Albert Ehrnrooth

Journalist, photographer and social commentator.

Culture

ELECTRIFYING STRAUSS AT FINNISH NATIONAL OPERA

  Richard Strauss’ Elektra is a brutal opera. The title role requires a dramatic soprano to maintain total control across her entire range, from low A to high C.  While navigating the rapidly descending and ascending vocal lines, she must […]

REVIEW SCHOENBERG BOX SET BERLIN PHIL

Berliner Philharmoniker recordings · Kirill Petrenko · Arnold Schoenberg  3 CD / 1 Blu-ray Disc The Berlin Philharmoniker, under the direction of Chief Conductor Kirill Petrenko, presents a box set of live recordings featuring some of Schönberg’s most ‘beloved’ works, including […]

VIENNA PHIL’S HOMMAGE TO TCHAIKOVSKY VIA MOZART

The Vienna Philharmonic are regular guests at BBC Proms, and during their visits audiences expect to hear at least one quintessentially Viennese work. On their first night we were treated to Bruckner’s magnificent (unfinished) Symphony No.9, premiered in 1903 in […]

DIDO, AENEAS AND THE LONGBOROUGH OPERA HOUSE SESSIONS

To put on a production of Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689 ) presents several challenges right from the outset. First, the musical sources are fragmentary. The earliest surviving scores date from 1775 or later and they lack enough […]

GARSINGTON’S QUEEN OF SPADES HAS ALL THE CARDS

Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades – or Pique Dame – was the last opera Stalin attended. Though he had some appreciation for classical music – as depicted in The Death of Stalin – he was never particularly fond of opera. […]

URKRAINE’S FREEDOM FIGHTER IS VILLAIN IN TCHAIKOVSKY’S MAZEPPA

Ukraine features almost on a daily basis on our digital front pages. In the Russo-Ukrainian war Western sympathy clearly lies with the underdog: Ukraine. Yet Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa (1883), inspired by Pushkin’s poem Poltava, portrays the Ukrainian leader of the […]

BIRMINGHAM’S BARBER VISITS LONDON’S FINEST ART INSTITUTE

Intertwined in a lover’s knot – or a leggy pretzel – the nubile Deianira is seen smooching a well–fit Hercules in Hercules and Deianira (1517) by Jan Gossaert. In Giovanni Bellini’s St Jerome in the Wilderness (1460) the patron saint […]

EMPEROR FOOLED BY DUTCH ILLUSIONIST

The painter and art theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627 -1678) is largely forgotten. During his lifetime he was in demand in Holland, at the Emperor’s Court in Vienna and the upper echelons of London society. He was thought of as […]

INTRANSIGENTS GO IMPRESSIONISTIC IN ‘NEW PARIS’

The group of French painters rejected by the official Salon was initially referred to as intransigents. It was the playwright and critic Louis Leroy who coined the term impressionist in his derisive review of their first independent exhibition, titled The […]

MONET PAINTS ROUEN CATHEDRAL―28 TIMES

Claude Monet ( 1840 – 1926) was a master of the variations on a theme. He was a prolific creator of colourful series of paintings containing one and the same motif. Most people have probably seen one or two works […]

FIRST FOREIGN VISIT OF EXQUISITE SWISS COLLECTION AT COURTAULD

A superb exhibition containing just a small pick of an extraordinary Impressionist and Post-Impressionist ‘bunch’ is now on show at the Courtauld Gallery, visiting a foreign country for the first time from Switzerland. This is a once in a lifetime […]

Turtle Tower, one of Vietnam's most iconic buildings

48 LIVELY, BUT POLLUTED HOURS IN HANOI

There is much to recommend Hanoi as a vibrant tourist destination. But it is also one of the world’s most polluted cities. Six million motorbikes and two million other motor vehicles have been registered in Vietnam’s capital. Imagine all the […]