Just listening to Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror"..... this has to be one of the great pop records. Staggering Quincy Jones arangements/production (aren't they all?) and the most uplifting key change in all pop music: "If you wanna make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make that.... C-H-A-N-G-E...!" And there it is - a sunburst of feel-good close harmony voices to blow your socks right off. And irony of ironies, to rekindle that blazing energy the poor man just needed to sleep..

It's been pretty scary returning from the Big Apple eager to share one's excitement over the glorious revival of the 'American Tribal Love-Rock Musical' "HAIR" and finding yourself confronted with a series of puzzled faces - "What's 'Hair'?" I guess some of my friends are younger than is comfortable. But it does seen extraordinary that such an iconic and influential show should not be a part of everyone's experience. Like Beatles songs you would expect Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni and James Rudd's succession of timeless rock anthems to somehow have remained "in the air"? They seem SO familiar to those of us that were weaned on them forever to love them. Is it too much to ask that at least some of Diane Paulus' thrilling company make it across the Atlantic for old times sake?

Gavin Creel was in London not so long ago giving his Bert in "Mary Poppins" and here he is, flowing locks duly bandana-clad as Claude - the fresh-faced Mr. Nice Guy who gets all the great songs but is unable to resist the call of duty when the American army fingers him for the slaughter in Vietnam. The real irony in "Hair" seemingly having passed today's youth by is that if ever a show resonated with what is happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan this is it. Of all the protests we have seen and applauded over the last few years none is more poignant than than the spectacle of Paulus' Tribe invoking hope with "Let the Sun Shine In" as the snows of winter's deepest discontent fall. As they leave the darkened theatre, it falls to us to contemplate Claude's uniformed and lifeless body picked out in a single shaft of light.

There are two dead bodies left on stage at the first act curtain of "West Side Story" - another golden oldie enjoying a successful revival on the Great White Way. But what should have been a second big bang in Broadway terms turns out to be a bit of a whimper. At least everyone was on when I hit the show - of late there have been a slew of covers (one colleague of mine experienced NINE understudies at one performance a few weeks back). But what was wrong here that one of the greatest musicals ever written made so little impact this time around? Well, put simply it was just too SAFE. Even the band with its massed Latin percussion spilling into the side boxes never really broke sweat. The dancing was fine but never gravity defying and maybe the Palace Theatre stage was insufficiently "open" for the bodies really to fly. The recent European tour was far more impressive in this respect.

Of course, the big talking point of book writer Arthur Laurents' direction was his decision to interpolate more Spanish into the mix. I didn't have a problem with that - it worked just fine - but apart from the sizzling Anita of Karen Olivo the singing and acting was decidedly low-key. Can they really have not found a better and more imposing voiced Tony than Matt Cavenaugh? I know this stuff requires serious singing but his tremulous vibrato was so anti-heroic as to be a wee bit embarrassing. The lady on my left asked if I could hear the dialogue. I told her that I thought Laurents and his cast were aiming for a new-found naturalism. "But this is the theatre", she replied. Sometimes audiences really are the best critics.

It's good to report, though (and London take note), that alongside the run of heavyweight revivals (the magnificent "Ragtime" is currently in previews and Trevor Nunn's recent Menier Chocolate Factory production of "A Little Night Music" is in rehearsal - I met with Angela Lansbury to talk Sondheim literally the day before) new work can still emerge triumphantly from the workshops and Off-Broadway houses around the city. "Next To Normal" - music Tom Kitt, book and lyrics Brian Yorkey - won this year's Tony Award for "Best Musical" with Alice Ripley taking the Tony for "Best Actress in a Musical" - both well deserved. This is musical theatre dealing with "difficult" subject matter and you may well ask if a seriously bi-polar mother refusing to accept the passing of a beloved son is something to sing and dance about. But Alice Ripley, who gives her all and then some as Diana, would probably reply that when you've starred in a musical about Siamese twins (as she did with "Side Show") it's pretty much open season when it comes to what qualifies for musicalisation. "Next To Normal" is sharp, edgy, and heartfelt with a score whose slightly schizoid ensembles really drive and energise the narrative. My problem with the show was that its second act did not build sufficiently on its first (how familiar is that) and that the inevitable resolution of hope (this being a musical, perhaps it was too inevitable) was simply in the end too pat. But hey, the show has balls and heart and maybe the authors set the bar too high in act one. But it's on Broadway and people are going to see it. That's good for new musical theatre writing and right now it puts the West End to shame. All we have to get excited about is "Legally Blond" and Phantom 2 "Love Never Dies". Yawn.

