Opera lovers around the world will get their chance to see Glyndebourne’s landmark production of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers from Monday 1 August when a live film recording is released on the…
Month: July 2022
Ponchielli’s La Gioconda at Grange Park Opera
La Gioconda (1876) is a rare visitor to opera stages in the UK and this Grange Park Opera production, originally scheduled for the 2020 season, offers a welcome opportunity to…
Salome at the Aix Festival
A ponderous reading of the Strauss score, a meticulous, methodical staging of the Oscar Wilde drama. A radiant Salome, an unleashed Herod. Unsettling, sentient scenography. Unexpected magnificence. High, very high…
Outstanding Turn of the Screw from Garsington
Set within acres of verdant parkland and a lake, Garsington’s glass-sided auditorium surely makes the perfect location for Britten’s chamber opera, especially when dusk approaches on the Wormsley Estate. As…
Sumptuous artifice and sweet melancholy: Alcina at Glyndebourne
Lucidity is not a common characteristic of the Baroque opera libretto, and the anonymous text of Handel’s Alcina – drawn from an episode in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso – twists and…
Così fan tutte at the Royal Opera House
First unveiled in 2016, this second revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s Così fan tutte remains self-consciously preoccupied with the question, ‘What is theatre?’ While his interview in the souvenir programme…
Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder: Anna Prohaska and Christian Gerhaher at Wigmore Hall
A decidedly superior Liederabend, in terms of verse, musical setting, and performance. Hugo Wolf remains a connoisseur’s composer: slightly perplexing, perhaps, but then there is no playing to the gallery,…
Taking wing at the Royal College of Music: Jonathan Dove’s Flight
“I am stuck in Heathrow. Flight cancelled and no way, or no one, to tell me to leave the airport.” A Tweet by a frustrated passenger caught up in this…