To the New World: the Carducci Quartet and VOCES8

VOCES8’s Live from London, Spring series continues to offer diverse delights.  Recent performances by Apollo 5 and Stile Antico framed The Winter House – an interactive family concert created and…

Oxford Lieder: Winter into Spring – the changing seasons

The weather was fortuitous for Oxford Lieder’s live, online mini-festival, Winter into Spring.  Across the UK, the blossom buds and nudging crocuses were bathed in warm sunshine, the thick dawn…

Live@Lakeside: Manchester Collective with soprano Ruby Hughes

“This music builds so much adrenaline that you feel you have to let that out at the end!”  With a smile and a giggle, violinist Rakhi Singh, co-founder of the…

VOCES8 open their Live from London, Spring festival

Spring may be almost upon us, its rituals heralding re-awakenings and promising new beginnings.  But, this year, when we are all stuck in an eternal present, the cycles of the…

Anna Netrebko: Met Stars Live in Concert

The latest, and tenth, concert in the Met Stars Live series took us to the Spanish Riding School in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace complex.  The concert was once again genially hosted…

Sondra Radvanovsky and Piotr Beczała: Met Stars Live in Concert

January can be a dull and depressing month, and this year it is particularly difficult to keep faith that a light will eventually shine through the darkness.  But, a soul-lifting…

Opera Holland Park marks Holocaust Memorial Day in words and music

In November 2014, an exhibition opened in Brno entitled Janáček’s Most Talented Student to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the death of the Czech composer Pavel Haas.  In 1941, Haas…

Silenced art speaks powerfully in English Touring Opera’s Shostakovich-Britten pairing

Six years before he composed the Six Romances on Verses by British Poets (namely, Shakespeare, Raleigh and Burns), Shostakovich’s career as a composer of opera came to an abrupt halt…

The Britten Sinfonia create subtle but stirring sonic worlds at Wigmore Hall

Old and new were interwoven in this concert presented by soprano Jennifer France and five members of the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Jack Sheen.  The ancient warp was the music…

English Touring Opera presents a powerful pairing of Tippett and Shostakovich

Michael Tippett’s 1943 cantata for tenor and piano, Boyhood’s End, was one of first vocal works composed specifically for Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten.  It was first performed on 5th…