Features

Observations: Casino morality at the opera

Ill-fated is an understatement for the tangled performance-history of Prokofiev's opera based on Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. He composed it in 1917 as a piece of musical dynamite to galvanise the sclerotic St Petersburg Imperial Theatre, but the Bolshevik revolution did that job rather too effectively, by closing the theatre entirely. A post-revolution production scheduled for 1929 hit a political brick wall, with Dostoyevsky's books relegated to the samizdat list, and with the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians declaring its avant-garde music socially harmful. When Vsevolod Meyerhold, its great directorial champion, was shot in the Thirties purges, its prospects looked hopeless. And when it finally got its Russian premiere in 1974 – 20 years after Prokofiev's death – it was still seen as dangerously subversive. Not until Valery Gergiev conducted a performance at the Mariinsky for Prokofiev's centenary in 1991 was it purged of its seditious overtones.

Inside Features

Classical podcast: Mark Padmore

Thursday, 11 February 2010

English tenor Mark Padmore has enjoyed a career that has seen him grow from a choral scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, through membership of The Sixteen and Hilliard ensembles, to becoming the international Evangelist of choice in performances of Bach’s Passions across the globe.

A glass ceiling for women in the orchestra pit

Friday, 22 January 2010

Next week, Julia Jones takes the baton at the Royal Opera House. But a woman on the podium remains a rare event. And that is absurd, says Jessica Duchen

Observations: Just too many anniversaries

Friday, 22 January 2010

Time was when a composer's centenary felt like a significant event, but these days anniversaries are ten-a-penny, because they're such a wonderful crutch for programmers to lean on. When in doubt – and today's programmers at the BBC, South Bank, Barbican, etc are chronically in doubt – reach for a 100th, 150th, or 350th. It can be a birth or a death, so we're in for two doses of Mahler, whose birth 150 years ago is being celebrated this year, and whose death in 1911 will doubtless be commemorated next year.