Josef Woodard's review of the World Premiere of Stephen Schwartz' first foray into "Opera" - "Seance on a Wet Afternoon" - in the Los Angeles raises once more the spectre of divisive attitudes to music theatre - the them and us, Opera and the rest attitude. I haven't yet seen Schwartz' take on the 1964 Bryan Forbes film but when Woodard writes....

"This piece, in which arias behaved more like Broadway songs and orchestration as glossy as it is substantial, clearly belongs to the current blurring of lines between the traditionally considered domain of grand opera and the domain of musical theater, a distressing trend."

....I immediately start to bristle. Why "a distressing trend"? It seems to me that a healthy cross-fertilisation of talent from all walks of musical theatre is the only way forward. Leonard Bernstein once said that he hoped that out of the American musical would evolve a more sophisticated progeny. Why should Opera remain the exclusive domain of the contemporary music network? Why shouldn't major and emerging figures from the world of the musical not spread their wings into a more challenging form? As to "arias behaving more like Broadway songs", why the disparaging inference? Isn't that what arias are - songs? Isn't that what Italian audiences have been cheering on for generations? That's part of the problem with contemporary opera - no-one writes songs anymore.

Unlike some of their more celebrated victims, Jonathan Miller's mafiosa take on Verdi's "Rigoletto" just won't lie down. So what? If it ain't broke....

The latest revival (let's stop saying it's the last) is sharper than most, driven darkly by the dynamic conducting of Stephen Lord and dominated by a tough, distracted performance of the title role from Anthony Michaels-Moore. No revival to date has made clearer the unhealthily possessive relationship between the serpent-tongued hunchback and his imprisoned daughter. Even in her most desperate moments she is denied a father's reassuring embrace. When it finally comes, it reflects his needs not hers. Miller has directed this revival himself. It shows.

But even if you've seen it before, maybe umpteen times, get yourself down to the Coliseum to catch an auspicious debut from young Michael Fabiano. You may have caught him in a SKY TV documentary following rising young stars through the Met National Auditions process. Fabiano was a winner there and he is here, too. It helps that he's a looker with natural ease on stage but what really grabs you is the fearless open sound he produces. That kind of fearlessness can lead to recklessness, of course, but with Fabiano you really feel that he's eking out the enticements as well as thrills. It's an immensely promising and exciting talent and when he drops that dime in the Juke Box and selects THAT hit aria the self-satisfying swagger is just what Verdi - and Miller - ordered.

So Omid Djalili has stepped into Mr. Bean's - or should I say Mr. Atkinson's - shoes at Drury Lane and putting aside the supreme irony of a chap born of Iranian parents playing the most infamous Jew in English literature - a situation which will doubtless provide years of material for his stand-up routines - he is rather good. His physical robustness gives him pounds of advantage over the wiry Atkinson (who is forever saddled now with Bean's mannersisms) but Djalili wears the weight nimbly and has created an armoury of nervous ticks and double-takes born of years of frantically looking over his shoulder. And I'm sure Lionel Bart would have been charitable about the odd topical reference to MP's expenses and banks you can't trust.

I was an impressionable little boy when I first saw "Oliver!" and the intimacy and earthy music hall drive of the original production has stayed with me ever since. I even sang "Where is Love?" on that famous timbered Sean Kenny set and though I never fulfilled my dream of getting beyond the audition and into the title role, it was a deeply formative experience.

