Mutter, LSO, Sir Colin Davis, Barbican

London's loudest hall constricts the fervour of Janáček's Glagolitic Mass

Just a month after the end of the 2010 BBC Proms, can nostalgia really be setting in for the swimming-pool colosseum of the Royal Albert Hall? On Friday I missed its warming echo-effect around Delius, and last night we needed both its cavernous recesses and its king of instruments (the Barbican has none to call its own), preferably played by a top organist, for what Janáček imaged in 1927 as the outdoor worship of his Glagolitic Mass. With Sir Colin Davis rightly pushing its fervour to violent limits, the Barbican experience was like being stuck in a jar with angry, buzzing wasps.

Just a month after the end of the 2010 BBC Proms, can nostalgia really be setting in for the swimming-pool colosseum of the Royal Albert Hall? On Friday I missed its warming echo-effect around Delius, and last night we needed both its cavernous recesses and its king of instruments (the Barbican has none to call its own), preferably played by a top organist, for what Janáček imaged in 1927 as the outdoor worship of his Glagolitic Mass. With Sir Colin Davis rightly pushing its fervour to violent limits, the Barbican experience was like being stuck in a jar with angry, buzzing wasps.

The Seckerson Tapes: Soprano Amanda Roocroft

Star of The Makropulos Case speaks about her return to the stage

Amanda Roocroft was a star from the moment she graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music. At 25, Sir Georg Solti asked her to sing Pamina at the Salzburg Festival. She declined. It was too soon. Where would there be left to go? "Hurry slowly" would seem to have been her motto and now that she is playing - for the first time - a diva with 300 years of experience, the decisions she has made in her career are more than ever falling into perspective.

The Makropulos Case, English National Opera

Alden and Roocroft come together for a perfect, if nihilistic, night of opera

Opera spends so much of its time killing off female protagonists that it's refreshing to come back to The Makropulos Case. In it Janáček, in one of his many moments of generosity, imagines what might happen if you allowed a woman not just to live but to live forever. The answer? They become a bloody nightmare.

The Last Night of the Proms, Fleming, Rysanov, BBCSO, Bělohlávek

The UK-US special relationship on the 9/11 anniversary

It must have been with a leaden heart that the BBC Proms planning team realised that 2010's Last Night would fall plumb on 9/11. How to reconcile all the traditional Brit triumphalism and singing of Jerusalem with the rather more contemporary need to reconcile all, whether out of Jerusalem or not? They did, and full marks for a delicate balancing-act of culture politics and a moving occasion last night (admitted by one who had spent a lifetime avoiding the Last Night of the Proms).

Vogt, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Gardiner, Royal Albert Hall

Gardiner gets all Romantic with a splendid Czech platter

Short of rolling around the podium like a delirious pig in a mudbath, Sir John Eliot Gardiner couldn't have hidden his enjoyment of the warm, plush sounds and well-upholstered vibrato of this wonderfully old-fashioned orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, less well at last night's Prom. As he embarked on one of the broadest, most unashamedly Romantic openings to Dvořák's Eighth Symphony I have ever heard, I wondered what the hell his years of all-out warfare on modern performance techniques had been about. Was Sir John doing a Kim Philby? Was the period movement's greatest propagandist defecting live on Radio 3? And might there be an encore of "Erbarme dich" for seven swannee whistles?
 

Sir Charles Mackerras, 1925-2010

One of the final interviews given by the much loved conductor

Sir Charles Mackerras has died at the age of 84. In tribute to one of the most highly respected and best-loved of conductors, theartsdesk republishes here an interview he gave on the eve of conducting Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera last October. Despite bouts of ill health, he found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s and his run-ins with Richard Jones and Christopher Alden over their "monstrous" modern productions.

BBCSO, Bĕlohlávek, Barbican Hall

Czech master conductor soars to new heights in a Martinů masterpiece

It needs saying yet again, until the message gets through: Bohuslav Martinů is one of the great symphonic masters of the 20th century, and his fellow Czech, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra Jiři Bĕlohlávek, once more proves the right man to marshal a golden Martinů revival. It needs saying above all because, for all the beauties and oddities in every bar of the six symphonies, composed at the height of the exiled composer's mastery in America and France between 1942 and 1953, the Third Symphony is perhaps the one which cries out masterpiece from embattled start to shatteringly moving finish. I never thought I'd be writing this, but last night it even outshone by a long way two intriguing but problematic works by Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

1954 Cunning Little Vixen

Filmed extracts of a fantastically vivid 1954 production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen have been unearthed by the great blogger Doundou Tchil of Classical Iconoclast. Václav Neumann is the conductor; Berlin's Komische Oper is the house. Whets the appetite for tonight's Bill Bryden revival production at Covent Garden. Hard to imagine the sets or the acting (watch that singing vixen scrambling about before the poacher) being bettered. My friend says I'm setting myself up for a fall. But Sir Charles Mackerras will no doubt give Neumann a run for his money.

Hana Vojackova, Chernobyl: Red Balloon 86, 11 Mansfield St

Walk through Chernobyl: a visual reinterpretation of an idealised Soviet documentary from 1986.

A 1986 documentary about the USSR’s new modernist city, Chernobyl, featured a five-year-old boy kicking a football through landscaped gardens, past blocks of clean, elegant flats and inside the soon-to-be opened funfair in the workers' town of Pripyat. A brilliant propaganda tool for the new status symbol Nuclear Power Plant, the film was intended to convey the message around the Soviet empire that the nuclear age implied a safe, happy future. The film was never shown; three weeks later, the plant exploded in the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster and Chernobyl’s almost 40,000 inhabitants were evacuated after two days. Hana Vojackova, a Czech photographer and film-maker working in London, was also five years old at the time of the accident. Last November, she visited Chernobyl to tell a story about a story in danger of being forgotten.
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