“Composing a song-cycle is like writing a philosophical essay,” replies composer and pianist Eric McElroy when I ask him why he is so drawn to the genre. We’re meeting in…
Category: Interviews
In conversation with Antony Hermus
“Organised chaos!” is how the Dutch conductor Antony Hermus describes the first production rehearsal of the Prologue of Ariadne auf Naxos, when he chats to me from his hotel room…
A Child in Striped Pyjamas: a new chamber opera by Noah Max
When John Boyne’s book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was published in 2006, it immediately became an international bestseller. Boyne’s ‘fable’ presents a fictional account of the horrors of a…
In conversation with Mary Bevan
Operas sometimes seem like the proverbial London bus: you wait at the stop for ages and then three come along at once. This year, the bus’s destination has been Alcina’s…
Magic and Music: Wexford Festival Opera 2022 – in conversation with Rosetta Cucchi
Magicians and monsters, gods and ghosts, witches and the wonderous: the mysterious and the marvellous are woven into the fabric of opera, the music itself expressing the enigmatic and ineffable…
Friendship in Song: An Intimate Art – the 21st Oxford Lieder Festival
Music is a profound means of forming conversations, connections and communities. From the salon to the soirée, artists and friends have gathered to share music and ideas, politics and passions. …
Kaleidoscope: in conversation with Fatma Said
kaleidoscope (OED): ‘an optical instrument containing pieces of coloured glass which may be rotated into constantly altering, brightly coloured, symmetrical figures and reflections; a constantly changing group of bright colours…
The Vache Baroque Festival 2022: in conversation with co-founder Betty Makharinsky
The myth of Orpheus and the story of opera are inextricable. Gifted the first musical instrument, the lyre, by his father, Apollo, Orpheus and his art represent man’s need to…
A premiere recording of Handel’s pasticcio, Caio Fabbricio, by London Early Opera
1733 was not a good year for George Frideric Handel. His business affairs were in a shaky state, the collapse of the Royal Academy in 1728 having forced him, in…
The Three Choirs Festival presents Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress: in conversation with Charlotte Corderoy
As an inscription to his 1925 oratorio Sancta Civitas, Ralph Vaughan Williams drew on the words of Plato: ‘A man of sense will not insist that things are not exactly…