Handel's Alcina, Barbican

An unforgettable night for lovers of the Baroque - and the jumpsuit

Classical music does not get any cooler or sexier than mezzo Vesselina Kasarova. An awesome black jumpsuit hanging off her rangy figure, she possessed the Barbican stage last night. She jived. She grooved. She shuffled. She shimmied. Every bit of her body was in ecstasy, her neck sliding about like an Indian dancer's, her feet (in perfect little heels) spinning like a jazzer's, her bullying arms posturing and prodding, her face distorting in the maddest ways imaginable (words can't come close to describing what was going on here), her mouth flashing its whites like a primate's. Her voice? Extraordinarily weird, moving, honest, explosive. Her Sta nell'Ircana was a theatrical moment of the year.

Mingardo, Gritton, The English Concert, Bicket, Barbican

Sober, thoughtful, affecting and edifying: Handel, Vivaldi and Pergolesi at their best

Before Mozart, there was Pergolesi. The 18th century couldn't get enough of the Neapolitan prodigy. He was the first great tragic musical wünderkind of the Enlightenment, prefiguring what Mozart would become for the 19th century. Like Mozart, Pergolesi died prematurely aged just 26. Like Mozart, Pergolesi was a musical simplifier and distiller, a divine and revolutionary sieve. Like Mozart, Pergolesi's popularity spawned an industry dedicated to mythologising his life and misattributing the music of contemporaries to him. Yet we celebrate Pergolesi's 300th anniversary this year, quite unlike we would Mozart's, with just one piece: the Stabat mater.

Sir Charles Mackerras Memorial Concert, Royal Festival Hall

Sir Charles Mackerras during rehearsals for his final Philharmonia concert last December

Happy, energetic tribute to the long-serving master conductor

In the last year of his life he was, as a colleague noted when we learned of Charles Mackerras’s death, the wise old gamekeeper in the spring forest of Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. No wonder Mackerras, we were told last night by his conductor nephew Alexander Briger, wanted that most ecstatic celebration of the natural order for his memorial, just as Janáček had had it played at his funeral. Was it trivialised by an encore number from Mackerras’s deliciously arranged Sullivan potpourri-ballet, Pineapple Poll? Not a jot, mate.

The English Concert, Alice Coote, Wigmore Hall

A crack team showing its emotional side in a programme of love and death

There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked limbs make a rather more human case for its attractions. It was a case matched for persuasive enthusiasm (and significantly bettered for taste) last night by The English Concert and Alice Coote, in a programme of charged highlights from 16th and 17th-century repertoire.

Radamisto, English National Opera

A sexy, postmodern take on Handel's Orientalism

There’s something about Handel opera that provokes even the most stolid of directors to flights of fancy. If it’s not water tanks, balls rolling across the stage or a set constructed largely of pot plants, it’s a chorus of dancing sheep. The broad-shouldered solidity of Handel’s structures can carry a lot of experimentation, and if David Alden’s Baroque, Orientalist fantasy of a Radamisto in no way overpowers its material, it says more about the quality of the music than the delicacy of Alden’s own creation. Big, colourful and allusive, the production is a muddle, but strangely bewitching for all that.

The Seckerson Tapes: Ailish Tynan on Radamisto

Young star of Alden's new production discusses playing a short, fat, bald man

Ailish Tynan plays a short, fat, bald man in David Alden's staging of Handel's Radamisto at ENO. It is, she says, an occupational hazard when venturing into the cross-gender world of 18th-century opera. That Tynan is one of our brightest young stars - a shining lyric soprano equally at home in the rarefied world of song as she is in opera - only adds to the somewhat surreal prospect of hearing that voice emanating from a grotesquely fat-suited body.
 

Niobe, Regina di Tebe, Royal Opera

Agostino Steffani's baroque obscurity is an unmissable operatic revelation

One after the other they came. Stunning aria after stunning aria. Affecting in their harmonies, infectious in their rhythms, arresting in their textures, vivid in their melodies. The Royal Opera had taken a mighty gamble with Agostino Steffani's 300-year-old Niobe, Regina di Tebe, a forgotten opera by a forgotten composer. But they were completely right to do so. For Niobe is a masterpiece. And last night's performance was a triumph.

Jimi Hendrix, Snap Gallery/Handel House Museum

Two exhibitions devoted to the greatest guitar hero of them all

A soundtrack of "Purple Haze", "Hey Joe" and other eternal Jimi Hendrix hits, is currently drifting out of the Snap Gallery along the swanky Piccadilly Arcade in Mayfair. A boutique exhibition space, Snap sits incongruously amongst purveyors of "fine" jewellery and gentlemans’ tailoring and its front windows are transforming the chi-chi mall with Gered Mankowitz’s photographs of the Sixties guitar genius, Hendrix.

The Seckerson Tapes: René Jacobs Interview

The multi-talented René Jacobs tackles Mozart's beloved Singspiel 'Die Zauberflöte'

On the trail of the authentic sound of Mozart's Magic Flute

René Jacobs: singer, conductor, scholar, archivist, alchemist, teacher. In recent years he's been "rehabilitating" the Mozart operas for the Harmonia Mundi label, eradicating 19th-century retouchings and stylistic anomalies in order to restore these great works to their vibrant original colours. He and his handpicked performers have now arrived at Mozart's beloved Singspiel Die Zauberflöte and the results are quite revelatory.

The Seckerson Tapes: Christophe Rousset Interview

Baroque's great mischief-maker talks Handel and Couperin

Christophe Rousset - master harpsichordist, conductor and musical archeologist - was once described by the Guardian as "music's greatest mischief-maker". He took it as a compliment. In 1991 he founded the stunningly virtuosic period instrument group Les Talens Lyriques and together they have trawled the archives in search of the forgotten composers and forgotten repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries - contemporaries of giants like Mozart and Handel who in their day were often more famous and more successful than the greats they inspired. Composers like Martin y Soler, Cimarosa, Jommelli, Traetta, and, of course, his compatriot Lully. In this exclusive audio podcast Rousset talks in his Paris apartment between performances of Handel's Semele.
 
Christophe Rousset - master harpsichordist, conductor and musical archeologist - was once described by the Guardian as "music's greatest mischief-maker". He took it as a compliment. In 1991 he founded the stunningly virtuosic period instrument group Les Talens Lyriques and together they have trawled the archives in search of the forgotten composers and forgotten repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries - contemporaries of giants like Mozart and Handel who in their day were often more famous and more successful than the greats they inspired. Composers like Martin y Soler, Cimarosa, Jommelli, Traetta, and, of course, his compatriot Lully. In this exclusive audio podcast Rousset talks in his Paris apartment between performances of Handel's Semele.
 
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