The International Opera Awards has today [11 October 2023] announced the shortlist for this year’s Awards, which will be held at Teatr Wielki, Polish National Opera, Warsaw on Thursday 9 November. The International Opera Awards celebrate…
Author: Claire Seymour
A Night at the Museum: English Touring Opera’s La Cenerentola
Who hasn’t had a childhood dream of being locked in the British Museum or Natural History Museum overnight? What would happen if the exhibits came to life? Films and fiction…
Ian Bostridge and Les Talens Lyriques open the Echter’Classic Festival in Echternach, Luxembourg
The website of the Echternach Tourist Office tells me that this small medieval town (5,600 inhabitants) in the east of Luxembourg, nestled next to the German border, is one of…
Voices and Viols: Ensemble Pro Victoria and the Arculo Consort of Viols at Hatfield House
The extravagantly carved Marble Hall at Hatfield House, which is named after its black-and-white chequered floor, remains much as it was when Robert Cecil, the 1st Earl of Salisbury, built…
Ruby Hughes and friends at the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival
The theme of this year’s Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival is ‘A Family Affair’. As Lord Salisbury and Artistic Director Guy Johnston explain in their introductions in the Festival programme,…
Medtner in England: a marvellous new release from SOMM
Composer-pianist Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) has sometimes been labelled, like his compatriot and friend Sergei Rachmaninov, as being ‘born too late’. The late-Romantic idiom in which they both wrote, well into…
The English Tenor: a debut disc from Scott Robert Shaw
The English Tenor might seem a rather odd title for a disc which is sung by a tenor who was born in Australia, trained at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music…
George Benjamin’s Picture a day like this at the Linbury Theatre
In George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Picture a Day like this,a Woman sets out on a quest to find a person who is genuinely happy. Having experienced the death of…
David’s Alden’s Peter Grimes returns to the Coliseum
David Alden may have dragged George Crabbe’s eighteenth-century Suffolk Borough into the twentieth century, updating Britten’s Peter Grimes to the time of its composition and emphasising post-war parochialism and hypocrisy,…
The Glass Eye: Hugh Cutting sings a new song cycle by Alex Ho at the Oxford International Song Festival
The theme of this year’s Oxford International Song Festival (previously known as Oxford Lieder) is Art:Song – Images/Words/Music. The performances, exhibitions and events will bring the visual arts, poetry and…