On 15 October 1943, Britten’s for tenor, horn and strings received its premiere at Wigmore Hall, performed by Peter Pears, Dennis Brain and a string ensemble conducted by Walter Goehr. …
Category: Reviews
A hard and heartless Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House
One of my opera-loving friends, a singer and musician herself and a regular devotee of both opera and ballet at the Royal Opera House and elsewhere, never attends performances of…
Cal McCrystal’s Iolanthe is revived at English National Opera
The curtain lifts to reveal a land of fairies: trailing vines, enormous flowers, rainbow-tinted lights. As W.S. Gilbert writes later on, it all looks like something from ‘Andersen’s library’. This…
Magdalena Kožená and Mitsuko Uchida at Wigmore Hall
One performer exudes profundity of thought and subtlety of rhetoric: acute attention to detail, technical finesse and delicate restraint characterise her musicianship. The other has a voice which glows with…
MacMillan, Tavener & Vaughan Williams: the Choir of Westminster Abbey
In its century-spanning traversal of sacred music, this recent issue from Hyperion and the Choir of Westminster Abbey – the last recording from the recently retired Director of Music James…
A Night at the Museum: English Touring Opera’s La Cenerentola
Who hasn’t had a childhood dream of being locked in the British Museum or Natural History Museum overnight? What would happen if the exhibits came to life? Films and fiction…
Rouvali falls short: Uninspired Verdi opens the Philharmonia’s new season
The Philharmonia Orchestra is no stranger to offering Verdi’s Requiem as either a work to open a season – or to close it (or anywhere in between). Many of its…
Ian Bostridge and Les Talens Lyriques open the Echter’Classic Festival in Echternach, Luxembourg
The website of the Echternach Tourist Office tells me that this small medieval town (5,600 inhabitants) in the east of Luxembourg, nestled next to the German border, is one of…
The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs in San Francisco (finally)
Is it man pitted against machines, or is it man sacrificed to machine? Or is it mankind sacrificed to machines. Sitting in the War Memorial Opera House for Mason Bates’…
King Arthur: Early Opera Company at Temple Church
Gustav Holst condemned the entire genre of semi-opera as ‘almost insuperable’, at once ‘too dramatic for the concert platform’ and ‘too incoherent for the stage’. How, he asked, are these…