Barbara Hannigan’s quasi-miraculous and multifaceted feats in this concert with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Hall made me reflect on what it is and means to ‘conduct’ a…
Category: Reviews
The Cunning Little Vixen at English National Opera
Failure to love the operas—more generally, the music—of Janáček would be a strange, soulless thing indeed. It seems more to be opera companies, strange, incomprehensible entities, than opera-goers, be they…
Covent Garden’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ Rigoletto
In his first production since taking up his appointment as Director of Opera in 2017,Oliver Mears’s thought-provoking staging clearly acknowledges Rigoletto as a timeless classic. His presentation debuted in September…
Werther in Monte-Carlo
A superb cast, an inspired maestro, an intimate theater, an operatic masterpiece (the eighteenth of Massenet’s thirty-six operas), Werther in Monte-Carlo was a thrilling bombardment of emotional crises. From the…
Carolyn Sampson, Tim Mead and Arcangelo explore German-Italian crosscurrents at Wigmore Hall
This concert at Wigmore Hall by Arcangelo, under their director Jonathan Cohen, explored German-Italian cultural crosscurrents in the early 18th century. So, we had a motet dating from the Italian…
As the leaves fall: impressive new choral disc from Guildford Cathedral Choir
The music of Harold Darke and Maurice Duruflé might seem curious bedfellows on this recent disc from Guildford Cathedral Choir, with girls’ and men’s voices, issued by Regent. Yet both these relatively…
Nadine Benjamin triumphs in ENO’s La bohème
The fifth revival of Jonathan Miller’s well worn-in production of Bohéme has brought with it a number of revelations. On the first night (February 3), it was the conducting of…
Mark Padmore and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall
The five concerts forming Mark Padmore’s 2022-23 residency at Wigmore Hall will be his last ‘full recitals’ at the Hall, though not necessarily his last appearances. The series focuses on…
Seattle Opera’s Orfeo ed Euridice: Small and near perfect
During the entire epidemic, Seattle Opera continued to create, primarily through videos showing it in survival mode: a monochrome, monaural reduction of Don Giovanni; Jonathan Dove’s “airport opera” Flight lip-synced…
La Valkyrie in Marseille
Omicron roared through Marseille, civil authorities refused its opera house orchestra entry into the dangerously close confines of its pit. But sitting comfortably distanced on stage itself, this under appreciated…