In a concert that could have been titled ‘Towards Bach’, the Marian Consort fashioned a themed programme that linked two towering German composers: Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach. They…
Category: Reviews
London Handel Festival: Opera Settecento perform Fernando, re di Castiglia
This London Handel Festival performance at St George’s Hanover Square was billed as ‘Fernando, re di Castiglia: A Handel Premiere’. Well, not quite, one might say: the first staged revival…
Angel Blue excels as Violetta at the Royal Opera House
Another revival of Richard Eyre’s seemingly timeless production of La traviata (first unveiled in 1994) has returned to the Royal Opera House. It provides a further opportunity to hear yet…
A truthful Winterreise from Ian Bostridge and Angela Hewitt at Wigmore Hall
Wunderlicher AlterSoll ich mit dir gehn?Willst zu meinen LiedernDeine Leier drehn? [Strange old man!Shall I go with you?Will you grind your hurdy-gurdyto my songs?] If the answer to the wanderer’s…
Blow’s Venus and Adonis: the Early Opera Company at St John’s Smith Square
Probably first performed at the London or Windsor court in 1683, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis is a thinly veiled political satire on the amorous appetites of Charles II and…
London Handel Festival: Acis and Galatea at Stone Nest
We don’t know much about the first performance (in 1718) of Handel’s pastoral Acis and Galatea but there is a tradition that it was premiered in the gardens of Cannons, the grand…
Stream of Tears (Iberian roots): The Sixteen at Wigmore Hall
Marian devotion in the New World was the focus of this concert by The Sixteen at Wigmore Hall. Perhaps it was coincidental that it happened to be Mother’s Day in…
“Family Secrets” in Lyon (Trauernacht)
Some years ago British stage director Katie Mitchell, with French early music conductor Raphaël Pichon concocted a dramatic action based on fragments of cantatas by J.S. Bach for the Aix Festival. Here it was again, in Lyon’s historic, spoken word Théâtre des Célestins (above photo).
The Royal Academy of Music celebrates 200 years with a triple bill and a new opera
Commissioning a new opera for its 200th anniversary, and then staging and performing it with such excellence, are laudable things for the Royal Academy of Music to have done. If…