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…
Year: 2025
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…
Proms 2025: Stupendous Mahler 3 from the Royal Albert Hall
It’s hard to believe live performances of Mahler’s Third Symphony – the longest symphony in the standard repertoire – only began life in the UK in 1961 when a performance…
Pocket-sized Wagner: Grimeborn Opera’s Tristan und Isolde
Much has been written about Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and for various reasons. It is one of the most compelling love stories of all time, with roots stretching back to…
Mango Street Under Construction at Glimmerglass
For its landmark Fiftieth Anniversary Season, the Glimmerglass Festival is to be heartily commended for commissioning a bold new work, The House on Mango Street, by composer Derek Bermel, who also…