To Hampshire and The Grange for the second of what should for me be three productions of Così fan tutte this summer. I cannot yet comment on Munich (Benedict Andrews/Vladimir…
Author: Mark Berry
Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence at the Royal Opera House
Kaija Saariaho’s latest opera, first seen at the 2021 Festival d’Aix en Provence, has now reached another of its co-commissioners, the Royal Opera House. It would be difficult to overstate…
Rusalka at the Royal Opera House
A strange evening: I very much enjoyed this new Rusalka, though found myself slightly haunted by the suspicion I did so more than I should have done. Musically magnificent yet…
Das Rheingold at English National Opera
Like the Biblical cosmos, that of the Ring offers more than one creation myth, perhaps not entirely consistent with one another. Therein lies the dramatic rub. Richard Jones’s new production…
Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera House
‘R. slept well and has decided to have a massage only once a day,’ writes Cosima Wagner in one of her last diary entries, from Venice, only twenty days before…
Katya Kabanova: orchestral drama from the LSO and Sir Simon Rattle
Perhaps the most perfectly proportioned of Janáček’s operas, certainly one of the most emotionally and dramaturgically correct—which, in Janáček’s case, is saying quite something—Katya Kabanova has not wanted for recent…
The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Academy of Music
Blessed by varied approaches to its staging and performance, The Rake’s Progress seems to remain eternally itself (whatever that might mean, as a sometime Prince of Wales might have put…
The Rape of Lucretia at the Royal Opera House
This new Rape of Lucretia, seen first at Snape, now in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre, fittingly features singers from two young artists’ programmes: Britten Pears and Jette…
Chineke! Voices and Orchestra at the Proms
Very much a concert of two (unequal) halves, I am afraid. The first Proms performance of George Walker’s 1995 Lilacs promised and delivered much. However, the following performance of Beethoven’s…
Prom 17: London premiere of Jennifer Walshe’s The Site of an Investigation
I am sure one could find something these two works had in common if one tried; one always can. The question is whether it would be anything more than a…