Author: Gary Hoffman

First, a sigh of relief: in almost every respect, this new ENO staging of
Benvenuto Cellini marks a significant improvement

‘I like the atmosphere of the West’, Puccini wrote after seeing three of David Belasco’s plays performed on Broadway in 1907, ‘but in all the “piËces” I have seen, I have found only a few scenes here and there.

A month in which London, or indeed anywhere else, saw one performances of a Birtwistle drama would be something.

For the final recital in his three-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall, Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley offered the familiar and the new in striking juxtaposition, Franz Schubert’s posthumously published Schwanengesang enclosing Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Rub·iy·t, which was written specially for Finley.

In this Schubert Liederabende — the second in Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake’s planned series of four recitals at the Wigmore Hall — dark, sombre worlds evoking the romantic turbulence of Death and the Maiden were only briefly alleviated by radiance and light.

With the FIFA World Cup just three weeks away perhaps it is permissible to use a sporting metaphor, for this performance by The English Concert at the Wigmore Hall — part of the ensemble’s 40^th anniversary celebrations — really was a game of two halves.

The company bids a smiling farewell to its 2013-14 HD simulcast season with Rossini’s comic masterpiece