by Ben Hogwood, incorporating text from the press release
Gaspar Claus has announced a new album, CELLS, featuring collaborations with Matt Elliott (The Third Eye Foundations) and producer Basile3. It will be released by InFiné on 25 September, but has been prefaced by two singles. The second of these, Désir des astres, is available now:
On the track, Gaspar said, “This theme comes from music written for a documentary. It ultimately wasn’t used: the cello often carries that melancholic sweetness so unique to it, and it weighed the film down a bit. So I dug it up, reworked it, and pushed it towards an almost epic boldness. It’s an ideal way to kick off the journey this album offers.”
The title of the piece also plays with the etymology of the word “désir”, which shares the same root as the word “sidéral”, placing the track in a resonance that is both intimate and cosmic.
It is a passionate piece, played with searching expression by the cellist – whose accents bring a humid, almost Mediterranean flavour to the track. I was reminded, in a good way, of the music of Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo.
Désir des astres follows the single release of the album’s opening track, World of Idols, in edit form:
CELLS will be released on Biovinyl LP and Digipack CD (all-paper packaging), with all details on the Bandcamp link below:
Violetta Valéry – Madison Leonard (soprano); Alfredo Germont – Oleksiy Palchykov (tenor); Giorgio Germont – Roland Wood (baritone); Gastone de Letorières – Sam Harris (tenor); Baron Douphol – Chuma Sijeqa (baritone); Doctor Grenvil – Henry Waddington (bass baritone); Annina – Mathilda Bryngelsson (mezzo-soprano); Flora Bervoix – Alexandria Moon (mezzo-soprano); Marchese d’Obigny – Sam Young (baritone); Giuseppe – Matthew Sotillo-Cooke (tenor); Messenger – Peter Lidbetter (bass); Flora’s Servant – Sisa Mjekula (baritone)
Garsington Opera Chorus, Philharmonia Orchestra / Douglas Boyd
Director Louisa Muller; Designer Christopher Oram; Lighting Designer Marcus Doshi; Movement Director Matthew Steffens
Reviewed by Tom Hardwick
Garsington Opera started its 2026 season with a punchy, classy La Traviata, its first production of a reliable standby of the repertoire. Giuseppe Verdi’s adaptation of Alexandre Dumas Fils’s 1852 play La Dame aux camélias narrates the relationship between tubercular courtesan Violetta Valéry and Alfredo Germont, doomed by his father’s insistence that she break off the affair so his daughter can make a respectable marriage. Will Violetta and Alfredo be allowed to reconcile before she breathes her last?
Before the opera’s 1853 première at La Fenice, objections from the Venetian censor’s office obliged Verdi to set Dumas’s contemporary story around 1700. In Louisa Muller’s production, which premiered at Santa Fe in 2024, the setting was updated to Paris in the late 1930s. Germont père’s unyielding morality is still believable rather than anachronistic, while Muller and designer Christopher Oram could indulge in an inter-war baroque silver leaf revolving set, chrome-plated accoutrements, and stylish costumes and wigs. In Act 2’s vaguely de Lempicka / Cocteau-inspired fancy dress ball, the well-disciplined Garsington chorus made brisk work of Verdi’s party goers posing as Gipsy fortune-tellers and matadors (spirited dancers Nikki Cheung and Jonathan Milton), before they synchronised to pass comment on Alfredo’s denunciation of Violetta. Smaller roles were well cast in a strong ensemble, particularly Mathilda Bryngelsson as Annina and Alexandria Moon as Flora.
Violetta and Alfredo’s love happens largely offstage. Their relationship is defined by anticipation and by its dissolution. In act one Violetta dreams of love with Alfredo before dismissing it as a fantasy and resolving to live for pleasure. Act two sees Germont père, a remorseless humbug carefully sung by Roland Wood, dapper and imposing in military uniform (was this really necessary?), browbeat Violetta into submission. Oleksiy Palchykov and Madison Leonard, as Alfredo and Violetta, had sung the (happier fated) lovers in Garsington’s L’elisir d’amore last year, and made an attractive couple with plausible chemistry. Palchykov was an eager and enthusiastic Alfredo with an easy-going, fluid line and great diction. However American soprano Leonard, who was a stand-out Sophie in Garsington’s 2021 Rosenkavalier, gave the performance of the night. Her Violetta was assertive, strong, and angry rather than the usual wet tart with a heart: a powerful view of the role. As twilight deepened outside the see-through wings of the theatre at Wormsley, Violetta did not go gentle into that good night.
Douglas Boyd conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra through the score at almost breakneck pace without sacrificing detail. There’s always something rather jarring about the country house opera principle of confronting extremely well-dined opera goers with tragedy, but the company left the audience enraptured. Do what you can to get a ticket.
La Traviata runs until 24 July 2026 – and you can find more information on the production and explore ticket options at the Garsington Opera website
Just over two weeks ago the sad news of the death of popular British soprano Dame Felicity Lott was announced. ‘Flott’, as she was affectionately known, was one of the finest singers to grace UK opera houses and concert stages from the second half of the 20th century onwards.
This obituary for the Guardian reveals her career and accomplishments in detail, but Arcana had great enjoyment in putting together this Tidal playlist below as an indication of just how strong her career on record came to be.
