My apologies for not having thought to post this review online earlier. The recording was made back in 2017, and I reviewed it for American Record Guide. I should have…
Year: 2025
Proms 2025: Fabio Luisi and his Danish Forces Serve Up a Bright and Breezy Beethoven 9
Given that Beethoven’s final symphony normally has a playing time of just over an hour, what can you sensibly pair with it in the first half? Something else by Beethoven,…
Proms 2025: Pappano conducts Puccini and Strauss
It used to be a fairly rare treat to hear Suor Angelica, but of late there have been a number of significant stagings. Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten is rarer…
Proms 2025: A Mass of Life outlined in all its sumptuous beauty
Hailed by many commentators as a choral masterpiece, Delius’s A Mass of Life is an expansive choral extravaganza taking inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. The composer interprets the…
Giulio Cesare in Salzburg
Stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov sets Handel’s most performed opera in an air raid shelter (where else these days?), wittily deploying a direct hit on the shelter to announce Cleopatra’s scorching…
One Morning Turns into an Eternity in Salzburg
A concoction imagined by American stage director Peter Sellars and Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. It is three orchestral masterpieces, fused, that host an abstract theater action — a body bag…
Proms 2025: Le Concert Spirituel and Hervé Niquet
This should be what the Proms is all about. ‘Super-size me,’ said Cosimo I de’ Medici when asking for music (probably not a direct quote); and there is certainly a…
The Barber of Seville at Cape Town
There is no more remote place on earth than Cape Town to experience opera. At the juncture of two vast Oceans and over 8,000 km south of the nearest opera…
Proms 2025: East and West collide with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Making unusual connections is one of the hallmarks of the BBC Proms. Honouring Sofia Gubaidulina, who died aged 93 in March, this concert opened with the sound of soft tubular…
Proms 2025: Joe Hisaishi and Steve Reich
Duck-quacking effects aside (in the opening work, The Boy and the Heron), this was a dark concert. Both Joe Hisaishi’s The End of the World and Steve Reich’s The Desert…