Idomeneo, said to be one of the great operas of all times in a magnificent production at Pierre Audi’s Aix Festival. Though the Mozart opera seria itself had been filtered…
Category: Reviews
Ponchielli’s La Gioconda at Grange Park Opera
La Gioconda (1876) is a rare visitor to opera stages in the UK and this Grange Park Opera production, originally scheduled for the 2020 season, offers a welcome opportunity to…
Salome at the Aix Festival
A ponderous reading of the Strauss score, a meticulous, methodical staging of the Oscar Wilde drama. A radiant Salome, an unleashed Herod. Unsettling, sentient scenography. Unexpected magnificence. High, very high…
Outstanding Turn of the Screw from Garsington
Set within acres of verdant parkland and a lake, Garsington’s glass-sided auditorium surely makes the perfect location for Britten’s chamber opera, especially when dusk approaches on the Wormsley Estate. As…
Sumptuous artifice and sweet melancholy: Alcina at Glyndebourne
Lucidity is not a common characteristic of the Baroque opera libretto, and the anonymous text of Handel’s Alcina – drawn from an episode in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso – twists and…
Così fan tutte at the Royal Opera House
First unveiled in 2016, this second revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s Così fan tutte remains self-consciously preoccupied with the question, ‘What is theatre?’ While his interview in the souvenir programme…
Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder: Anna Prohaska and Christian Gerhaher at Wigmore Hall
A decidedly superior Liederabend, in terms of verse, musical setting, and performance. Hugo Wolf remains a connoisseur’s composer: slightly perplexing, perhaps, but then there is no playing to the gallery,…
Taking wing at the Royal College of Music: Jonathan Dove’s Flight
“I am stuck in Heathrow. Flight cancelled and no way, or no one, to tell me to leave the airport.” A Tweet by a frustrated passenger caught up in this…
Opera Rara perform Mercadante’s Il proscritto at the Barbican Hall
Mercadante is the nearly man of Italian opera, with a successful career lasting from 1819 to the 1860s yet never quite achieving the level of prominence, or historical endurance, of…
A harrowing but very ‘human’ Winterreise from Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis at Wigmore Hall
There could really only be one work with which Mark Padmore would conclude this season residency at Wigmore Hall, a series forming his final solo recitals at the Hall, but…