Martin Kettle

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Martin Kettle

Back when Mahler’s symphonies were still rarely played in Britain – and, yes, there really was such a time – Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) was the most familiar of his major orchestral works. Much of that was the legacy of Kathleen Ferrier’s inimitable recording of Das Leid’s final song, Der Abschied (The Farewell) under Bruno Walter before her early death in 1953.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Martin Kettle

It would be “liberation day” in the US, the White House announced. Well, we shall see. Yet even if one puts the noise and nastiness that accompany a Donald Trump announcement to one side – in this case tonight’s pronouncement that there will be an executive order announcing “reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world”, a 10% tariff on the UK and 20% on the EU – the significance of the theatre is hard to miss.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Martin Kettle

Joyce DiDonato doesn’t just sing Winterreise. She acts it too. This is not as rare as you may imagine. The desolated lover’s winter journey is an accommodating masterwork. Actor-singers including Håkan Hagegård, Mark Padmore and Simon Keenlyside have performed staged versions too, establishing for all except diehard purists that a traditional male voice and piano recital need not necessarily be the only way with Schubert’s bleak setting of Wilhelm Müller poems.

4 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Martin Kettle

There is memory, but there is also “post-memory”. Mingled with the recollection of our own life stories, we humans also carry those of others, told or sometimes concealed by those we once knew, or even never met. But what is passed down becomes ours too. This interwoven fabric of past, present and future is the rewarding inspiration behind Michael Zev Gordon’s compelling and intelligent new concert piece, A Kind of Haunting.

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Martin Kettle

Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Puccini’s final opera was a well-flogged warhorse by the turn of the millennium, hugely assisted by the global 1990s popularity of the aria Nessun Dorma. Revived only two years ago it returns again, part of a Puccini-rich season marking the centenary of the composer’s death (the event which left Turandot unfinished). But thankfully this staging is still far from showing its age.