The Cameron Mackintosh experience is epic by comparison but you have to hand it to the man - no one puts a show on a stage quite like him and every detail, both visual and auditory, wreaks of high-end, West End, class. There is nothing better looking on the London stage right now. And as we hurtled through the familiar cityscapes to one of the great knees-up show songs of all time - "Consider Yourself" - and the dome of Saint Paul's rose up from the deepest recesses of the huge Theatre Royal stage, I found myself getting more than a little choked at having journeyed with this great show from its humble beginnings. Mr. Mackintosh will know how I feel.

The word on the street is that "Too Close to the Sun" - a new musical by the composer who tormented us with "The Man in the Iron Mask" - has no business in the West End. How did it get there? Someone's hard-earned money unknowingly squandered. And all the while a wealth of writing talent goes unnoticed and unheard. Don't get me started.

Anyway, here are my "six of the worst" musicals for our times:

"Bernadette" ("Wholly unacceptable")

"Fields of Ambrosia" (Tales of a travelling executioner - yes, really. Good title song; pity about the others)

"Which Witch" ("nul points" for this egregious Norwegian import - even the Norwegian royal family couldn't save it)

"Dracula" (Frank "Jekyll and Hyde" Wildhorn stinker)

"Gone With The Wind" (Not the 1972 Drury Lane version - which was bad enough - but Trevor Nunn's wrong-headed exhumation with superfluous songs by Margaret Martin)

"The Man in the Iron Mask" (Who says lightning doesn't strike twice? Composer/Lyricist Professor John Robinson is again named and shamed with the current "Close to the Sun")


There are plenty more where these came from.... But take yourself down to Dress Circle and get hold of a copy of Nigel Richards' new CD "A Shining Truth" - 14 previously unrecorded show songs by theatre composers who matter. Why is it that it's invariably the dross that gets produced??

There's been more than a buzz about Amanda Echalaz for some time now. Her Tosca at Holland Park wowed even my most hardened colleagues and English National Opera's decision to strike while the iron is hot and book her to sing both Liu ("Turandot") and Tosca in the same season (2009/10) is tantamount to acknowledging that she'll soon be unassailable. But there's nothing like stepping into Angela Gheorghiu's frocks and donning that imperious tiara for announcing your arrival in the big time. At the Royal Opera House last night Echalaz may have shown tentative signs of nerves - and in that regard the climactic phrases of "Vissi d'arte" will always find you wanting - but this Tosca on the very stage Callas once trod was blessed with a temperament and a completeness that, notwithstanding the nerves, was world class.

It's a born Tosca voice - dusky of colour, keen of attack, with wonderful use of "cover" and palpitating portamento but fabulously open at the top. She nailed all those defiant top notes as surely as she nailed Bryn Terfel's grubbily insinuating Scarpia. And what tremendous form he was on. Their scenes together were living proof that it takes two to tango in a dramatic confrontation and by the time she reached that moment in act three where she relives plunging the knife into the bigot's black heart her fearless attack from high above to way below the stave was a phrase that will have caught everyone's breath to the back row of the amphitheatre.

She's giving her Amelia in Verdi's "Un ballo in Maschera" next Tuesday. I can't wait. But right now I hope Antonio Pappano has his eyes and ears on her - a talent this exceptional in such a dangerous "fach" needs careful nurturing.

"Avenue Q" - a little show with humongous appeal - celebrated its transfer to the Gielgud Theatre last night with a pool party. None of its furry friends took to the water (Trekkie Monster has a well known aversion to it - it dampens his ardour) but the humans they brought along looked like they might have been tempted had their felted and furry alter egos given them a free hand, so to speak.

In the final number of this smart and sassy show "For Now", the line "George Bush is for now" now reads "George Bush WAS for now" and it's that message of change, of anything-is-possible if you make the most of today, that has caught the mood of the NOW generation and given Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx' canny show its edge and its longevity (it's now entering its 4th year in the West End).

