Author: Colin Clarke

Performances of Handel’s Alexander’s Feast don’t come along too often; much less the Dublin version of 1742, meticulously recreated here by Peter Whelan, the conductor/director of Irish Baroque, and Donald…

To say Glyndebourne and Le nozze di Figaro are linked is a huge understatement: it was Mozart’s opera, which many see to be the most perfect ever constructed, that launched…

It used to be a fairly rare treat to hear Suor Angelica, but of late there have been a number of significant stagings. Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten is rarer…

This should be what the Proms is all about. ‘Super-size me,’ said Cosimo I de’ Medici when asking for music (probably not a direct quote); and there is certainly a…

Sandrine Piau’s recent Alpha disc (also Enchantresses) was mostly re-enacted in front of us (with a signing afterwards) for this remarkable concert at Wigmore Hall. The instrumental group used was…

Handel’s last oratorio presents, as amongst the composer’s catalogue of undeniable masterpieces, a masterwork of stunning stature. Not a note is misplaced in Jephtha: long though it is (more of…

Any Mahler Eighth Symphony is an occasion. It is an unwieldy, but nevertheless impressive behemoth of a piece. Interestingly enough, my most recent encounter with the symphony was also with…

How to approach the St John Passion?  Certainly, I feel lucky to have experienced two proportions of epic power in recent years: Masaaki Suzuki and the Collegium Musicum Japan in…