Category: Performances

The best news about the Met’s eleven-year-old Jonathan Miller
production of Le Nozze di Figaro is that it has been restaged by
Gregory Keller, more tautly spun, many elegant jokes or character moments
inserted, several idiocies discarded and with plenty of room remaining for
singers with a flair for it (such as Luca Pisaroni and Isabel Leonard) to
invent comic business of their own.

Sir Peter Hall created this production of Otello at Chicago Lyric Opera in 2001.

ENO did not exactly ‘import a choir of Heathens’ to encourage the Shaws of this world to ‘hasten’ to its version of ‘Messiah’ ‘if only to witness the delight of the public and the discomfiture of the critics,’ the contribution of ‘Heathens’ in musical terms being limited to representing the populace of an initially grey Britain (or so I assume) but for every critic who was discomfited — most of us — there were hundreds of audience members who loved it, so it’s fairly safe to predict a considerable hit.

Mark Padmore and The English Concert took us on a journey from the dark depths of melancholy to the ethereal transcendence of joy, in a display of consummate artistry at the Wigmore Hall.

The question that puzzled me when attending Esther was Why.

Like most opera companies, the Mozart/da Ponte trifecta of Figaro,
Don Giovanni and CosÏ fan tutte are central to Opera
Australia’s repertoire.

There was a certain inevitability about the build-up to Iestyn Davies’ recital at the Wigmore Hall in London last Wednesday.

Leoš Jan·ček’s From the House of the Dead is a
very odd duck to find on the stage of a grand opera house.

London has long been spoiled in the operatic rarity department, thanks to companies like Opera Rara, Chelsea Opera Group and University College Opera populating various areas of the Venn diagram that is obscure repertoire.