Essentially there's nothing like a good idea and this one - "Sesame St." with attitude and political incorrectness - was always a winner. But it would have come to nothing without the time and encouragement lavished on it by the BMI in New York where it was worshopped and developed. One applauds organisations like the Mercury Music Foundation which actively encourages new writing in the UK but they need the money and clout to run with outstanding talent regardless of commercial appeal. Sir Cameron Mackintosh, that's where you come in. I know you think that "talent will out" but sometimes "outing" requires the intervention of a benefactor - or at least a space, an experimental theatre devoted to the cause. And it is a cause worth fighting for.

How ironic that Jeff Whitty, the book writer of "Avenue Q", was fired as an intern from both the Mackintosh and "Sesame St." offices... Ho ho ho.

There is, of course, one moment where staging Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The King and I" 'in the round' at the Royal Albert Hall well and truly comes into its own - and that's the moment where Anna and the King of Siam finally (and really quite erotically) lock arms and bodies and enjoy a climactic lap of honour of "Shall We Dance?" twice sweeping the circumference of the Albert Hall arena as if on some massive movie soundstage of the palace ballroom. We will have all thought of the movie at this point, not least on account of the 40-piece band (the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra sounding like 140 under Gareth Valentine's assured direction) and the sheer scale of the imagery. Add into the mix the supreme irony of Siam being effectively dropped into the centre of the grandest Victorian folly ever conceived and you've a tidy metaphor for cultural clash right there before even a note of music or dialogue has been sounded.

The problem with the hall, however good your sound designer, is the horrendous lack of intimacy with dialogue going cosmic and ricochetting about the auditorium as if determined to be heard as well as seen from outer space. To their eternal credit, Maria Friedman (Anna) and Daniel Dae Kim (the King) still managed to make every word tell with charm, humour, and poignancy. Friedman had the style to a T curbing her chest voice and minding her manners whilst wholeheartedly conveying the passionate woman secretly inhabiting the gigantic hooped skirts. The wondrous verse of "Hello Young Lovers" evoked a palpable sense of misty-eyed nostalgia.

Well, it helps that it is a conspicuously great song and it helps too that Oscar Hammerstein's book sets it up so deftly. But really, seeing this piece again serves to remind one how skilfully it is crafted. Who but a Hammerstein could set up the act one curtain line in a prayer? The moment where the King finally fulfills his promise to give Anna what she so desires - a house - is a guarenteed choking-up moment because he honours his promise in return for hers. Anna may take time to understand the King but she quickly recognises his pride. And that process of "getting to know" him, and he her, is the dramatic core of what drives the show. Let no one even intimate that Hammerstein was not a great lyricist and book writer. And lest you dare, how about the reprise of "Hello Young Lovers" which suddenly switches its focus from Anna's romantic past to Tuptin and Lun Tha's present. Likewise the ingenuity of "The Small House of Uncle Thomas" ballet in act two which in addition to 'that' polka is another good reason for the Albert Hall treatment and worked better in this context than it ever does on a proscenium stage.

http://www.edwardseckerson.biz

It's been pretty much open season on nuns since "The Sound of Music" and really there can be no greater irony than Alan Menken and lyricist whiz-kid Glenn Slater's "Sister Act" following that venerable show into the Palladium. Needless to say London's old variety theatre is now rocking to a very different mode of "Do Re Me" and the only mountain Sheila Hancock has to climb is that of sharing the stage with the soulful dynamo that is Patina Miller. There ain't no mountain high enough to equate with that unenviable task (or the scary "height" of Ms. Miller's belt) - though Hancock's seasoned way with wry put-downs gives her a more than useful head-start.

