Wexford Festival’s Stunning Two Women

When you enter the auditorium for the performance of Mark Tutino, Fabio Ceresa and Luca Rossi’s La ciociara (Two Women), the darkened stage is fronted on the far left apron…

Red Dawn Rises Again in Wexford

The venerable Wexford Festival’s M.O. is rehabilitating forgotten operas from the past, and few are further beyond recollection than Camille Erlanger’s competent potboiler, L’Aube rouge (The Red Dawn). The libretto…

Gallery of Memories: Mary Bevan & Anna Tilbrook at the Oxford International Song Festival

There was a veritable feast of new music at this year’s Oxford International Song Festival, much of it commissioned by the Festival itself.  Gallery of Memories, a song cycle by…

The Glass Eye: an important and impressive new song cycle at the Oxford International Song Festival

Introducing Alex Ho’s new song cycle, The Glass Eye, before this evening recital at the Oxford International Song Festival, Artistic Director Sholto Kynoch noted that this was the most substantial…

Filiations – Les compositrices de la Conservatoire de Paris: Oxford International Song Festival

In a review in Le Temps in 1937, Florent Schmitt commented, ‘It was, if I may say, the great feminine week: at the Concerts Lamoureux the Concerto of Mlle Jeanne…

Life Victoria: Oxford International Song Festival

Two events on day thirteen of the Festival, in partnership with LIFE Victoria in Barcelona, marked the centenary of the great Spanish soprano Victoria de los Angeles, a celebration that…

Un ballo in maschera: Chelsea Opera Group at Cadogan Hall

The title of Un ballo in maschera may suggest elegance and courtly high jinx, but Verdi’s opera, with its vengeful assassins, Beelzebub-conjuring sorceress and murderous drawing of lots is a…

The Pre-Raphaelite Poets: Oxford International Song Festival

Continuing this year’s theme of the relationship between the musical, poetic and visual arts, this Oxford International Song Festival lunchtime recital purported to reflect the topics which ‘fixated the artists…

The Colour Revolution: Oxford International Song Festival

The Ashmolean Museum’s current special exhibition, Colour Revolution: Victorian art, fashion & design, aims to dispel the notion of the Victorian era as a bleak, black-and-white industrial age by revealing…

Visions and Visuals: Oxford International Song Festival

When you listen to a piece of music, performed live or on a recording, do visual images and visions sweep or fly through your mind, or fix themselves indelibly on…