Those new to Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto might have wondered about his quasi-symphonic concept, a work of Mahlerian proportions that Benjamin Grosvenor considers to be a “kind of operatic symphony,…
Year: 2024
PROM 24: Baroque meets Hip-Hop for Purcell’s The Fairy Queen.
Purcell’s ‘other’ stage works are beginning to receive recognition, at last; Dido and Aeneas has held sole sway for too long. Recently, Paul McCreesh recorded King Arthur (1691), while television…
Longborough Festival’s La bohème doesn’t fail to tug at the heartstrings
Good summer weather outside may have coincided with this run of La bohème, but Sarah Fahie’s production reminds us that Acts One and Two are set at Christmas Eve, with…
Santa Fe Opera’s Ravishing Rosenkavalier
Let me cut right to the chase and say that Santa Fe Opera’s stunning production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier has driven me stark raving glad. It was a long-awaited thrill…
Nikolaus Lehnhoff strips back action and ideas to create a calm dream-like state for Tristan und Isolde
‘A monument to this most beautiful of all dreams’ is how Wagner described the intoxicating contemplation of love that is his Tristan und Isolde, and it is essentially as a…
PROM 19: Marking 150 years since Holst’s birth, The Cloud Messenger receives its Proms premiere
With an all-British programme bookended by Eastern influences, variously Buddhist and Sanskrit, this was one of those concerts that looked interesting on paper. The curiosity quota was high, but the…
Bodacious Bordeaux: Santa Fe Elixir
Santa Fe Opera’s piquant, frolicsome version of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love) is currently regaling audiences with a revival of its popular 2009 staging. Director Stephen Lawless and…
An Unusual Bel Canto Revival in New York: Carolina Uccelli, Anna di Resburgo (1835)
With New York’s Metropolitan Opera struggling to hype star singers, commission enduring new works, fill a mammoth space, and balance its budget, the vitality of the city’s opera scene has…
Santa Fe Righteous, Roiling and Rueful
A new operatic work with an original story is a joy to anticipate, and Santa Fe Opera’s World Premiere of The Righteous is to be applauded for its bountiful creativity…
A Barber of Seville that combines Italian and Spanish elements in the quintessentially English gardens at West Green
The theatre at West Green already has the house as the background beyond the lawn at its open back. Victoria Newlyn’s production of The Barber of Seville, therefore, simply reduces…