The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) has a long tradition of superb concert and semi-staged opera, most recently under conductors like Seiji Ozawa, Colin Davis and Bernhard Haitink, as well as…
Year: 2023
Carmen and Le Trouvère in Paris
Among the most performed titles in the repertory, it was the 30th performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore in this 2016 production by Barcelona’s chic theater collective La Fura dels Baus,…
A dramatic masterclass from Véronique Gens in Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine
This recent issue from Alpha brings together two sides of Poulenc’s strikingly individual musical personality. Both works, some ten years apart, inhabit a similar bittersweet quality, yet while his operatic…
Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera House
‘R. slept well and has decided to have a massage only once a day,’ writes Cosima Wagner in one of her last diary entries, from Venice, only twenty days before…
Amazone: Lea Desandre and Jupiter at Wigmore Hall
The percussive thump and burr which sparked into life Francesco Provenzale’s ‘Non posso far’ (from his opera Lo Schiavo di sua moglie) at the start of this lunchtime recital by…
Peter Grimes in Paris
That the Four Sea Interludes and the Passacaglia from Peter Grimes have become orchestral showpieces attests to the opera’s musical might, manifest just now at the Palais Garnier by British…
Tristan et Isolde in Paris
A few weeks ago it was one act per night in Los Angeles, in Paris just now it is all three acts at once, as it had been back in…
Brünnhilde’s Dream: an inventive, expressive and impressive sequence by Rozanna Madylus and Counterpoise at Wigmore Hall
The programme originally planned for this Wigmore Hall recital by the ensemble, Counterpoise, might have been titled ‘Fathers and Daughters’. A new monodrama integrating speech, sprechstimme and singing, The…
Machaut’s Remede de Fortune: the Art of Music, Poetry and Love
Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune (c.1340) is at once a coming-of-age tale; a didactic work on the arts of poetry, music, rhetoric and memory; a microcosm of, and manual for, fourteenth-century…
Glyndebourne unveils ambitious new autumn programme to showcase and share the transformative power of opera
Glyndebourne has unveiled new plans for autumn 2023 that will invite people to experience the transformative power of opera, at Glyndebourne, in schools and in the community, while also providing…