‘Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests’.…
Category: Reviews
Grayston Ives’s engaging Requiem
There’s a degree of inevitability that a composer who has made numerous contributions to the repertoire for church and cathedral choirs spanning some fifty years might want to add a…
A very special Schumanniade, hosted by Bostridge, Coote and Drake, closes a season to cherish at Wigmore Hall
After keeping the music alive and the song flowing during an incredibly challenging 2020-21 season, Wigmore Hall’s artistic and executive director, John Gilhooly, offered one final feast of lieder to…
Heart & Hereafter: Elizabeth Llewellyn shines a lustrous light on the songs of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Last September, soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn made her belated Wigmore Hall debut, an occasion which introduced me to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Six Sorrow Songs – settings of Christina Rossetti’s poetry which I…
Quiet charm at Opera Holland Park: Mascagni’s L’Amico Fritz
‘So, we grew together,Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,But yet an union in partition,Two lovely berries moulded on one stem.’ I don’t know if Mascagni knew his Shakespeare, but…
A New Day: The King’s Singers, Live from London
The King’s Singers’ Live from London Summer programme was titled, optimistically, A New Day, reflecting the series’ theme of renewal and regeneration, and drawing together music ‘with a focus on…
The Golden Cockerel at the Aix Festival
It was Rimsky Korsakov’s last opera, his 1907 masterpiece Le Coq d’Or in one fell swoop (no intermission). In Aix Pushkin’s poetic Tzar Dodon met his fate, his head smashed,…
Le Comte Ory: a riotous romp concludes Garsington’s 2021 season
Announcing that there was a full house assembled for the final performance of Garsington’s Le Comte Ory, the Festival’s artistic director Douglas Boyd was greeted by a spontaneous burst of…
Stirring Fellow Travelers Journeys to Des Moines
In addition to the “Big Three” Main Stage offerings in the Des Moines Metro Opera summer season, we were also indeed fortunate to experience their deeply affecting Second Stage production…
Rameau’s Platée in Indianola
A champagne cork pops at the onstage bar under a spate of piss-elegant chandeliers, the music strikes up, and Des Moines Metro Opera’s fizzy, heady Platée is off to the…