording if the work I had first acquired back in the mid-1970s when I began to become seriously interested in classical music, but drew a blank. However, I vividly remember hearing the work in […]
2024-03-04 10:05:00
There is no right reaction to great music
[…] of young adult readers. However it also attracted criticism from the cognoscenti for its lack of conventional structure and ending. In a later edition Fowles was prompted to add a Foreword. In this he wrote:...The foregoing will, I hope, excuse me from saying what the story 'means'. Novels, even more lucidly conceived and controlled ones than this, are not like crossword puzzles, with one unique set of correct answers behind the clues - an analogy ("Dear Mr Fowles, Please explain the real significance of...) I sometimes despair of ever extirpating from the contemporary from the contemporary student mind. If The Magus has any 'real significance', it is no more than that of a Rorschach test in psychology. Its meaning is what ever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned there is no 'right' reaction.
2024-02-23 12:43:00
Being performed for the first time for almost 20 years: Murray Hipkin & the North London Chorus give us a chance to finally experience Ethel Smyth's The Prison in concert
Whilst the last few decades have seen a remarkable increase in the amount of exploration of neglected 19th and 20th century British music, there has still been a tendency to view individual composers through quite a narrow lens. So, Stanford's most popular opera during his lifetime, Shamus O'Brien is only now getting its first studio recording, whilst Parry's oratorios, highly popular and influential in their day, have similarly only recently arrived properly on disc.Ethel Smyth is another one of those composers. Whilst The Wreckers has long been available on disc, it took Glyndebourne in 2021 to finally explore the composer's original version of the opera and her other operas have all had a patchy life and though finally we have all but one (the score of which has disappeared) available on disc. But what about the rest of Smyth's oeuvre? The early Mass certainly, but the rest of her work is only patchily […]
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