For the first late night Prom of the 2024 season, Jakub Józef Orliński gave this intimate recital of 17th century Italian vocal and operatic music, which would have been sung…
Author: Curtis Rogers
A cheerful and entertaining performance of Verdi’s late comedy amidst the sylvan magic of West Green
The opera at West Green is back in the ‘green theatre’, rather than open air on the lake, but opened up at the back so that the house itself forms…
A Colourful and Properly Immersive Take on Tippett’s Wacky Last Opera
Tippett’s last opera New Year (premiered at Houston in 1989, given at Glyndebourne the following year and apparently not staged in this country since) looks forwards and backwards as its…
A vivid concert performance of Handel’s Orlando brings out its magical elements
In the midst of appearances at Garsington Opera as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Iestyn Davies took the title role in one of the sorts of Baroque opera that…
Intellectually serious but searing take on Monteverdi’s masterpiece
Having presented Handel’s Agrippina in 2018 – wittily reinterpreting Nero’s accession to power as the Grange Festival’s assumption of the role of company in residence at the Grange, Northington, after the…
A trenchant production of Tosca which moves its Roman setting into a more recent era of Italian history
Alongside a production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, the Grange Festival present another opera set in Rome against the backdrop of the tyrannical exercise of power, albeit nearly two…
A fine cast of young singers persist within a distracting interpretation of Handel’s magical opera
Even by the standards of Baroque opera, Alcina – Handel’s third, and perhaps greatest and most ingenious operatic adaptation from Ariosto’s epic Orlando furioso – comprises quite an array of…
Despite some unevenness, vivid musical and dramatic interpretations remain intact for Vivaldi’s lively L’Olimpiade
For those of us with little or no interest in sport, an Olympics year does at least offer the opportunity for otherwise rarely seen operatic settings of Metastasio’s libretto L’Olimpiade, whose action…