With Autumn in the air, Garsington Opera is delighted to offer viewers the chance to relive one of the highlights of the summer festival. The 2022 production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo will…
Author: Claire Seymour
Stanford: Children’s Songs – a generous, involving recital by Kitty Whately and Gareth Brynmor John
In 1906, Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) published The National Song Book, a collection of folk-songs, carols and rounds. In an address to a musical society in 1917, Arthur Somervell –…
The Unravelling Fantasia of Miss H: a powerful operatic tribute to Mary Frances Heaton
She stood up one Sunday in St George’s church, the parish church of Doncaster, and interrupted the sermon, accusing the preacher of being “a whited sepulchre, a thief, a villain,…
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Proms
John Eliot Gardiner surely named his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique with an intent that was thrillingly in evidence during this performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the instrumentalists being joined by…
Opera Award Foundation announces 2022 bursary recipients
The Opera Awards Foundation today announces its latest bursary recipients. Established by Harry Hyman in 2012 to help aspiring young artists reach their professional potential, the Opera Awards Foundation is…
A Handelian capriccio from Bampton Classical Opera at the Barn at Old Walland
Georg Frideric Handel and Richard Strauss may make unlikely bedfellows, but for this inaugural performance at the Barn at Old Walland, in Wadhurst, Sussex, Bampton Classical Opera wittily presented Handel’s…
A stirring The Dream of Gerontius from Edward Gardner and the LPO at the Proms
The final weeks of this Proms festival are serving up some terrific big choral works and, sitting in the stalls before this performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, how wonderful…
Glyndebourne’s sumptuous new staging of Handel’s Alcina now available to stream on Glyndebourne Encore
Glyndebourne’s critically-acclaimed new production of Handel’s Alcina, which premiered at Glyndebourne Festival 2022, has just been released on Glyndebourne Encore. Glyndebourne Encore is a new streaming platform giving on-demand access to…
Stateliness and sincerity from John Butt and the OAE: Bach’s Mass in B Minor at the Proms
Why Bach wrote the B minor Mass is a puzzle that keeps musicologists occupied. How to perform it today is a probably unresolvable question for practitioners. The Mass began life…