Snape Proms: Bostridge sings Brahms and Schumann

Two men, one woman. Both men worshipped and enshrined her in their music. The younger man was both devotee of and rival to the elder.

The Queen of Spades, Opera Holland Park

The Queen of Spades has been doing rather well in and around London of late. I have only seen two stagings recently before this, but know of quite a few others. Of those: Opera North offered a rare lapse at the Barbican, about which the less said, the better; ENO, last year, offered strong vocal performances but a truly catastrophic production. All in all, then, Holland Park, as so often, came off best.

Prom 25: the dark, soulful realms of Bluebeard and Dvo?·k

Dvo?·k’s cello concerto is certainly one of the best known works for the instrument, and probably one of the best loved. Its Bohemian sensibility is by turns heroic, ebullient, poetic and wistful. Its soulfulness can inspire bravura impulsiveness from a soloist, as well as warm lyricism.

Prom 20: Berlioz, Romeo and Juliet

Saturday night seems to be Berlioz-Shakespeare night. After last week’s new production of BÈatrice and BÈnÈdict at Glyndebourne, yesterday evening it was the turn of the Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre RÈvolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir, with the National Youth Choir of Scotland, to tell us a Shakespearean tale ‡ la franÁaise. Not a ‘merry war’ this time, but the star-crossed strife and fatal misunderstandings of Romeo and Juliet.

Prom 18: Mahler, Symphony No.3

Bernard Haitink has what is absolutely necessary, yet more often than not lacking, to conduct a Mahler symphony, indeed to conduct any symphony worthy of the name: the ability to hear it in a single span and to communicate in performance that ability. That is not, of course, in itself enough to ensure a successful, let alone a great, performance, but its absence will be fatal.

Munich Opera Festival Baroque Concert: Music from the Court of Louis XIV

In many respects, this second ‘Festspiel-Barockkonzert’ made for an intriguing pendant to the previous night’s premiere of Les Indes galantes. All of the music was earlier than Rameau’s opÈra-ballet, some of that in the first half – the programme was broadly but not pedantically chronological – considerably earlier.

Les Indes galantes, Bavarian State Opera

Baroque opera has long been an important part of the Bavarian State Opera’s programming. And beyond the company itself, Munich’s tradition stretches back many years indeed: KubelÌk’s Handel with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, for instance.

Don Giovanni, Bavarian State Opera

All told, this was probably the best Don Giovanni I have seen and heard. Judging opera performances – perhaps we should not be ‘judging’ at all, but let us leave that on one side – is a difficult task: there are so many variables, at least as many as in a play and a concert combined, but then there is the issue of that ‘combination’ too.

Il barbiere di Siviglia, Glyndebourne Festival Opera at the Proms

For its annual visit to the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, Glyndebourne brought its new production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, an opera which premiered 200 years ago.

BÈatrice and BÈnÈdict at Glyndebourne

‘A caprice written with the point of a needle’: so Berlioz described his opera BÈatrice and BÈnÈdict, which pares down Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing to its comic quintessence, shorn of the sub-plots, destroyed reputations and near-bloodshed of Shakespeare’s original.