Roderick Williams has had a busy pandemic. The last couple of weeks alone have seen the baritone joining with VOCES8 for a concert in their Live from London – Christmas…
Category: Reviews
Simon Mold: Song Cycles
As an ex-chorister of Peterborough Cathedral and varied involvement as a lay-clerk, Simon Mold has enjoyed working within the centuries-old church music tradition, affording him valuable encounters with some of…
Pauline Viardot’s Cinderella: a Christmas treat from Northern Opera Group
Pauline Viardot was the scion of a distinguished vocal dynasty. Her father, Manuel Garcia (tenor, impresario, teacher) took part in the premieres of Rossini’s Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra and Il barbiere…
Owen Wingrave: Grange Park Opera
In 1954, the year in which he completed The Turn of the Screw, Britten wrote to Eric Walter White that he had just read another short story by Henry James…
Schubert in the spotlight: Roderick Williams and ‘Momentum’ artists perform Schwanengesang
Led by Artistic Director Anthony Friend, Bandstand Chamber Festival, which presented a memorable series of concerts in the bandstand at Battersea Park this Summer, has returned with a Winter series.…
Solstice: VOCES8 & The Aeolians
The candles were in place; the rose blush lighting spread a warm glow in St Anne and St Agnes Church; mezzo-soprano Katie Jeffries-Harris was back from ‘self-isolation’; and, the semi-circle…
Britten: A Ceremony of Carols – Choir of Clare College, Cambridge
It’s a bold director who decides to explore Benjamin Britten’s smaller and relatively minor choral repertoire alongside the seldom recorded SATB version of A Ceremony of Carols. As the booklet…
Joachim Raff: Benedetto Marcello
Here’s yet another very effective German opera post-Weber but not by Wagner! We hear and see so few of these! I was quite taken in the past two years with…
A Guardian Angel: VOCES8 open their Live from London – Christmas festival
Sixteen concerts over five weeks, 280 artists, a ‘Young Singers’ spotlight featuring singers from the UK, US Germany and Singapore, and six newly commissioned works. VOCES8’s Live from London –…
Dmytro Popov: Hymns of Love
Two years ago, the Ukrainian tenor Dmytro Popov wooed the audience at Wigmore Hall with Russian romances, in a recital (with the Lithuanian mezzo-soprano Justina Gringytė) of songs by Tchaikovsky,…