The Royal Opera House continues its series of Handel’s operas and oratorios premiered at the theatre which once stood on the same site with Giustino (1737). Coming from the end…
Category: Reviews
It’s all in the telling: Jennifer France, Edward Gardner and the LPO
Music encompasses many different kinds of storytelling, with and without overt narration. In the world of fictional narratives, there are often heroes or victors, villains or antagonists, stereotypical characters, and…
Welsh National Opera’s Frothy Candide Showcases Its Pythonesque Humour
Welsh National Opera’s Candide has returned as part of its autumn season and, due to stringent Arts Council cuts, it’s one of only two productions, neither of which are new.…
Shocking Twist On A Biblical Tale: INseries’ St John the Baptist
Premiered in 1675 as a concert work, until now, Alessandro Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista has never been staged. Cue INseries, always striving to do something new and daring, starting their…
Youthful flair in Paisiello’s Don Quixote at Naples
Paisiello was one of the composers closely associated with the important operatic tradition of 18th century Naples. By the time he came to study in the city in the mid-1750s,…
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir present a composer who catches you by surprise
It was all going so well for him. He was already a celebrated opera composer, having made opera buffa something of a calling card, and in just 23 years had…
In from the cold: Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri at Hamburg State Opera
Fashions come and go. What might be hailed by one generation is often ridiculed by the next one. That was the fate of Schumann’s secular oratorio Das Paradies und die…
Dead Man Walking in San Francisco
Though one may chafe at the dramatic and musical naïveté of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, you will admit that it packs a wallop. A man is summarily murdered in…
Rigoletto in San Francisco
San Francisco’s 1932 War Memorial Opera House (honoring the city’s WWI dead soldiers) is among the world’s more lavish examples of theater architecture, surpassed, in my experience, only by the…
Opera Singers Bring A Beautiful Addition to Cherrydale UMC’s Concert Series
Started by pianist Mark Irchai last year, Cherrydale United Methodist Church’s concert series has twice so far featured a group of up-and-coming opera singers under the banner of “The Passion…