Two events on day thirteen of the Festival, in partnership with LIFE Victoria in Barcelona, marked the centenary of the great Spanish soprano Victoria de los Angeles, a celebration that…
Category: Reviews
Un ballo in maschera: Chelsea Opera Group at Cadogan Hall
The title of Un ballo in maschera may suggest elegance and courtly high jinx, but Verdi’s opera, with its vengeful assassins, Beelzebub-conjuring sorceress and murderous drawing of lots is a…
The Pre-Raphaelite Poets: Oxford International Song Festival
Continuing this year’s theme of the relationship between the musical, poetic and visual arts, this Oxford International Song Festival lunchtime recital purported to reflect the topics which ‘fixated the artists…
The Colour Revolution: Oxford International Song Festival
The Ashmolean Museum’s current special exhibition, Colour Revolution: Victorian art, fashion & design, aims to dispel the notion of the Victorian era as a bleak, black-and-white industrial age by revealing…
Visions and Visuals: Oxford International Song Festival
When you listen to a piece of music, performed live or on a recording, do visual images and visions sweep or fly through your mind, or fix themselves indelibly on…
Handel’s Clori, Tirsi e Fileno: The English Concert at Wigmore Hall
Clori, Tirsi e Fileno is one of Handel’s many ‘dramatic cantatas’, composed during his Italian sojourn of 1706-10 and performed in the private homes and palaces of wealthy patrons, to…
Lohengrin in San Francisco
This is the excellent David Alden 2018 production from Covent Garden. Here is how it fared at the War Memorial Opera House. It fit like a glove due to strong…
The Britten Sinfonia celebrate Britten at Snape Maltings
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. …
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…