Loss and celebration were the themes embedded in a programme comprising two secular cantatas from J.S. Bach’s Leipzig years, and a single aria attributed to him but now believed to…
Category: Reviews
World-Premiere Recording, under Richard Bonynge, of Alfred Cellier’s Once-Beloved 1886 Operetta Dorothy
Alfred Cellier is a largely forgotten figure today, but his Dorothy (1886), a “pastoral comedy opera in three acts,” ran for 931 performances, thanks in part to an excellent cast.…
Tosca returns to Covent Garden
Oh, what a difference a couple of months makes – Tosca returns to the Royal Opera, same production (the long-running Jonathna Kent) but with a new cast and conductor. December…
La bohème returns to ENO
This was, I think, the fourth time I have seen Jonathan Miller’s production of La bohème. It strikes me, in this revival directed by Crispin Lord, to have a good…
Tim Albery’s new production of Alcina for Opera North
Handel was rather fond of enchantresses; they pop up in his operas both early and late. It wasn’t the power per se that seems to have interested him but the…
Mesmerising performances from the LSO and Noseda at the Barbican
‘He liked to think that he wasn’t afraid of death. It was life he was afraid of, not death. He believed that people should think about death more often, and…
Bravura and brutality: Irish National Opera bring Vivaldi’s Bajazet to the Royal Opera House
In this age of copyright, the pasticcio – in which pre-existing arias by various composers are assembled to make a ‘new’ work – is a somewhat discredited form, generally regarded…
Opera North’s Rigoletto
Ostensibly, Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse satirised the licentious court of King Francis I of France, but at the play’s 1832 premiere in Paris the authorities thought the subject…
Handel’s Theodora at the Royal Opera House
Theodora is ‘coming home’ … but not as you know it, was the essential message of the press briefings issued by the Royal Opera House in the run up to…
A Musical Banquet: Iestyn Davies and Thomas Dunford
Hot off the press in 1610 was A Musicall Banquet furnished with varietie of delicious Ayres, Collected out of the best Authors in English, French, Spanish and Italian – a compilation…