Author: Claire Seymour

Michael Grandage’s production of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, which was new in 2012, returned to Glyndebourne on 3 July 2016 revived by Ian Rutherford.

‘A century after the Somme, who still stands with Britain?’ So read a headline in yesterday’s Evening Standard on the eve of the centenary of the first day of that battle which, 141 days later, would grind to a halt with 1,200,000 British, French, German and Allied soldiers dead or injured.

A day is now a very long time indeed in politics; would that it were otherwise. It certainly is in the Ring, as we move forward a generation to Die Walk¸re.

If composers had to be categorised as either conservatives or radicals, Christoph Willibald Gluck would undoubtedly be in the revolutionary camp, lauded for banishing display, artifice and incoherence from opera and restoring simplicity and dramatic naturalness in his ‘reform’ operas.

Das Rheingold is, of course, the reddest in tooth and claw of all Wagner’s dramas – which is saying something.

The sharp angles and oddly tilting perspectives of Charles Edwards’ set for David Alden’s production of Jen?fa at ENO suggest a community resting precariously on the security and certainty of its customs, soon to slide from this precipice into social and moral anarchy.

In a recent article in BBC Music Magazine tenor James Gilchrist reflected on the reason why early-nineteenth-century England produced no corpus of art song to match the German lieder of Schumann, Schubert and others, despite the great flowering of English Romantic poetry during this period.

Opportunities to see Idomeneo are not so frequent as they might be, certainly not so frequent as they should be.

Most of the attention during this revival of Daniele Abbado’s 2013 production of Nabucco has been directed at Pl·cido Domingo’s reprise of the title role, with the critical reception somewhat mixed.