"Sister Act" is actually a lot of fun - and it's that rare thing: a musical that doesn't stall in the second act. Funny how you can smell experience in a show. Menken, like Stephen Schwartz, is a master of style and pastiche and this score has a late 70s sensibility pulsing through every number. "Sweaty" Eddie (excellent Ako Mitchell) has a neat transformation number "I Could Be That Guy" which flips him from nervy desk-cop to Travolta slicker and back again and there's a cracking trio (that's a rarity nowadays) for the three hoods entitled "Lady in the Long Black Dress". Hancock and Miller both get moody ballads with the soar-factor of the title number giving Miller plenty to devour.

But it's the toe-tapping gospel numbers that whip up the expected frenzy of glitz and kitsch and definitely have your thinking "hail Mary" in the plural. The Protestants just don't do camp like the church of Rome. Indeed the biggest reaction Miller's Deloris gets from her sisters comes with her admission that she was raised.... I can't bring myself to repeat the "P" word.

So is this the dress rehearsal for Menken and Slater's "Leap of Faith"? They'll be taking holy orders next.


http://www.edwardseckerson.biz

For those less sad than I, the title is a pun on the Sondheim song "Finishing the Hat" from "Sunday in the Park with George - a song, a show, about the art of making art.

Tell me about it. For the second year running I've spent a whole day listening to 44 students sing 44 Sondheim songs in the hope of reach the final of The Sondheim Society Student Performer of the Year Competition which takes place at the Playhouse Theatre at Embankment on Sunday 31st May at 3.30. As Chairman of the Jury it's down to me to ensure that we get the best possible mix and the best possible show on the day. As ever the varying but sometimes very high standard of the heats reflected the level of care - or not - that some schools and some tutors bestow upon their students. Only one of those tutors took the trouble to be there for his two students on the day. Is it a coincidence that they both got through? I don't think so.

Expect a high standard from the twelve that have been chosen. Some will rise to the occasion, some will not - but all with have learned something. I offered a smattering of feedback to entrants this time around: "Did that feel comfortable? What about a little more mix in the belt? Don't afraid to be dirtier! Don't overwork the lyric. Why so angry?"

One lad gave us "Being Alive", hitting every line of lyric like his life, and ours, depended upon it. It was relentless but it had passion. He'd already left the building when we decided to get him back. I gave him some notes, he took them, he sang the song again. He's in the final.

Join us on the 31st - Playhouse Theatre. 3.30.

Something extraordinary is happening in Leicester. The newly opened Curve Theatre - so high-tec, high-spec that it appears somehow to have "materialised" rather than been built in what was the scrag-end of Leicester's town centre - is hosting the European Premiere of Adam Guettel's Tony Award winning musical "The Light in the Piazza" and if you've any serious interest in the genre you have one more week to catch a show that I have no hesitation in placing among the finest music theatre pieces written in two decades or more.

That a piece like this has not been seen in London (and that producers are not as I write falling over each other to transfer this production) says so much about the ghastly predictability of the times we live in. Whatever happened to embracing and rewarding quality? Are we now so lazy as a nation that producers only feel they have a hope in hell of selling anything more sophisticated than "Legally Blond"; or that hasn't been cast from a TV reality show.

The irony is that Leicester audiences are falling under the spell of this exquisite show: a heartbreaking story, beautifully told through a score so suffused with rapture and yearning that you ache at its consonance. When words are no longer adequate the characters in this show go into orbit with their soaring vocalise. Guettel, whose grandfather was Richard Rodgers, inherited the family's melodic genes alright, but his voice (like all the great ones) is unique. In Leicester there is a 15-strong band (almost unheard of nowadays) sounding pretty much acoustic under Julian Kelly's loving direction and a cast every bit as strong as that which graced the New York production. Matt Rawle, the West End's recent Zorro (and before that Che in the "Evita" revival) sings so beyond his "normal" voice that it is as if he has been reborn.

There have been dramas - Lucy Schafer, the show's by all accounts luminous leading lady, lost her voice two days ago (she should be back Tuesday) but even her game substitute, script in hand, did not compromise the magic.

