The Opéra de Marseille assembled a fine cast to perform the Massenet masterpiece in a prize winning production from Nancy. Bordeaux tenor Thomas Bettinger poured his heart out as the…
Category: Reviews
A brilliant Hansel and Gretel from Stephen Barlow and the Royal College of Music
The escalating cost of living crisis may soon result in many children in the UK sharing Hansel’s hunger pangs: ‘O Gret, it would be such a treat, if we had…
Pelléas et Mélisande in Montpellier
A third staging of French stage director Benjamin Lazar’s poetic and sophisticated production (Malmö in 2017 and Karlsruhe in 2019), highly refined in Montpellier by an early music tenor as…
A Twitcher’s Delight: Roderick Williams and Andrew West at Milton Court
A serious birdwatcher would take exception to being called a twitcher. Whereas the former is happy to wait patiently and passively for avian visitors to visit their locale, twitchers chase…
The cock crows: English Touring Opera presents Rimsky-Korsakov’s satire on incompetent autocracy
Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1907 fantasy-fable, The Golden Cockerel, brings together folklore and fact, angling Pushkin’s 1834 surreal satire on a Russian autocracy led by Nicholas I towards the Tsarist regime of Nicholas…
Origin: This is CLS
In 1971, the year in which he made his professional debut as a conductor, the late Richard Hickox founded the Richard Hickox Orchestra and the Richard Hickox Chorus, and commissioned…
Mixed performances in Menotti and Weir from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama
In food terms this was a programme comprising starter and main course, a well-designed menu beginning with a romantic comedy and followed by a picaresque meditation on fate with much…
Voices Unwrapped: Roderick Williams and members of the Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place
“Love, meet me in the green glen,Beside the tall elm-tree,Where the sweetbriar smells so sweet agen.” The poet-speaker’s call to his beloved to join him, at sunset, in the green…