The operas of Guiseppe Verdi have had an intermittent presence at Longborough over the last twenty-eight years with only Falstaff, La Traviata and Rigoletto making the cut. Now, Macbeth – the composer’s first foray into…
Category: Performances
Britten’s Billy Budd Sails into Glyndebourne for a Magnificent Revival
If the English Channel is some dozen or so miles away from Glyndebourne, one can still sense the proximity of the sea in Britten’s nautical masterpiece that is Billy Budd. In…
Richard Wagner, Die Walküre from Munich
As a student in Berlin, Ludwig Feuerbach attended lectures from, among others, GWF Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher: far from an unusual combination, but prophetic for his subsequent development as the…
Suddenly Last Summer at Bard’s SummerScape
First a one-act play by famed playwright Tennessee Williams (1958), then a famous movie (1959), and now, finally, an opera composed by Courtney Bryan — a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. More…
Giacomo Puccini, Turandot from Munich
How curious. I learned what this Turandot had been about only upon consulting the programme post-performance. To be honest, I wish I had not done so. A quotation from La Fura del…
Pappano’s mixed Tristan at the Barbican
This is surely Sir Antonio Pappano’s “Wagner period”: his recent Siegfried, the latest instrument of an ongoing Ring at RBO revealed, to my ears at least, his finest Wagner to date. He has,…
Brett Dean, Of One Blood in Munich
I remember, as a schoolboy, reading in a newspaper about ‘The Hecklers’, a pair of composers with highly reactionary aesthetics, who objected so strongly to Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain that they protested against…
Wolf Trap Opera Presents a Hilarious La Cenerentola to Remember
Wolf Trap Opera opened its summer fully staged opera season with Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Opening night was abuzz with laughter and fun in both the audience and the cast, who…
An Incomparable Tatyana in Grange Festival’s Eugene Onegin
Drawn from Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s eponymous opera could have been called after its heroine Tatyana Larin. Judging by this magnificent production and some compelling performances, I suspect Tchaikovsky…
La Morte d’Orfeo (various) in Munich
Founded to enable ‘historically informed’ performances of the three surviving operas of Monteverdi, Munich’s Monteverdi Continuo Ensemble both celebrated its thirtieth anniversary and commemorated the life of one of its…