Emotionally charged songs by Richard Strauss interleaved with youthful offerings by Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg form the basis for Lucy Crowe’s first disc with Linn under the title Longing.…
Month: October 2021
Vibrant visuals and fancy footwork: Cal McCrystal’s HMS Pinafore at English National Opera
The Modern Major-General may dismiss its whistled airs as “infernal nonsense”, but the songs of HMS Pinafore have lost none of their appeal during the near 150 years since Gilbert…
A standing ovation for Lisette Oropesa in the Royal Opera House’s revival of La traviata
Given the tubercular demise of Verdi’s tragic heroine, it’s tempting to describe the ROH’s latest reprise of Richard Eyre’s 1994 production of Verdi’s La traviata in pandemic terms – in…
Glyndebourne Tour hits the road + screenings of Chaplin’s City Lights with live orchestral accompaniment
Glyndebourne Tour hits the road in November taking performances of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (pictured), Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Handel’s choral masterpiece Messiah to The Marlowe, Canterbury (3 – 5 November), Milton Keynes Theatre (10 –…
dream.risk.sing: elevating women’s voices at the Oxford Lieder Festival
British-Australian soprano Samantha Crawford and American pianist Lana Bode describe dream.risk.sing as a ‘love letter to women of all ages … a programme for women and for those who love…
London Oriana Choir announces new choral scholarship programme
London Oriana Choir has announced the launch of a new Choral Scholarship Programme , offering a select number of funded places for singers aged 18-25 for its 2021-22 season, as part of its commitment to…
Imaginative, daring, enterprising: Fulham Opera’s production of Richard Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena
Richard Strauss’ Die ägyptische Helena remains something of the ugly duckling amongst the operas he wrote with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Premiered in Dresden in 1928, it has rarely been performed…
Giovanna d’Arco at Opera di Roma
The Opera di Roma opens its fall season this week with Giuseppe Verdi’s rarely-performed early work, Giovanna d’Arco. The Teatro Costanzi was sold out on Tuesday, for Italians now live…
Fidelio in San Francisco
A superb cast, a fine production, inspired conducting, classy orchestra and a classy chorus, a wired audience — it was Fidelio last night at the War Memorial Opera House. To…
Music opens the doors of memory: new opera company, Theatre of Sound, launches with a radical retelling of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle
Forbidden chambers, corpses dangling from wall-hooks, pools of clotted blood, stigmata of guilt: ‘Bluebeard’, which first appeared in literary form in Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century collection, Tales of Mother Goose, is…