As his Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem) in Pappano’s LSO performance proved conclusively (August 15), there are fewer if any better spaces to hold Berlioz’s monumental imagination than London’s Royal Albert Hall. …
Author: Colin Clarke
PROMS 2026: The Glyndebourne Prom, Richard Strauss’ Ariadne
This was a semi-staged version of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos; Laurent Pelly is the director at Glyndebourne, and, while I enjoyed his Donizetti La fille du régiment, seen at Covent Garden,…
PROMS 2026: A Mini–Italian Festival at the Proms
An Italian-Turkish conductor, Nil Venditti, led the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra alongside the vocal Epiphoni Consort in an all-Italian programme for this Prom (I see numbers seem to have…
Pappano’s mixed Tristan at the Barbican
This is surely Sir Antonio Pappano’s “Wagner period”: his recent Siegfried, the latest instrument of an ongoing Ring at RBO revealed, to my ears at least, his finest Wagner to date. He has,…
Handel’s Serse at Barbican
Most recently seen in March in a stunning Tamerlano at Shoreditch Town Hall as part of the 2026 London Handel Festival, Laurence Cummings and the Academy of Ancient Music now gave us…
125 years young: Wigmore Hall celebrates with Lise Davidsen
Happy “birth”- day to Wigmore Hall (inasmuch as bricks and mortar are birthed). On the hall’s actual 125th anniversary, it was Lise Davidsen and the equally astonishing collaborative pianist James…
Asmik Grigorian and Lukas Geniušas at Wigmore Hall
The Wigmore Hall’s 125th Anniversary Festival is shaping up well: in one day, the venue offered Jordi Savall at lunchtime and Asmik Grigorian in the evening, both (as far as…
Gangsta Salome: Richard Strauss in Bethnal Green
Perhaps fittingly, there is an establishment by the name of “Satan’s Whiskers” a mere one-minute walk from York Hall. Richard Strauss’s Salome is a visceral juxtaposition of the good (or…
An ‘authentic’ Rigoletto in Paris
Concert performances are often seen as pale imitations of the real thing, only one step behind that nebulous term, ‘semi-staged’. And yet, sometimes they remain memorable in their own right:…
Handel in Shoreditch: a Tamerlano Triumph
Those who attended Irish National Opera’s Bajazet at the Linbury Theatre will be familiar with the story here. Handel accorded titular status to Tamerlano; different librettos, though: Handel’s principally uses…