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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Nick Kimberley's rating
Reader rating
Description: Donald Runnicles takes the baton as the orchestra performs Beethoven's Symphony No 1 In C Major and Mahler's Das Lied Von Der Erde. With mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill and tenor Johan Botha.
Can music tell stories without words? Yes, according to Richard Strauss, whose tone-poems spin purely musical yarns as detailed as those in his operas.
His Sinfonia domestica re-creates a day in the Strauss family home and, like life itself, is by turns trivial, touching and irritating but there is also surging passion, including strenuous sex, as well as humour, such as baby’s bath-time.
The music, though, must stand without its narrative scaffold. Indeed, Donald Runnicles’s performance with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra brought out so much detail that you had to forget the plot for fear of missing something.
His players responded as virtuosos, with telling solos at every turn. He even made light of Strauss’s reluctance to end the piece, so that the repeated false finishes seemed entirely coherent.
Runnicles is the orchestra’s new chief conductor; the exuberance of this performance suggests that it will be a fruitful partnership.
Sinfonia domestica requires a vast orchestra. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 20 works on a smaller scale but with no loss of emotional impact.
Runnicles brought out the operatic menace as well as the ineffable sadness, while soloist Shai Wosner, at the beginning of his career, showed that he is already his own man in terms of phrasing, emphasis and occasional decoration. He provided his own cadenza in the final movement, and while it may not have been stunningly original, it worked, which isn’t always the case.
Runnicles opened with John Adams’s Slonimsky’s Earbox, given a hard-driving workout that gathered dangerous momentum. Runnicles kept it on track, his orchestra playing with a freedom that verged on abandon.
Repeated on BBC Radio 3 on Thursday September 10 (www.bbc.co.uk).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
