In the wrong performance Mahler’s Third Symphony can be a burden on the listener and I have very often found this the most difficult of his symphonies to bring off…
Category: Reviews
Korngold’s The Dead City at English National Opera
When he published his novel Bruges-la-Morte, in French, in 1892, the symbolist author George Rodenbach included within the narrative dozens of black-and-white topographical photographs of the Belgian city, largely images…
A lovely, lucid Figaro at the Royal Academy of Music
La folle journée is the title of the second play in Pierre Beaumarchais’s ‘Figaro trilogy’ and, duly, the single ‘mad day’ on which the wedding of Figaro and Susanna takes…
Handel’s Scipione: the Early Opera Company close the London Handel Festival with a celebration of clemency
This year’s London Handel Festival was brought to a gracious close with a celebration of clemency, magnanimity and honour. Scipione, the ninth of the operas that Handel composed for the…
Myths and monsters from the BBCSO and Brabbins at the Barbican Hall
Beowulf is an archetypal heroic text of the medieval age: warriors and kings, the sea and craggy cliffs, monsters and myths: the bright gleam of the hero’s ceremonial armour juxtaposed…
Akhnaten still compels at English National Opera
Those lavish costumes, the fiery sun and the troupe of jugglers continue to leave a vivid impression in Phelim McDermott’s sumptuous staging of Akhnaten. Now in its second revival since…
Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma
In his final years, celebrated film and opera director Franco Zeffirelli came to be closely associated with the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, which shared his traditionalist view of opera staging.…
Mary Bevan on superb form in Signum’s Visions Illuminées
If you think soprano Mary Bevan is associated only with Baroque repertoire, think again. Yes, she’s recently wowed audiences in Handel’s Alcina at Covent Garden, and she’s about to embark…
Tchaikovsky’s first surviving opera, Oprichnik, gets a vibrant performance from Chelsea Opera Group
Tchaikovsky was fascinated by opera; he started writing around 20 of which nine survive as complete works. We know so very few of them well. His first opera to survive…
A ‘fantastic’ Respighi-Ravel double bill at the Royal College of Music
If you thought that fairy tales were for children, then this fantastic – in all senses of the word – double bill at the Royal College of Music would teach…