La folle journée is the title of the second play in Pierre Beaumarchais’s ‘Figaro trilogy’ and, duly, the single ‘mad day’ on which the wedding of Figaro and Susanna takes…
Author: Claire Seymour
Handel’s Scipione: the Early Opera Company close the London Handel Festival with a celebration of clemency
This year’s London Handel Festival was brought to a gracious close with a celebration of clemency, magnanimity and honour. Scipione, the ninth of the operas that Handel composed for the…
Myths and monsters from the BBCSO and Brabbins at the Barbican Hall
Beowulf is an archetypal heroic text of the medieval age: warriors and kings, the sea and craggy cliffs, monsters and myths: the bright gleam of the hero’s ceremonial armour juxtaposed…
A ‘fantastic’ Respighi-Ravel double bill at the Royal College of Music
If you thought that fairy tales were for children, then this fantastic – in all senses of the word – double bill at the Royal College of Music would teach…
Tongues of Fire: James Gilchrist sings Eric McElroy’s song-cycles with wonderful discernment and beauty
“Composing a song-cycle is like writing a philosophical essay,” replies composer and pianist Eric McElroy when I ask him why he is so drawn to the genre. We’re meeting in…
English Touring Opera’s spring tour sets out on an Italian sojourn
With the familial knots of the guest list for Charles III’s coronation still to be unravelled and the UK still stretching itself on the Brexit-rack, Il viaggio a Reims, Rossini’s…
London Handel Festival: In the Realms of Sorrow at Stone Nest
Charcoaled-eyes and glitter-tears. Swirling coils of murky smoke. Twilight-zone lighting. Sensuousness verging on violence. Certainly not what Handel’s wealthy Roman patrons would have experienced when the young composer presented private…
Glyndebourne: Dialogues des Carmélites cast change
Danielle de Niese has withdrawn from the Glyndebourne Festival 2023 production of Dialogues des Carmélites. Sally Matthews will take over the role of Blanche, returning to Glyndebourne after several successful engagements. Sally…
Not pity but tragedy: Iestyn Davies and Joseph Middleton perform Die schöne Müllerin at Wigmore Hall
In The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’, James William Sobaskie suggests that while ‘Winterreise elicits empathy for its outcast, inducing us to share his emotions and experience similar distress’, Schubert’s earlier…
Florian Störtz announced as winner of International Handel Singing Competition
On Thursday 16th March 2023, baritone Florian Störtz was announced as the winner of the International Handel Singing Competition following the final presented by internationally acclaimed soprano Danielle de Niese, which took place at London’s St George’s Church, Hanover Square.…