Category: Performances

The lustreless white tiles of the laboratory which forms the set of Keith Warner’s pitiless staging of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck offer little respite — cold, hard, rigid and severe, they are a material embodiment of the bleakness and barrenness of the tragic events which will be played out within the workshop walls (sets by Stefanos Lazaridis).

At the heart of this Wigmore Hall recital were two sacred vocal works for solo countertenor and small instrumental forces, recently recorded by Florilegium and Robin Blaze to considerable critical acclaim: J.S. Bach’s cantata ‘Vergn¸gte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust’ and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s ‘Salve Regina’.

After the bitter disappointment of

There is a cornucopia of ideas on display in Gluck’s Armide at Amsterdam’s Het Muziektheater, but sadly only a few of them seemed to serve the piece.

Lyric Opera of Chicago has opened the season with a revival of its 2001 production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello.

Having impressed UK audiences in La Boheme (for ENO) and American Lulu (for the Opera Group/Scottish Opera),

First seen in 2005, and since feted in London (several times), New York and Lithuania, Anthony Minghella’s cinematic production of Madame Butterfly remains a breath-taking visual banquet.

The star of the show was the agile Robert Orth as Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty. A fine operatic baritone, Orth’s patter was machine gun fast, crisp, and completely understandable.