Programme announced for the73rd Wexford Festival Opera80 events, 16 daysrunning from 18 October to 2 November 2024Theatre within Theatre – ‘All the World’s a Stage’ The programme for the 2024 Wexford Festival Opera…
Author: Claire Seymour
Un ballo in maschera: Chelsea Opera Group at Cadogan Hall
The title of Un ballo in maschera may suggest elegance and courtly high jinx, but Verdi’s opera, with its vengeful assassins, Beelzebub-conjuring sorceress and murderous drawing of lots is a…
The Pre-Raphaelite Poets: Oxford International Song Festival
Continuing this year’s theme of the relationship between the musical, poetic and visual arts, this Oxford International Song Festival lunchtime recital purported to reflect the topics which ‘fixated the artists…
The Colour Revolution: Oxford International Song Festival
The Ashmolean Museum’s current special exhibition, Colour Revolution: Victorian art, fashion & design, aims to dispel the notion of the Victorian era as a bleak, black-and-white industrial age by revealing…
Visions and Visuals: Oxford International Song Festival
When you listen to a piece of music, performed live or on a recording, do visual images and visions sweep or fly through your mind, or fix themselves indelibly on…
Handel’s Clori, Tirsi e Fileno: The English Concert at Wigmore Hall
Clori, Tirsi e Fileno is one of Handel’s many ‘dramatic cantatas’, composed during his Italian sojourn of 1706-10 and performed in the private homes and palaces of wealthy patrons, to…
The Britten Sinfonia celebrate Britten at Snape Maltings
On 15 October 1943, Britten’s for tenor, horn and strings received its premiere at Wigmore Hall, performed by Peter Pears, Dennis Brain and a string ensemble conducted by Walter Goehr. …
The Ivors Classical Awards 2023: celebrating creative excellence
The Ivors Academy have today [18 October] announced the 34 composers who have been nominated for an Ivor Novello Award as part of The Ivors Classical Awards 2023, celebrating the…
A hard and heartless Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House
One of my opera-loving friends, a singer and musician herself and a regular devotee of both opera and ballet at the Royal Opera House and elsewhere, never attends performances of…
Magdalena Kožená and Mitsuko Uchida at Wigmore Hall
One performer exudes profundity of thought and subtlety of rhetoric: acute attention to detail, technical finesse and delicate restraint characterise her musicianship. The other has a voice which glows with…