We don’t know much about the first performance (in 1718) of Handel’s pastoral Acis and Galatea but there is a tradition that it was premiered in the gardens of Cannons, the grand…
Author: Robert Hugill
Tim Albery’s new production of Alcina for Opera North
Handel was rather fond of enchantresses; they pop up in his operas both early and late. It wasn’t the power per se that seems to have interested him but the…
Opera North’s Rigoletto
Ostensibly, Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse satirised the licentious court of King Francis I of France, but at the play’s 1832 premiere in Paris the authorities thought the subject…
Imaginative, daring, enterprising: Fulham Opera’s production of Richard Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena
Richard Strauss’ Die ägyptische Helena remains something of the ugly duckling amongst the operas he wrote with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Premiered in Dresden in 1928, it has rarely been performed…
Arias for Ballino: Opera Settecento at the London Handel Festival
Annibale Pio Fabri, known as ‘Ballino’, is not the best-known name amongst the singers who worked for Handel, yet on hearing him for the first time in 1729, Mrs Pendarves…
The English Concert perform Samson at the London Handel Festival
Handel’s dramatic talents as a composer ran to the expansive, in a way that Handel the promoter found tricky so that many of his works were trimmed and edited for…
Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the Grange Festival
Stephen Lawless’ production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut opened at the Grange Festival on 26 June 2021, the third of this year’s three opera productions all originally planned for 2020. Elin Pritchard was…
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ivan the Terrible at Grange Park Opera
Rimsky-Korsakov wrote 15 operas yet few have attained any sort of currency outside of Russia. As part of its Spaced Season 2021, Grange Park Opera presented Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ivan the Terrible…
Il tabarro: Marek Janowski and the Dresden Philharmonic continue their series of verismo operas
During the 1880s and 1890s, Italian publishers were making a concerted effort to find a successor to Giuseppe Verdi who, however, remained a towering force in Italian operatic life. The…
Pauline Viardot’s Cinderella: a Christmas treat from Northern Opera Group
Pauline Viardot was the scion of a distinguished vocal dynasty. Her father, Manuel Garcia (tenor, impresario, teacher) took part in the premieres of Rossini’s Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra and Il barbiere…