Music Matters
24 April 2005 Sunday 24 April 2005 17:45-18:30 (Radio
3)
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Under the director Graham Vick, Birmingham
Opera Company has forged a groundbreaking mix of international
professional opera production and street-level performances
involving people who live and work in the city. Music Matters
goes to Birmingham for rehearsals of their latest production:
Monteverdi's opera, Ulysses Comes Home. And a look at
The Musical Madhouse - the first complete English
translation of one of the composer Berlioz's most compelling
literary works.
Duration:
45 minutes |
In this programme
Ulysses Comes Home
Director Graham Vick's versions of works by Berg,
Beethoven and Bernstein have made opera speak with a new voice
and to new audiences. So, it is no surprise that his latest
offering, a production of Monteverdi's opera, Ulysses Comes
Home, continues to challenge preconceptions of both
performance method and space. Birmingham Opera Company
productions involve hundreds of people from the local
community performing alongside professional singers and
musicians. For this production, the performance will take
place in a disused ice-rink in the centre of Birmingham.
However, while the conventions of opera production are
challenged, no compromise is made on the quality of the
performance as the values and standards of the company remain
rigorously high. Graham Vick, along with professional and
amateur members of the opera company, explains the ethos of
the collaboration.
Birmingham Opera Company's
production of Monteverdi's Ulysses Comes Home directed by
Graham Vick opens at Planet Ice in Birmingham on April 29th
Berlioz: A Musical
Madhouse
For more than thirty years, composer Hector
Berlioz wrote music criticism for newspapers and journals in
Paris. His criticism was funny, scurrilous and outspoken and
his collection of essays, The Musical Madhouse, is a fine
example of Berlioz at his most irreverent. Composers,
impresarios and audiences are treated to the same caustic wit,
but the writing also creates a vivid picture of 19th century
musical life. Tom talks to the translator of this collection,
Alastair Bruce, and to French music specialist, Richard
Langham Smith, about Berlioz's double life as composer and
critic, and asks why these writings have not been translated
into English before now.
The Musical Madhouse
(Les Grotesques de la musique), Written by Hector Berlioz and
Translated and edited by Alastair Bruce is published in
paperback by the University of Rochester Press at £17.99. ISBN
1580461824
Nuria Schoenberg
Nono
Nuria Schoenberg Nono has a unique connection with
the history of 20th century music. Daughter of the composer,
Arnold Schoenberg, and wife of the late avant-garde Italian
composer, Luigi Nono, she has dedicated her life to these men
and their music. She first met Luigi Nono at the world
premiere of Schoenberg's unfinished opera, Moses und Aron, in
Hamburg in 1954. Initially, Nono's music attempted to
communicate his radical left-wing politics with a view to
changing society, but in his later years, his compositions
became more intimate and private. Nuria tells Tom about her
astonishing life, and her relationship with her
husband.
You can hear a concert of Nono's music with
the London Sinfonietta and Oliver Knussen on Performance on 3
on 28th April here on BBC Radio
3
Rosenthal's
Children
Opera retains its power to shock at the
Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in a new production from librettist
Vladimir Sorokin and composer Leonid Desyatnikov: The Children
of Rosenthal. But, is this really down to the content of the
opera, or more to do with political censorship of culture in
Putin's Russia? It's a story of a scientist who clones five
great composers, from Mozart to Tchaikovsky, but politicians
are in uproar because of its alleged pornographic content. BBC
Correspondent Dasha Pushkova reports from Moscow on whether
this scandal is simply a story of moral protest about a new
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