Go if you can (shamefully, this may be your last chance to see the show in the UK) and thank you, Paul Kerryson (Curve's Artistic Director) for yet again bucking the trend and bringing us the shows that no one else will touch.

Friends, colleagues, bloggers....

My official website is now LIVE. For everything you need to know but thought you did already about the man, click below to unveil....

Friends/ Colleagues

My official website is now LIVE. Everything you ever needed to know and thought you already did know about the man. Click below to unveil....


http://www.edwardseckerson.biz/


Very Best Wishes,

Edward


Read my latest blog posting:
http://edseckerson.independentminds.livejournal.com/

Really, who could blame Queen Priscilla for eschewing the desert and installing herself at the Palace (theatre, that is).... but just be careful where you sit. "Premium" seating (essentially the best seats in the house but with a substantial mark-up to keep them more "exclusive") is a nasty money-making trick that originated on Broadway and has now arrived here. Problem is that you shouldn't have to break the bank to be afforded a clear view of the entire stage and I can tell you that even rear stalls and dress circle will exclude you from a goodly chunk of the spectacle - and this being perhaps the best and most elaborate drag show you'll ever see, you wouldn't want to miss the "flying" Three Divas or those bus-top walk-downs, would you? Bottom line: there are a lot of "restricted view" seats for this sumptuous stage version of Stephan Elliott's Australian movie classic.

Still, I was all right Jack and from the fourth row of the stalls caught every sequin and shower of confetti and was well within ping-pong ball range. "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" has the best compilation soundtrack in the history of the world (excluding "Mamma Mia", it should be noted, for obvious reasons) and Stephen "Spud" Murphy and Charlie Hull's trumpet-topped arrangements really rock. Ok, so there's more bathos than pathos in the stage version, but from "premium" seating it's quite an eyeful, and you'll want to be close enough to catch every nuance of Tony Sheldon's gloriously proud and imperious Bernadette. Oh, and Jason (Donovan) isn't bad, either. Love the moment when his "Mitzi" 'fesses up to fancying Scott in "Neighbours"... many a true word.....

There's almost too much music going on in this great city of ours. As a professional critic, difficult choices have to be made; it just isn't possible to cover everything. But sometimes the biggest surprises come when one is off-duty - like last night at the Royal Festival Hall when the London Philharmonic under its principal guest conductor - Yannick Nezet-Seguin - gave us a truly uplifting account of Bruckner's 7th Symphony. It's been many years since I heard a conductor (a young one at that) so completely in sync and sympathy with the pulse of this music. Too often in Bruckner performances only half the picture emerges. Bruckner, the devout spiritualist, the visionary, is wholeheartedly embraced but Bruckner, the hale and hearty outdoor man, is downplayed. In other words Bruckner performances are invariably too reverent. One mood, one tempo. Not so this Nezet-Seguin performance. The young French-Canadian truly created a gripping odyssey, as surprising as it was inevitable. It was beautiful, passionate, raw, incandescent. The silence of the audience spoke volumes for the atmosphere he created. Even the Wagner tubas were in tune. I would have given it *****.

Check out my interview with Yannick Nezet-Seguin:

http://www.lpo.co.uk/about/nezet_seguin.html

Patti LuPone better up her game - or else she and Christian Bale should consider a two-hander...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqO4aBJ37Lg&eurl=http://www.gaywired.com/Article.cfm?ID=21465

There really is only one Mandy Patinkin and love him or loathe him, you really can't ignore him. Last night's press night for his quickie run of 9 performances at the Duke of York's saw him go into memory meltdown during that notoriously tricky Stephen Sondheim number 'Franklin Shepard Inc.' from "Merrily We Roll Along". "Those of you who know me", he said, "will understand that I will stay here all night until I get this right." Oy. His bemused pianist - the remarkable Ben Toth, standing in at the eleventh hour for Patinkin's usual collaborator Paul Ford - could only smile benignly since his music didn't carry the lyric (as if he didn't have problems enough). "Call Sondheim", someone from the audience helpfully suggested. "Sing something from 'Company' instead", added another. But while we shifted uneasily in our seats (it's a fine line between sympathetic amusement and all-out embarrassment and we'd crossed it) Patinkin stopped and started, took time-out, head-in-hands, at the piano, and kept at it until I, for one, really began to wonder if it was all an elaborate set-up. Patinkin, the method actor, has after all turned performance informality into an art and since he's an obsessive perfectionist I wouldn't put it past him to want to share that - to show us how tough it is being up there!

