Author: Anne Ozorio

The BBC Proms 2014 season began with Sir Edward Elgars The Kingdom (1903-6). It was a good start to the season,which commemorates the start of the First World War. From that perspective Sir Andrew Davis’s The Kingdom moved me deeply.

Jan·?ek started The Cunning Little Vixen on the cusp of old age in 1922 and there is something deeply elegiac about it.

Luca Francesconi is well-respected in the avant garde. His music has been championed by the Arditti Quartett and features regularly in new music festivals. His opera Quartett has at last reached London after well-received performances in Milan and Amsterdam.

Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House, London, brings out the humanity which lies beneath Puccini’s music. The composer was drawn to what we’d now called “outsiders. In Manon Lescaut, Puccini describes his anti-heroine with unsentimental honesty. His lush harmonies describe the way she abandons herself to luxury, but he doesn’t lose sight of the moral toughness at the heart of AbbÈ PrÈvost’s story, Manon is sensual but, like her brother, fatally obssessed with material things. Only when she has lost everything else does she find true values through love..

An ideal choice for this year’s Aldeburgh Music Festival, Britten’s Owen Wingrave. From a very early age, Britten was incensed by bullying and repression.

A black bare stage heaving with a rebellious revolutionary throng; they stare with still hostility directly at the audience, stark light streaming from above.

Der Rosenkavalier opened Glyndebourne’s 80th anniversary season, dedicated to the memory of George Christie, who created country house opera as we know it today.