Rodula Gaitanou’s production of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos debuted at Gothenburg Opera in 2018. A co-production with Opera North, the production finally made its way to Leeds, opening at…
Category: Reviews
Carmen at English National Opera
Calixto Bieito’s grimly visualised Carmen has now reached its third revival. First presented by ENO at the Coliseum in 2012 (and much travelled around Europe since its launch in Barcelona…
Not pity but tragedy: Iestyn Davies and Joseph Middleton perform Die schöne Müllerin at Wigmore Hall
In The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’, James William Sobaskie suggests that while ‘Winterreise elicits empathy for its outcast, inducing us to share his emotions and experience similar distress’, Schubert’s earlier…
Gran Cadenza: Irvine Arditti’s 70th Birthday and Jake Arditti sings Hilda Paredes’ Canciones Lunáticas
Although over its many years the faces of the Arditti Quartet have changed, its one constant has been Irvine Arditti himself. Now 70-years old, this birthday lunchtime recital, called Gran…
Tannhäuser at the Boston Symphony Orchestra
The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) has a long tradition of superb concert and semi-staged opera, most recently under conductors like Seiji Ozawa, Colin Davis and Bernhard Haitink, as well as…
Carmen and Le Trouvère in Paris
Among the most performed titles in the repertory, it was the 30th performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore in this 2016 production by Barcelona’s chic theater collective La Fura dels Baus,…
A dramatic masterclass from Véronique Gens in Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine
This recent issue from Alpha brings together two sides of Poulenc’s strikingly individual musical personality. Both works, some ten years apart, inhabit a similar bittersweet quality, yet while his operatic…
Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera House
‘R. slept well and has decided to have a massage only once a day,’ writes Cosima Wagner in one of her last diary entries, from Venice, only twenty days before…
Amazone: Lea Desandre and Jupiter at Wigmore Hall
The percussive thump and burr which sparked into life Francesco Provenzale’s ‘Non posso far’ (from his opera Lo Schiavo di sua moglie) at the start of this lunchtime recital by…
Peter Grimes in Paris
That the Four Sea Interludes and the Passacaglia from Peter Grimes have become orchestral showpieces attests to the opera’s musical might, manifest just now at the Palais Garnier by British…