The Rossetti family, according to William Michael, in Some Reminiscences (1906), ‘were not a musical family; they had no gift in that direction … no craving to be constantly hearing…
Year: 2021
A First-Rate Serious Opera by Rossini with Pre-Echoes of The Barber of Seville
Another good-to-superb recording of a little-known Rossini opera, thanks to the Rossini in Wildbad festival. The recording blends three concert performances from July 2017 and features Silvia Dalla Benetta as…
English Touring Opera announce the appointment of Gerry Cornelius as Music Director
English Touring Opera is delighted to announce the appointment of Gerry Cornelius as the company’s new Music Director. Born of Irish & Sri Lankan parentage and raised in south-east London,…
An absorbing, imaginative ‘enactment’ of the St John Passion from Oxford Bach Soloists
Last April, writing in the Observer, Fiona Maddocks lamented her first Easter without the mysteries and joys of Bach. ‘This year all performances have been cancelled. Our lives have already…
Atmospheric performances from the choir of Trinity College Cambridge enhance the music of Cecilia McDowall
Coinciding with Cecilia McDowall’s 70th year, this recent Hyperion disc crowns an already impressive series of recordings from Dutton Epoch that, with her keen sensitivity to text and grateful melodic…
Opera Holland Park releases The House of Life with David Butt Philip and James Baillieu
Ahead of the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s birth in 2022, Opera Holland Park is releasing a performance of The House of Life. Leading British tenor David Butt Philip and the…
Tête à Tête, The Opera Festival: How to successfully put on live performances during a pandemic
Ahead of its 2021 return, Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival has released a video and other assets with key tips on how to successfully put on live performances in the new age of pandemic. The short…
A Third Catarina Cornaro Opera: Not Halévy or Donizetti but Franz Lachner, and It’s Good!
Opera lovers may think they have never heard any music by Franz (or Franz Paul) Lachner. But, if they’ve enjoyed Cherubini’s Medea, they almost surely have heard – and been…
Bach’s B Minor Mass: VOCES8 and the AAM on Easter Sunday
In 1818, the Swiss musician, writer and publisher Hans Georg Nägeli (1773–1836) issued a public advertisement announcing an ambitious publishing project, which would make a new Mass, that he had…
The Children’s Hour: an eclectic and enlightening new disc from baritone Gareth Brynmor John
Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day’s occupations, That is known as the Children’s Hour. The nineteenth-century poet Henry…