So, after months of serving as the immensely professional, amiable and modest host of the Metropolitan Opera’s Met Stars Live in Concert series, soprano Christine Goerke finally got her own…
Category: Performances
A Soldier’s Tale for our time: a captivating new film from the Hallé
One bright morning in mid-February 1919, a crowd of a million people gathered in New York to welcome home the 15th Infantry Regiment of New York’s National Guard, who had…
A magical marriage of Occident and Orient: Fleur Barron at Leeds Lieder
‘Dreams, Homeland and Childhood’ was an apt title for Fleur Barron’s Leeds Lieder Festival recital with pianist Joseph Middleton. Born in Northern Ireland, to a British father and Singaporean mother,…
The Barber of Seville by San Francisco Opera
San Francisco has fielded, masterfully, a giganticized miniaturized version of Gioachino Rossini’s iconic masterwork Il barbiere di Siviglia in a parking lot for hundreds of socially distanced cars. It is…
POP’s Tahiti Goes Live and In Person
To note its tenth anniversary season, the enterprising Pacific Opera Project has quite winningly kicked off the celebration by revisiting the first opera it ever produced, Leonard Bernstein’s one act…
Re-Wilding the Wasteland: I Fagiolini return to Live from London
I Fagiolini’s third contribution to VOCES8’s Live from London series took its inspiration and its structure from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem described in the introductory programme note…
The House of Life: David Butt Philip and James Baillieu at Leighton House
The Rossetti family, according to William Michael, in Some Reminiscences (1906), ‘were not a musical family; they had no gift in that direction … no craving to be constantly hearing…
An absorbing, imaginative ‘enactment’ of the St John Passion from Oxford Bach Soloists
Last April, writing in the Observer, Fiona Maddocks lamented her first Easter without the mysteries and joys of Bach. ‘This year all performances have been cancelled. Our lives have already…
Bach’s B Minor Mass: VOCES8 and the AAM on Easter Sunday
In 1818, the Swiss musician, writer and publisher Hans Georg Nägeli (1773–1836) issued a public advertisement announcing an ambitious publishing project, which would make a new Mass, that he had…
VOCES8 and the English Chamber Orchestra join forces on Good Friday to perform Bach and Fauré
For their Good Friday Live from London performance, VOCES8 joined forces with members of the English Chamber Orchestra at Cadogan Hall. Barnaby Smith had moved from his countertenor’s perch to…