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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Verdi

What I’ve been writing about this week.

01 Thursday Oct 2015

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Boris, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Brahms, Castro, Elgar, Haydn, Hugo Wolf, Ibarra, John Williams, Revueltas, Richard Strauss, Salome, Smetana, Symphony Hall, Verdi

books2

John Williams’ complete music for Star Wars.

Elgar’s Piano Quartet and Wand of Youth Suite No.1.

Butterworth’s Suite for string quartet.

Hugo Wolf: Italian Serenade.

Haydn: Quartet Op.76 No.1.

Verdi: String Quartet in E minor.

Smetana: Tabór.

Brahms: Piano Concerto No.1.

Revueltas: Sensemayá.

Ricardo Castro’s opera Atzimba.

Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.

…and Richard Strauss’s Berlin lunch with Count Harry Kessler in March 1915.

Tomorrow: Federico Ibarra’s Symphony No.2, then a review of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance of Salomé.

My intern has been no help at all.
Boris_at_home2

In love with “Louise”

24 Friday Jul 2015

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Buxton Festival, Buxton Opera House, Donizetti, Gustave Charpentier, Louise, Reviews, The Arts Desk, Verdi

Buxton Opera House in Festival time

For three successive days this week, I’ve driven the lovely road from Lichfield across the Derbyshire border to Ashbourne and then along the roof of England through the High Peak, to Buxton, and its annual Festival. Its a trip I’ve long wanted to make (impossible before acquiring a car), and it was well rewarded – and not just because it’s a town full of antique and book shops,  faded Edwardian spa facilities and unpretentious Regency architecture. I was there to review three of the Festival’s opera productions: a better-than-expected Verdi Giovanna d’Arco, a disappointing Donizetti Lucia di Lammermoor and…and…Louise, lovely Louise.

Louise: poster for the original 1900 production.

I’ve hankered after seeing this mouthwatering great slice of verismo a la Francaise since the day I read the description in (of all things) Gerhard von Westermann’s Opera Guide. Saki used it as a punchline in his own short story Louise – proof of just how popular it was in the years before the Great War. I had a feeling that Gustave Charpentier’s heroine and I would hit it off when I finally encountered her live (the last UK staging was in 1981, when, aged 8, I don’t think my 15p weekly pocket money would have run to a ticket) and here at last she was. OK, admittedly it was a concert performance (and how I wish they’d ditched the Donizetti – I mean, this’ll be my 4th different Donizetti production this year – and staged this instead), but as any music lover knows, the difference between listening to a CD and hearing anything live is that between splashing in a paddling-pool and swimming in the sea.

The result: I’m now obsessed. I’ve a brand new special-favourite opera. By ‘eck, it’s gorgeous. Any critic who says otherwise (and especially if they’ve recently bent over backwards to insist that some freshly-exhumed bel canto turkey is a neglected masterpiece) is just wrong. Entitled to their opinion, but wrong. So there.

Possibly my enthusiasm coloured my review of the Buxton Festival for The Arts Desk: you tell me.

Seventy-word Season.

15 Monday Dec 2014

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Blurbs, Copywriting, Glazunov, Twitter, Verdi

It’s December, and that means that the annual classical music copywriting season is roaring away from the starting line. I’m a lucky to have a range of great clients, each with distinctive needs and preferences for their promotional copy. No two orchestras or promoters are quite the same, of course, and while some send their annual season brochures to print shortly after Christmas, others work on them right through to Easter.

That suits me fine: it gives me the chance to focus on each client individually, and really get into the swing of their preferred style and length. Some like their text bubbly and informal, others prefer a more specialist tone. Some have space for 100-150 words per concert; others need it all wrapped up in 60 words (copywriters always have to be mindful of the designer’s needs). Increasingly, clients want tweetable summaries too – a whole concert outlined in 140 characters. After writing a few bits of copy, in a certain style and length, it starts to flow – and before you know it you’re even writing Facebook updates and Christmas letters in zippy 70-word paragraphs.

It’s tremendously stimulating work, and it’s a privilege to get a confidential preview of what some of my favourite orchestras and venues are planning over the next twelve months. And it’s enormously rewarding to act as an advocate for some really glorious music-making. To have the chance to persuade thousands of people that they’ll love Glazunov’s The Seasons, to hear what a new conductor has to say about a Beethoven symphony, or to overcome their fears about Schoenberg.

There’s just one downside to writing these “blurbs” (as absolutely everyone ends up calling them). Months later, after the work’s been done and they’re all in print, they have a tendency to draw friendly fire. That’s summed up for me by the national critic who took issue with my 70-word summary of a performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Prompted by a friend from the non-classical world who habitually refers to all choral music (whether Tallis, Haydn or Orff) as “the death music”, I’d written that Verdi’s great, pulsing, blood-and-thunder blow-out “isn’t exactly what you expect from religious music”. “Over 40 years I’ve seen every one of Verdi’s operas” huffed this gentleman on Twitter, “and the Requiem IS exactly what I’d expect”.  

But, but (as I tried to cram into 140 characters) that’s the whole thing about blurbs. I know that. You know that. You’ve seen every one of Verdi’s operas, and doubtless a Requiem a year for the last four decades. You don’t need to be told what to expect. In fact, you don’t need a descriptive blurb in a concert brochure or on a website at all. Like many really seasoned concert-goers, you’ll have been able to form a good idea of what to expect from the name of the piece and the listing of the performers alone. No piece of prose, however enthusiastic or erudite (or both) is ever likely to alter the well-informed judgment you’ve made for yourself.

That being the case, dear sir, does it not perhaps occur to you that…it might have been written for someone else?

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