Category: Performances

In my July 2009 review of the first revival of Moshe Leiser’s and
Patrice Caurier’s 2005 production of Il barbiere di Siviglia I
commented that the directors, aided by conductor, Antonio Pappano, had
reinvigorated this operatic ‘old friend’, injecting freshness and
spontaneity into familiar material.

Arms swinging loosely at his side, a relaxed smile and bright eyes conveying
his confident ease, James Gilchrist’s young wanderer bounded nimbly onto
the stage at the Wigmore Hall, radiating and embodying the fresh
optimism of spring, at the start of this technically assured and dramatically
coherent performance of Schubert’s song cycle, Die schˆne
M¸llerin.

The dust on 65th Street is clearing up and the reviews for the renovated Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts are in — the piazza is being hailed as newly “inviting” by architects and arts critics alike, and rightly so.

Since he first came to notice a few years ago — in Messiah in this very hall, as Creonte at Covent Garden, and as Arsace in Partenope at New York City Opera, to name by a few recently acclaimed performances — many a starry accolade has been heaped upon young Welsh countertenor, Iestyn Davies: “achingly beautiful tone”,“unforgettable focus and poignancy” and “compelling sense of rhetoric” are typical of the bountiful superlatives.

In its production this season of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera
Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged the work in its original locale at the royal
court of Sweden.

At the end of November Los Angeles Opera brought two productions to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

It may have been five years since Susan Bullock last performed at the Wigmore Hall, as her prominence on the world operatic stage has taken her away from the recital hall, but she wasted no time getting into her stride in this charming and musically varied concert.