Francesco Celata (clarinet); Roger Benedict (viola); Daniel Herscovitch (piano)
Margaret Sutherland Trio in C major (1935) Peter Dart Peripheral Visions (2021-22) Roger Smalley Clarinet Trio (1992-99, rev. 2001) Andrew Schultz Stick Dance no.2 Op.22b (1989) Richard Vella Tango (1990) Brett Dean Night Window (1993)
Heritage Records HTGCD119 [71’25”]English texts included Producer David Kim-Boyle Engineer David Kinney
Recorded 27 & 29 November 2023, 14 & 15 April 2025 at Verbrugghen Hall, Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Heritage releases an enterprising anthology of pieces for clarinet trio from three generations of Australian composers that, in the process, demonstrates a stylistically varied while always imaginative approach at the forefront of these consistently assured and committed recordings.
What’s the music like?
Thanks to recent revivals (not least her tone poem Haunted Hills at last year’s Prom season), the importance of Margaret Sutherland in the context of Australian music is well established. Unheard for eight decades, her Clarinet Trio typifies the unforced Classicism of her maturity – whether in that modal tinge of its restrained opening Allegro, winsome poise of its central Adagio or the amiable impetus of its closing Allegro giocoso. It certainly provides a telling contrast with Stick Dance by Andrew Schultz which, as reworked from his earlier piece for larger ensemble, leaves a distinctive impression through often disjunctive contrasts and an ominously visual quality doubtless emanating from its inspiration in Indonesian puppetry.
At the forefront of new music in the UK and subsequently Australia, Roger Smalley latterly found a productive rapprochement with the musical past as demonstrated by his Piano Trio. Its concise sonata-form design is overlaid with that of variations in what becomes a process of continual development away from then back to that melodic fragment from the finale of Brahms’ Clarinet/Viola Sonata in E flat. From the intrinsically musical to the overtly visual – Peripheral Visions finds Peter Dart referencing poems by W. G. Sebald or drawings by Jan Peter Tripp as it unfolds from stealthy dialogue in ‘Reflections and Shadows’, via contrasts of darkness and light in ‘Above the Somme’, to emotive effects of colour in ‘After Cézanne’. The no less visual (and theatrically derived) immediacy of Richard Vella’s Tango makes for an ideal upbeat to Night Window, Brett Dean’s engagingly oblique take on the piano trio as genre or medium. Here an ‘Introduction’ of cadenzas for bass clarinet and viola leads into a ‘Fast, vigorous’ movement, with piano making its presence felt in music incisive and agile. There follows ‘Variations’, on a chorale-like theme whose otherness is as pervasive on the brief first four of these as on a more extended fifth variation that crystallizes the expressive essence overall. It only remains for ‘Return’ to bring about closure, its capricious progress drawing salient motivic facets from across the work into purposeful and inevitable accord.
Does it all work?
Very much so. What comes across most tellingly throughout this recital is a lack of inhibition, shared by these composers, when it comes to writing for a medium already much favoured by those in France and Germany during the previous century. The highly distinct nature of these three instruments is inevitably exploited; so too their timbral or textural similarities for what can equally become an ensemble unified as to its overall sound and conception. In touching on both premises, these three musicians convey the potential of all six pieces in full measure.
Is it recommended?
It is. Sound could hardly be improved on for clarity or definition, without sacrificing warmth, while the booklet note features succinctly informative commentaries by five of the composers as part of an overview that in itself segues unobtrusively between description and biography.
Acoustic Alchemy [Greg Carmichael (nylon guitar), Miles Gilderdale (acoustic and electric guitars), Jay Rowe (keyboards), Gary Grainger (electric bass), Greg Grainger (drums)] with Julian Crampton / Dave Pomeroy (electric bass), Geoff Dunn / Bert Smaak (drums), Berthold Matschat (harmonica), Mario Argandoña (percussion)
Onside Records CDONSIDE04 [16’02”] Producers Miles Gilderdale, Greg Carmichael Engineer/Mixer Klaus Genuit Recorded at Hansahaus Studios, Bonn, Germany
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Acoustic Alchemy is now into its fifth decade and, still gigging regularly with some 16 studio albums to its credit, has opted for the EP format – familiar to an earlier generation – to release its latest music. Not there is anything at all predictable or routine about what is on offer here.
What’s the music like?
It may be just four tracks, but it certainly plays to the band’s strengths. Back to Back launches the EP in fine style with its perky tune on acoustic guitar; listen out for those brass harmonies on keyboards with a lively break from electric guitar on the outro. More down-tempo without being down-beat, Other People sounds a reflective or even ambivalent note – listen out for the softly dissonant mid-point harmonies – and Alisio (evidently a meteorological term for ‘trade winds’) brings the return of AA reggae-inspired music with its lilting back-beat then nagging rhythmic hooks. By the same token, 8,000 Miles is in a lineage of AA ‘road’ numbers with its fluid drumming and evocation of widescreen vistas through contributions from harmonica or piano, before this fades out (surprisingly?) swiftly as though in anticipation of tracks to come.
Does it all work?
It surely does. With Greg Carmichael and Miles Gilderdale interacting via a familiarity borne of respect, judicious keyboards from relative newcomer Jay Rowe, and the Grainger brothers being a rhythm-section with few equals, all the expected ingredients sound enticingly in place.
Is it recommended?
It certainly is. At a time when all previous notions of what constitutes an album have been left behind, it will be interesting to see what this band has in store as follow-up. Whether a further four-track or maybe even two more EPs, the omens for new AA music could hardly be better.
Arcana.fm 