One bright morning in mid-February 1919, a crowd of a million people gathered in New York to welcome home the 15th Infantry Regiment of New York’s National Guard, who had…
Category: Reviews
A magical marriage of Occident and Orient: Fleur Barron at Leeds Lieder
‘Dreams, Homeland and Childhood’ was an apt title for Fleur Barron’s Leeds Lieder Festival recital with pianist Joseph Middleton. Born in Northern Ireland, to a British father and Singaporean mother,…
The Barber of Seville by San Francisco Opera
San Francisco has fielded, masterfully, a giganticized miniaturized version of Gioachino Rossini’s iconic masterwork Il barbiere di Siviglia in a parking lot for hundreds of socially distanced cars. It is…
POP’s Tahiti Goes Live and In Person
To note its tenth anniversary season, the enterprising Pacific Opera Project has quite winningly kicked off the celebration by revisiting the first opera it ever produced, Leonard Bernstein’s one act…
Re-Wilding the Wasteland: I Fagiolini return to Live from London
I Fagiolini’s third contribution to VOCES8’s Live from London series took its inspiration and its structure from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem described in the introductory programme note…
First class performances from the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge
This new disc is the second volume of Evening Canticles from the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge under Andrew Nethsingha. It presents nine settings of the Magnificat and Nunc…
The House of Life: David Butt Philip and James Baillieu at Leighton House
The Rossetti family, according to William Michael, in Some Reminiscences (1906), ‘were not a musical family; they had no gift in that direction … no craving to be constantly hearing…
A First-Rate Serious Opera by Rossini with Pre-Echoes of The Barber of Seville
Another good-to-superb recording of a little-known Rossini opera, thanks to the Rossini in Wildbad festival. The recording blends three concert performances from July 2017 and features Silvia Dalla Benetta as…
An absorbing, imaginative ‘enactment’ of the St John Passion from Oxford Bach Soloists
Last April, writing in the Observer, Fiona Maddocks lamented her first Easter without the mysteries and joys of Bach. ‘This year all performances have been cancelled. Our lives have already…
Atmospheric performances from the choir of Trinity College Cambridge enhance the music of Cecilia McDowall
Coinciding with Cecilia McDowall’s 70th year, this recent Hyperion disc crowns an already impressive series of recordings from Dutton Epoch that, with her keen sensitivity to text and grateful melodic…