It’s not often that a Glyndebourne production offers its audience an interactive experience. But, that’s what seemed to be happening towards the close of the final Act of the second…
Category: Reviews
A Baroque double-bill from Hampstead Garden Opera
The Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone is typical of the sort of intimate venue in which Hampstead Garden Opera customarily presents its productions, which showcase young singers and musicians in performances…
Apollo of the Arts: Lost Lamentations – a concert for connoisseurs at Winchester College Chapel
It’s rare these days to find a new vocal ensemble prepared to dip its toe in the water of Marian-themed repertoire that is virtually unknown. Such is the case with…
An irreverent but stylishly sung Imeneo at the Royal Academy of Music
Imeneo, Handel’s penultimate opera, has a somewhat chaotic history. It was the only one of Handel’s forty or so operas to be presented as an ‘operetta’ – perhaps to make…
Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida bring darkness and dreams to Wigmore Hall
Mark Padmore continued his season-residency at Wigmore Hall with a programme of lieder by Beethoven and Schubert. In the latter’s ‘Ihr Bild’, one of the Heine settings in Schwanengesang, the…
Laurence Equilbey and the Insula orchestra bring a very ‘human’ Fidelio to the Barbican Hall
Sometimes, less really is more. Such was confirmed by this powerful and affecting concert performance at the Barbican Hall of Beethoven’s lone opera, Fidelio, by Laurence Equilbey’s Paris-based Insula orchestra…
Tormento d’amore: Italian love laments from Ian Bostridge and Cappella Neapolitana
The booklet article by the musicologist Dinko Fabris which accompanies Tormento d’amore – Ian Bostridge’s most recent recording, with Antonio Florio’s Cappella Neapolitana – is titled ‘From Venice to Naples…
Zipangu and Lonely Child: Two Claude Vivier masterpieces in magnificent performances by the London Sinfonietta
The Quebquois-born composer Claude Vivier – still largely neglected, despite many of his works having an almost fearless intensity entirely relevant for today – was the subject of a rare…
A glimpse of eternity: the LPO performs Birtwistle and Mahler
For many, the greatest English composer since Purcell and the greatest English composer of opera tout court, Harrison Birtwistle died little more than a fortnight before this concert. Even for…
From the Hills of Dream: the forgotten songs of Arnold Bax
In a 1949 broadcast, Sir Arnold Bax (1883-1953) declared: ‘Yeats’ poetry means more to me than all the music of the centuries.’ And, when the Irish poet and dramatist died…