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A Night of Love with Ion Marin and Renée Fleming - Waldbühne Click here for tickets I have a soft spot for the charismatic American soprano Renee Fleming, well, who doesn’t? Renée Fleming joined conductor Ion Marin and the Berlin Philharmonic to perform some of the most beautiful love songs of the classical repertoire in a concert entitled Night of Love at the Waldbuhne. One of Europe's most beautiful open-air concert halls, Berlin's Waldbühne is the summer residence of the Berlin Philharmonic. The orchestra's summer performances there are among the most popular classical music concerts in the world, with audiences regularly numbering more than 20,000. Works like Dvořák's "Song to the Moon" from Russalka take on a special significance when performed with the moon itself shimmering above the stage: as Fleming herself explained "When you're standing there on the stage, you have the feeling that you can sing into the sky." The concert includes Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and gorgeous songs by Dvořák, Strauss, Puccini, Elgar, Leoncavallo, and more. American Songbook at NJPAC - Christine Ebersole and Seth Rudetsky Click here to watch Here’s a casual live show from New Jersey Performing Arts Center which is fun to watch. Radio Host Seth Rudetsky and Broadway leading lady Christine Ebersole team up for an entertaining evening of banter and songs relating to Ebersole's career and their mutual love of the Great White Way. Christine Ebersole starred in the Broadway musicals 42nd Street and Grey Gardens, winning a Tony Award for each. In addition to her theatre work she’s an outstanding cabaret and concert singer in venues both large and small such as the Cinegrill in Hollywood and the Café Carlyle in New York, winning the 2010 Nightlife Award for Outstanding Cabaret Vocalist in a Major Engagement for her Café Carlyle cabaret. Seth Rudetsky is an American musician, actor, writer and popular radio host with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Broadway lore an theatre history. Songs include Al Dubin and Harry Warren's "Lullaby of Broadway"; Lerner and Loewe's "Simple Joys of Maidenhood" and Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns". Before and after: three years of conservation work on Piero's Nativity - National Gallery Click here to watch Everybody who works at the National Gallery always looks exhausted and disheveled but they have wonderful insights into the artworks they tell us about. Here’s a case in point. Jill Dunkerton, one of the Gallery’s distinguished restorers, takes us on the fascinating journey of the process of restoring Piero della Francesco’s Nativity. By the time she’s through we understand why so much love and expertise goes into her work and also why this painting took three years to bring back from the almost dead. Die Schone Mullerin – Alinde Quartett with Daniel Johannsen Click here to watch I have no timely reason to recommend this short video to you except that it’s beautiful and wonderfully well played and sung by a young quartet and singer. My friend Debra Ayers sent me this excerpt from Schubert’s songcycle Die Schone Mullerin, rearranged for voice and string quartet by composer/singer Tom Randle, himself a trained composer and conductor, who has had a long singing career as a tenor. This is the first and the only arrangement for voice and string quartet. And what better time to present this arrangement to the world than on the 200th birthday of Schubert's immortal masterpiece. Schubert composed this song cycle in 1823 at a low time in his life when he was deeply depressed and in hospital with a violent recurrence of the syphilis which was to kill him five years later. Revitalised by the poems of his friend Wilhelm Müller (Seventy-seven Poems from the Papers of a Traveling French Horn Player) he composed what became the first ever cycle of 20 art songs, known as Die Schone Mullerin. The tenor, Daniel Johannsen, who has performed the cycle countless times since the 1990s, and the young Italian-American Alinde Quartett have found a composer who could hardly be better suited to the recomposition of this amazing work. American-born Tom Randle's tenor voice has taken him to the world's greatest opera houses and festivals (such as the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Glyndebourne and Aix-en-Provence). Thanks to his many talents and dual perspective, he was able to provide the vocal-instrumental quintet with a tailor-made version, which, according to current findings, is the first and the only arrangement for voice and string quartet. Tribute to Joel Grey and John Kander – Tony Awards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQaSzupJXzA Click here to watch Several readers complained last week that the link for this delightful short video tribute to Joel Grey and John Kander following their Life Achievement awards at the Tonys was unstable or didn’t work. Sorry about that. I don’t want you to miss it so here it is again with a stable YouTube link that works. I promise. Pocket Review The Crucible – Gielgud Theatre Lyndsey Turner’s National Theatre production of Arthur Miller’s classic play about the Salem Witch Trials of the late 17th century is elegant, thoughtful and respectful. It gives us a period play in every sense of the word. Designer Es Devlin’s wall of rain which spills its torrents onto the village of Salem exemplifies the panic that spreads when the sexual jealousy of a young girl impels her to attempt to implicate her lover’s wife in accusations of witchcraft. Her malicious but compelling accusations of contact with the Devil, while entirely untrue, become a tide of hysteria which engulfs, first the other local girls, then an entire village, resulting in escalating hysteria amongst the townspeople, more and more of whom claim to have seem their neighbours with the Devil. The religious leaders trying to unravel the truth are themselves so convinced of the Devil’s presence that no contrary claim or evidence can be accepted. If someone is accused, well, then, they must be guilty. So it was in the 1950s, when Arthur Miller wrote this play. In a rising tide of fear, generated by Senator Joe McCarthy and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, he, and many of his friends were accused by of being, or of supporting Communism. and the fear was so great that writers and artists of all stripes left the country to avoid being hauled before Congress to plead a negative – that they weren’t, and had never been, Communist. “The Crucible” was an act of desperation.”, Miller wrote in an essay for the New Yorker, “I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.” Miller found the parallels for his existential fear in his discovery of the identical fears in the inhabitants of the 17th century village of Salem and its destruction by hysteria, and it is this that motivated his wonderful play. This current production, while entirely faithful to the letter of Miller’s work, fails to find the contemporary parallels which he wrote about. This Crucible should be making us think about the clear and present dangers of panic and fear in our own times. Instead, it is ‘just’ an excellent production of a history play.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
March 2024
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