Hyperion has brought together three composers with a special affinity for choral music, as already demonstrated in earlier recordings devoted solely to their music on Delphian, Naxos and Opus Arte…
Month: March 2022
Ariadne auf Naxos at the Met
A funny thing happened at the Metropolitan Opera last Thursday, during the final performance of a recent run of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In the silence after the applause…
Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera House
“What harbour shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms?” The opening moments of Deborah Warner’s new production of Britten’s Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera House make it…
Eastertide Evensong from St John’s College, Cambridge
Does the release of a second live evensong album from this celebrated choir reflect a growing interest in the music and ritual within our great cathedrals and collegiate chapels? Whatever…
Werther in Marseille
The Opéra de Marseille assembled a fine cast to perform the Massenet masterpiece in a prize winning production from Nancy. Bordeaux tenor Thomas Bettinger poured his heart out as the…
Bampton Classical Opera to perform Haydn’s Il mondo della luna
Bampton Classical Opera’s summer 2022 production will be Haydn’s Il mondo della luna. This three-act dramma giocosa from 1777 is the best-known of several operatic settings during the second half of the century of…
A brilliant Hansel and Gretel from Stephen Barlow and the Royal College of Music
The escalating cost of living crisis may soon result in many children in the UK sharing Hansel’s hunger pangs: ‘O Gret, it would be such a treat, if we had…
Pelléas et Mélisande in Montpellier
A third staging of French stage director Benjamin Lazar’s poetic and sophisticated production (Malmö in 2017 and Karlsruhe in 2019), highly refined in Montpellier by an early music tenor as…
A Twitcher’s Delight: Roderick Williams and Andrew West at Milton Court
A serious birdwatcher would take exception to being called a twitcher. Whereas the former is happy to wait patiently and passively for avian visitors to visit their locale, twitchers chase…