London Handel Players toast the Music and Beyond Festival in Ottawa for a fantastic series of concerts and workshops

Posted By: Sinead O'Carroll, 13th July 2018

A toast from the London Handel Players to Music and Beyond Festival in Ottawa for inviting them to bring their dance project, A Baroque Rebellion!, to the festival in July this year.  Joined by the internationally renowned baroque dancers, Mary Collins and Steven Player, the ensemble performed three concerts of music of English, French and German dances.

Watch Live-Stream at The Wigmore Hall: Anita Lasker-Wallfisch speaker; Raphael Wallfisch cello; John York piano

Posted By: Sinead O'Carroll, 9th July 2018

Director John Gilhooly felt compelled to invite Anita Lasker-Wallfisch to Wigmore Hall following her recent address to the Bundestag, to mark the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. For this event, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch – a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen – describes her life story and the importance of learning from one of history’s darkest chapters. She is joined on stage by her son, the acclaimed cellist Raphael Wallfisch and the pianist John York, for music by Bloch, Ravel and Korngold.

Watch it now via their live weblink:

The Times: Dance review: Elizabeth at the Barbican (Raphael Wallfisch, cello)

Posted By: Sinead O'Carroll, 21st May 2018

Former Royal Ballet principal Zenaida Yanowsky is radiant in a show that explores the Virgin Queen’s relationships with the men in her life

★★★★☆
She arrives on stage, dolled up in her regal finery, her red hair fabulously coiffed, every inch of her dressed to rule. Suddenly the layers are stripped away and Elizabeth I is no longer a monarch but a feeble flesh-and-blood woman. The year is 1603, the year of her death. Will Tuckett and Alasdair Middleton’s dance-theatre collaboration then takes us back to the beginning of her reign, in 1558, in a show that explores Elizabeth’s relationships with the men in her life.

The Virgin Queen didn’t have much luck with the opposite sex, but that wasn’t from a lack of trying. Her list of “favourites” included Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester), Sir Walter Raleigh and Robert Devereux (Earl of Essex), but she was betrayed by them all. Even the Duc d’Anjou, the French toy boy she was supposed to marry, abandoned her by dying prematurely.

Middleton draws on poems, songs and letters of the time (some of them written by Elizabeth) to flesh out the story. Tuckett’s articulate pointe shoe choreography is classically vibrant with a tinge of period flavours, a sheen of regal authority and bursts of acute emotional pain. Martin Yates’s score for solo cello (played wonderfully by Raphael Wallfisch) draws on the music of Elizabethan composers such as John Dowland and Thomas Tallis. A trio of actresses, led by the marvellous Samantha Bond, deliver the words; the baritone Julien Van Mellaerts brings the songs to life with warmth and wit.

Zenaida Yanowsky, the former Royal Ballet principal (this revival is presented by the Royal Ballet), inhabits the many faces of the Tudor queen, from the coquettish but headstrong young woman who loved to sing and dance to the embittered old woman ravaged by time. Yanowsky is radiant throughout the 90 minutes; passionate, tempestuous, melancholic and majestic. A statuesque presence on stage, she looks gorgeous in a succession of beautiful frocks designed by Fay Fullerton.

Yanowsky is well matched by her brother Yury, who brings humour and pathos to the proceedings as the feisty peacock Leicester, the foolish Duc d’Anjou, the rogueish and randy Raleigh and the treacherous Essex.

Debra Craine, The Times, 18 May 2018