The April Guide

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Marina Poplavskaya in La Traviata
Marina Poplavskaya in La Traviata© Klaus Lefebvre/De Nederlandse Opera 2010

Classical music, including opera, both of the past and of now, is a bottomless pit of pleasure and all the CDs in the world will never compensate for the spontaneity of live performance.

Classical music, including opera, both of the past and of now, is a bottomless pit of pleasure and all the CDs in the world will never compensate for the spontaneity of live performance. London especially is a non-stop music festival with great events taking place virtually every night. In the month of April, there are many, many concerts, not only of the regular classics in what will almost certainly be excellent performances, but also exceptional evenings of music that is relatively little performed, and that will be more than worth exploring.

A Celebration of Composer Gustav Mahler
From the 12 April at Royal Festival Hall, the veteran conductor Lorin Maazel, is directing a number of performances of Gustav Mahler Symphonies – this year is the hundredth anniversary of his death. But it is the event on 20 April that really intrigues me: the London Philharmonic Orchestra performs Mahler's rarely heard re-workings of pieces by JS Bach and Beethoven.

Three Opera Recommendations
There are two other opera rarities that are likely to receive outstanding performances. One is the Tsar's Bride – a historical fantasy about Ivan the Terrible by Rimsky Korsakov, who was the teacher of Igor Stravinsky, and without whom, his early works such as the Firebird, would be unthinkable. The Tsar's Bride, at the Royal Opera House, with an impressive Russian cast, stars the beautiful Russian soprano, Marina Poplavskaya, who has just had huge success in New York and Berlin singing in La Traviata, and is conducted by Mark Elder. And at the Young Vic at the beginning of April, there are likely to be highly recommended performances in the round of Claudia Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses. Monteverdi was as much as anyone, the founder of opera as we know it back in Mantua and Venice in the early 17th century. His ability to write heart-rending melody was extraordinary. An equally memorable evening should be a concert performance at the Barbican on 19 April, of Claude Debussy's divine Wagnerian/anti-Wagnerian opera, Pelleas and Melisande with the Orchestra de Paris, a largely French cast, headed by the already legendary soprano in every sense, Natalie Dessay.

Three of the World's Greatest Pianists
Wigmore Hall is hosting within a week of each other what are likely to be two extraordinary performances accompanied by two of the world's greatest pianists, of Schubert's Wintereise (Winter's Journey) certainly without question, the greatest and most tragic cycle of songs ever written. One performance by the great English tenor Ian Bostridge is accompanied by Mitsuko Uchida, and the following week the German Baritone, Robert Holl, is accompanied by Andreas Schiff. Book early or queue for returns! Meanwhile, on 29 April at the Royal Festival Hall, the celebrated veteran Italian pianist (still on the top of his form), Maurizio Pollini, is playing Chopin's 24 exquisite Preludes, and as well as works by Debussy, Pierre Boulez's fantastically complex and grand 2nd Piano Sonata, composed in 1947.

An Outstanding British Composer
Listening to contemporary music is always a challenge, but one well worth taking up, and in April there are two events that will be both historic and in every way, worthwhile going to hear. One is the UK premier being given on 7 April in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, of a new work written by the British composer Thomas Adès, for the Emerson String Quartet, the outstanding and pre-eminent group from New York. The programme also includes, as well as a late quartet by Beethoven, one of Mendelssohn's quartets, which, coming from the composer of the famous 'light music' of A Midsummer Night's Dream, are extraordinarily complex and powerful exercises of the genre. Together with the new piece by the still young Tom Adès, himself a composer of two operas and other pieces of the greatest intensity, including the marvellous Powder her Face about the fall from grace of the Duchess of Argyle (a sort of British Ana Nicole!) all bode for a concert not to be missed.

April's Must-see and hear: A Day Devoted to Composer Unsuk Chin
But perhaps the most remarkable anticipated event of the month is a whole day of no less than five concerts at the Barbican Centre on 9 April, the first at 11am, the last, a grand concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra devoted to the Berlin resident Korean composer Unsuk Chin. She is an incredibly talented creator of music for many and multifaceted instruments, both western and eastern, who studied with Ligeti (he of the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey). She has already written what – judging by YouTube – is a wonderful full length opera, Alice in Wonderland, a film version of which will be shown during the day. I cannot wait.


Norman Rosenthal spent more than thirty years as director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts.  Since he was nine-years-old, which was 1953, has been haunting London's many concert and opera venues, large and small, absorbing classical, opera and contemporary music, all of which he enjoys in equal measure.