The Arts Year Begins
17 January

I gave a special award in my last year's end-of-year round up to Sir Charles Mackerras for being a long time source of musical delight.

I got the chance to experience his special talents once more in my first Liverpool Phil concert of the current calendar year. The programme started with a rip-roaring account of Wagner's overture to his opera The Flying Dutchman. It was good enough to almost persuade me that I might like to listen to the rest of the show to hear how Charlie Mac would handle it.

For the Wagner and for the Beethoven after the interval, I'm quite happy to rate the concert as very good indeed.

Less good by far, however, was the Brahms violin concerto. It is one of those works about which I have a complete blind spot. I just don't get it. Roland and Nigel do like the work but thought that the soloist, Sarah Chang, was at complete odds with the orchestra and conductor. Certainly, I didn't think that the performance matched up to the Classic FM marketing hype.

And then, after the interval, Charlie was on his own again leading the orchestra through an exhilarating performance of Beethoven's Symphony No 7. Berlioz said of this symphony that it was "the spirit of the dance" and, for once, I understood why. There was a rhythmic pulse to the whole piece that made it difficult to keep you foot from tapping. Even the second, slower movement sounded like a pavane rather than a funeral march.

I loved also the way that Charlie Mac allowed the woodwind to sound pungently different from each other. I grew up with the 1960s Berlin Philharmonic Herbert von Karajan recording where the sound is homogenised so that everything is blended together. Here was the complete antithesis with all of the instruments showing their individual characters. It was indeed very good.

On the way home, I started thinking about all of the Beethoven that I have heard over the past few years. After a bit of research, I came up with the following list.

• Egmont Overture and Symphony No 3 Eroica with the RLPO conducted by Vasily Petrenko
• Symphony No 5 with the Crosby Symphony Orchestra
• Symphony No 6 Pastoral with the RLPO conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras
• Symphony No 7 with the RLPO conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras
• Incidental music to the play Egmont and Symphony No 9 Choral with the RLPO conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy
• Piano Concerto No 4 played by John Lill with the RLPO conducted by Gerard Schwarz
• Last year's concerto cycle with Paul Lewis and the RLPO conducted by Vasily Petrenko
• Piano Concerto No 1
• Piano Concerto No 2
• Piano Concerto No 3
• Piano Concerto No 4
• Piano Concerto No 5 Emperor
• Piano sonatas Nos 8 Pathétique, 9 and 10 played by Radu Lupu
• Mass in C with the Southport Bach Singers

That's quite a list. I can see myself deliberately pulling back from attending Beethoven concerts when the 2009/2010 season comes round.

There's not a lot of joyful news from Welsh National Opera about their 2009/2010 season.

Assuming that they stick with the pattern of recent years so that the autumn programme goes to Liverpool and Llandudno, the spring programme goes to Llandudno and the summer programme only goes to Cardiff and Birmingham, my thoughts went...

• Autumn Season
  
• Traviata
  Good! I wanted to see this new David McVicar production after the Scottish Opera reviews earlier this year but what an uninspiring cast - it just goes to show what happens when you lose all sense of a company.
• Butterfly
  Not that tired old production again and why would I want to hear Amanda Roocroft ruining her voice in that role?
• Wozzeck
  Having seen it when it was new, wild horses would not get me back in the theatre to witness it again - baked beans!!!!
   
• Spring Season
  
• Seraglio
  I might travel to Llandudno for this new production.
• Carmen
  It's a nice production but I've seen it twice before and there's no-one in the cast who could persuade me to travel to Llandudno.
• Tosca
  Absolutely ditto.
   
• Summer Season
  
• Rigoletto
  I saw this production in Llandudno when it was new and it's OK and the idea of Simon Keenlyside singing the title rôle is intriguing but am I going to travel to Birmingham or Cardiff for it? - No!!
• Mastersingers
  Well, Bryn Terfel's debut as Hans Sachs makes this an event but the Richard Jones production is likely to be irritating (he did the Wozzeck) so why would I want to invest so much time and money organising my life to travel for something I'm not likely to enjoy.

All in all, the company are doing me a favour in these times of credit crunch by not tempting me into the theatre.

I'm looking forward therefore with even more vigour to Opera North's season announcement later in the year. I'm expecting news of Janacek's The Adventures of Mr Broucek, Massenet's Werther and Richard Strauss's Capriccio - all of which I'd be happy enough to travel to Salford to attend.