One of the 20th century's most influential and leading conductors has died aged 84 in London. Sir Charles Mackerras lost his long running battle against cancer 
on the 14th of July 2010, but leaves behind him a great legacy, not least of which is his vital contribution in promoting the works of the Czech composer, Leos Janacek. It was in 1951 that he gave the British premiere of Janacek's Kat'a Kabanova at Sadlers Wells, which sparked the beginnings of the international interest in the operas of the Czech composer, including the legendary Janacek opera cycle of recordings, which Sir Charles recorded for Decca. In a career which spanned more than 60 years, Sir Charles became synonymous not only with the operas of Janacek, but also with those of Handel, Britten and Mozart, whose Idomeneo he was due to conduct at the Edinburgh Festival in August.
Having the privilege of once interviewing Sir Charles, it became clear that he was not only an extraordinary scholar, but he was someone who lived for music, hence his busy schedule which saw him recently conduct in London: Britten's Turn of the Screw at the ENO and Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen at The Royal Opera. He will be sadly missed by his family, friends and his many colleagues, with whom he had collaborated over a long and distinguished career.
Antony Lias
Opera Britannia
To read our interview with Sir Charles, please click here.
invited to join composer Anna Meredith, sound designer Sam Godin and the classically trained Indian singer Falu, in an evening where they can record Satyagraha-inspired loops that will form part of the “Remix”. 
even as warmly as they did to Thomas Adès’ The Tempest. Both these works were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and each of these broadcasts has been cleaned up and recently issued on double CD (Adès on EMI, 2009; MacMillan on Chandos, 2010). Both operas also have composers who enjoy successful careers as conductors, but while Adès conducted The Royal Opera House forces at Covent Garden, it was unfortunate that on the night when The Sacrifice was broadcast from the Wales Millennium Theatre with Welsh National Opera, MacMillan was unwell and was therefore forced to hand over the reins to Anthony Negus.
of recession by the magnificent margin of point squit of a zillionth, it was nice actually to encounter something quite so uncomplicatedly positive as her recital. Opera singers, in the up-close and personal context of a recital room, fall into extremely contrasting categories, ranging from the all-singing, all-dancing Ethel Merman-esque firecrackers (Cecilia Bartoli) to the half-barmy and catatonic (um, better exercise some discretion here, I suppose) by way of sassy, sweet ‘n simple, straightforward or sepulchral, the raunchy or the reverential, the bullish or the businesslike. 
Covent Garden, the Metropolitan and, as preserved on this DVD, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, each of the original directors was no longer around to supervise his show's latest outing. This matters less, of course, in stagings that cleave close to the scenic and theatrical givens of the work as conceived by Hofmannsthal and Strauss in microscopic detail, than in ones like that under consideration here that avail themselves of varying degrees of liberty and licence.