But, as I say, there are no half measures with Patinkin - it's all or nothing - what you see is what you get, you share the risks and the anxieties; and whilst there were moments when I didn't want to hear one more note delivered in that strangely disembodied falsetto (now laden with vibrato), there were others when his total engagement with a lyric gave me the proverbial shivers. He sang a lot of Sondheim, giving the lie to the idea that those songs don't stand alone but only work as an integral part of the dramas they inhabit. Patinkin reminds us that like all great songs, Sondheim's connect with many different moods and contexts. One final thought: how many performers sing "Being Alive" like it's a fantastic privilege?

If you haven't watched this, then you should. It's a testimony to hope and unity in the world, yes, but it's also a moving endorsement of raw and untapped talent the world over. Watch old grandpa and the guy from Amsterdam - nobody taught them to dig so deep into their souls...

In no particular order....

English National Opera: "Riders to the Sea" - Fiona Shaw's "quietly devastating" staging of Vaughan Williams' one act opera; a fitting tribute to to the late lamented Richard Hickox who did so much for the cause of English music.

English National Opera at the Young Vic: "Lost Highway" - stunning David Lynch homage.

Royal Opera: Strauss/von Hofmannstahl "Elektra" - an exceptional revival which simply dug deeper into the subtext of this dazzling shocker. Extraordinary work from conductor Mark Elder and a brave, intensely human, performance from Susan Bullock.

Stravinsky "The Rite of Spring"/ London Philharmonic Orchestra/ Vladimir Jurowski - one of those rare performances that totally re-evaluates a modern classic.

Daniel Barenboim/ Beethoven Sonatas on the South Bank - challenging, dangerous, sublime. Truly an event. Who says great performances don't transcend technique?

Schubert "Winterreise"/ Alice Coote/ Julius Drake at Wigmore Hall - the amazing Alice Coote crosses sexual boundaries to search for personal truths in the winter of discontent.

Honourable mention: the sexy and talented Anna Netrebko storming the Royal Opera as the sickly and impassioned Violetta in Verdi's "La Traviata". Can she build upon her prodigious gifts or will she succumb (as so many do) to international stardom and become yet another fashionable side-show? We shall see.

Rarely do the arrangers and orchestrators of stage musicals get their dues in print. Until relatively recently there wasn't even a category for them in the annual Broadway Tony Awards. So here's something for Sarah Travis, the arranger and supervisor of the latest import from the miniscule Watermill Theatre at Newbury where the only way to stage musicals at all is to have the cast double as the band. We've seen and heard several examples of her cunning reductionism - most notably the John Doyle directed Sweeney Todd - but this latest incarnation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's best score (well, I for one am certain of it), Sunset Boulevard, is arguably the most successful. If anything her ingenious instrumentation intensifies the sepia, other-worldly quality of ALW's music, lending the key themes a more fragile ephemeral quality. Even the show's most cinemascopic moment - the moment Norma Desmond returns to the studio and is hurled into the spotlight once more - creates the illusion of opulence from only a handful of instruments, the harmony at one point transfixed by a single violin sustained above the stave. That moment, incidentally, magnifies the great song in the show - the stonking "With One Look" - and achieves an emotional uplift that few other Lloyd Webber tunes manage to quite the same degree. As Norma Desmond herself says (and Kathryn Evans is a whisker away from turning herself into a durable stage diva this time around) "I am big. It's the movies that have gotten smaller". So have the shows - but nobody appears to have told Sarah Travis. Good on her.