Producing festival quality opera in these challenging times for the arts can be murder, but Glimmerglass is knocking ‘em dead with its thrilling and fulfilling new production of Elizabeth Cree.…
Category: Performances
Glimmerglass: Rollicking Pirates Rock the Stage
Gilbert and Sullivan’s enduring favorite, The Pirates of Penzance, handily captured the hearts of the capacity audience at the Glimmerglass Festival and held them hostage in rapt amusement throughout a…
The Turn of the Screw – a triumph for Waterperry Opera Festival
No better choice could have been conceived for Waterperry Opera’s first foray into a full-length Britten opera than The Turn of the Screw. And no better performance space for its…
Tristan und Isolde in Bayreuth
It is a Tristan well worthy of the Wagner shrine (not all Bayreuth productions are). Icelandic theater director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson imposed a truly hermetic discussion of love onto the…
Der Fliegende Holländer in Bayreuth
Like all productions by Russian revisionist stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov, the Bayreuth 2021 Dutchman production is fraught with meaning, delving deeply into the contemporary resonances he discovers in nineteenth century…
PROM 27: Towards the celestial region in Saariaho, Mozart and Richard Strauss
Religion has much to answer for, not least in the range of musical inspiration it has delivered over the ages. In the 1960s people were drawn to southern Mexico to…
PROM 23: Bravura performance of Busoni’s Piano Concerto from Benjamin Grosvenor
Those new to Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto might have wondered about his quasi-symphonic concept, a work of Mahlerian proportions that Benjamin Grosvenor considers to be a “kind of operatic symphony,…
PROM 24: Baroque meets Hip-Hop for Purcell’s The Fairy Queen.
Purcell’s ‘other’ stage works are beginning to receive recognition, at last; Dido and Aeneas has held sole sway for too long. Recently, Paul McCreesh recorded King Arthur (1691), while television…
Longborough Festival’s La bohème doesn’t fail to tug at the heartstrings
Good summer weather outside may have coincided with this run of La bohème, but Sarah Fahie’s production reminds us that Acts One and Two are set at Christmas Eve, with…
Santa Fe Opera’s Ravishing Rosenkavalier
Let me cut right to the chase and say that Santa Fe Opera’s stunning production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier has driven me stark raving glad. It was a long-awaited thrill…