Commissioning a new opera for its 200th anniversary, and then staging and performing it with such excellence, are laudable things for the Royal Academy of Music to have done. If…
Author: Mark Berry
The Cunning Little Vixen at English National Opera
Failure to love the operas—more generally, the music—of Janáček would be a strange, soulless thing indeed. It seems more to be opera companies, strange, incomprehensible entities, than opera-goers, be they…
La bohème returns to ENO
This was, I think, the fourth time I have seen Jonathan Miller’s production of La bohème. It strikes me, in this revival directed by Crispin Lord, to have a good…
‘Hymns to the Virgin’: The Tallis Scholars at St John’s Smith Square
St John’s Smith Square’s 36th Christmas Festival has gone ahead as planned. That in itself is something to grant seasonal cheer, especially at what again is proving a trying time…
An RAM double bill: Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi
How wonderful at last to return to opera at the Royal Academy of Music. (I caught an excellent concert of chamber music by Bartók and Eötvös from musicians coached by…
Le nozze di Figaro: Hampstead Garden Opera
HGO (formerly Hampstead Garden Opera) has been one of the musical heroes of the pandemic. Last year, it brought opera back to London with Holst’s Savītri; this year, it was…
Musick’s Monument: Lucy Crowe and Fretwork at Wigmore Hall
Thomas Mace’s Musick’s Monument, or, A remembrance of the best practical musick, both divine and civil, that has ever been known to have been in the world divided into three…
The Cunning Little Vixen at Opera Holland Park
Our present condition lends us, perhaps more than ever, to think of what has led us here, how things really are now, and where the world will take us next.…
An excellent Figaro at Opera Holland Park
What a welcome return to Holland Park this proved to be. Glorious weather helped, of course—quite a change from an earlier visit to Glyndebourne with altogether necessary overcoat and umbrella—but…
A new La clemenza di Tito from Richard Jones at the ROH
Over fifteen months since I had last set foot in an opera house—for Carmen at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden—it felt extraordinary to be back. All else would be secondary.…